Entanglement and response: locating human responsibility in Karen Barad’s agential realism
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Date
2017
Authors
Shaw, David
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Abstract
The role of “the human” remains a contentious issue in the field of critical posthumanism. While there is broad agreement that the liberal humanist conception of “the human” must, as Rosi Braidotti suggests, be “decentered”, the effect of this decentering on the ontological status of the beings previously understood as “humans” remains unclear. With this problem in mind, this thesis will extend Karen Barad’s notion of agential realism to present a conception of “the human” that does not rely on liberal humanist universalism. I argue that “the human” is best understood as a pattern of becoming that emerges through an ongoing process of entanglement and response with its environment. In this way, this work will provide a basis for further critical posthumanist discussion of literary representations of “the human” within its community of human and nonhuman others.
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Keywords
Posthumanism, Agential Realism, Karen Barad, Agency, Responsibility