Being and Not Being: End Times of Posthumanism and the Future Undoing of Philosophy [Hardcover]

Against the grain of many contemporary theoretical positions that indulge in delusions of safety and certainty,Being and Not Beingargues that contingency is definitive of the structure of being itself. As a result, any predictions about the future founded upon present or habitual states of being arenecessarilysubject to possible error given the unpredictability that is the condition of all emergent forms of being. Rather than signal the absenceof an ethical dimension, this prior inscription of potential, which gives rise to profoundly unforeseen forms of being, necessarily invokes ana prioriethical demand that is common to biological and technological systems alike. This ethical demand transforms the rules of critical and ethical engagement not simply with other, inhuman forms of being, but with the future itself. Indeed, this ethical demand requires us to pose serious questions about the legitimacy and usefulness of any decisions made today on the back of predicted futures that erroneously presume the absolute determinability of all beings lacking the alchemical privilege definitive of life. As the exemplary figure of unfounded privilege, it is with Hamlet that the question of life ultimately ends, replaced instead by the extremophile as the figure of unforeseen futures that simply cannot be imagined in the present. Tobeis the potential tobe otherwise, that is to say, tonotbe that which a given beingis.Richard Ivesonwas awarded his doctorate from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and then took up a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. Under the general rubric of posthumanism and the posthuman, his current research focuses on the intersection of Continental Philosophy, emergent technologies and the philosophy of science.

It is Richard Ivesons great merit to require posthumanists not to neglect the most funl*