This book, originally given as a lecture at Harvard University in 2019, is built on the assumption that we are currently situated in a posthuman convergence between the Fourth industrial Age and the Sixth Extinction, between and advanced knowledge economy, which perpetuates patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and the threat of climate change devastation for both human and non-human entities. This convergence calls for a posthuman critical intervention in the form of intersecting critiques of western humanism on the one hand and of anthropocentrism on the other.
Robots designed to care for people and neglected landscapes of digital trash. The promise of synthetic biology and the panic of living on a dying planet. Wonderful feats of intelligence and systemic acts of violence. Exhilaration and exhaustion. Rosi Braidotti argues that we must think about these apparent contradictions all together in order to make differences that actually matter.
Posthuman Knowledge and the Critical Posthumanities oscillates between evocations and transections of contemporary conditions, for which Braidotti offers what she calls the “posthuman convergence” as a new paradigm for situating and navigating their problems and possibilities. Reflecting on the knotted situation of the academic humanities, cognitive capitalism, and advanced climate change, she delivers an intersectional critique of humanism and anthropocentrism, and targets their exclusions and aporias to address subjectivity, knowledge production, and academic structures within that posthuman convergence. Braidotti's convergence demands imagination, endurance, connectivity, and perspectives multiplied, embodied, and grounded in the only world we have.
