Beyond Human investigates what it means to call ourselves human beings in relation to both our distant past and our possible futures as a species, and the questions this might raise for our relationship with the myriad species with which we share the planet. Drawing on insights from zoology, theology, cultural studies and aesthetics, an international line-up of contributors explore such topics as our origins as reflected in early cave art in the upper Palaeolithic through to our prospects at the forefront of contemporary biotechnology. In the process, the book positions "the human" in readiness for what many have characterized as our transhuman or posthuman future. For if our status as rational animals or "animals that think" has traditionally distinguished us as apparently superior to other species, this distinction has become increasingly problematic. It has come to be seen as based on skills and technologies that do not distinguish us so much as position us as transitional animals. It is the direction and consequences of this transition that is the central concern of Beyond Human.
Charlie Blake is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Theory at
Liverpool Hope University, UK. He has recently co-edited a two volume study for
the journal Angelaki entitled Shadows of Cruelty: Sadism, Masochism
& the Philosophical Muse, and contributed 'A Preface to Pornotheology:
Spinoza, Deleuze & the Sexing of Angels' to Deleuze and Sex
(Edinburgh UP, 2011) and Pirate Multiplicities' on Pessoa, Badiou and the
graphic fiction of Alan Moore for Studies in Comics 2:1 (Intellect,
2011). He is now working on the politics of pornotheology and the emergent
field of spectral materialism in connection with art, music and cinema.
Claire
Molloy is Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics, History, Media & Communication at Liverpool Hope University, UK and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.
She has published on anthropomorphism, representations of animals in
videogames and literature and dangerous
dogs, media and risk. She is the author of Memento (EUP 2010) and Popular Media and Animal Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and co-editor of American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Steven Shakespeare is Lecturer in Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. His publications include The Inclusive God (co authored with Hugh Rayment-Pickard, SCM, 2006), Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction (SPCK, 2007) and Derrida and Theology (T and T Clark, 2009).
