Past the Human: Narrative Ontologies and Ontological Stories

Abstract

Our existence, the existence of our species and its cognitive evolution, is far from being pure and confined within secure margins. Starting from mitochondria and all the way up, the human is constantly mixed with the nonhuman. It reveals itself by way of hybridizations. For this reason, a perfectly consistent atlas of human biology would actually be a treatise on xenobiology. A compelling example is that of the bacteria colonies that constitute our microbiome. Even though they do not have anything “human” in their genetic code, they are an integral part of our body and our health. Open to transformations, the human is materially and historically permeable to other natures, other matters, and other cultural agents. To be properly human is therefore, in a certain sense, to go past the boundaries of human “nature.” This is the meaning of posthumanism, as theorists such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Roberto Marchesini, Bruno Latour, Andrew Pickering, Rosi Braidotti, or Cary Wolfe conceptualize it. For these authors, posthumanism is a vision of reality according to which the human and the nonhuman are confluent, co-emergent, and define each other in mutual relations.