The Evolving World of the Posthuman

Encounter with Rosi Braidotti

December 3, 2015 - 7:30 p.m.
Until full capacity is reached
Place
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Luis Gordillo. Payseyes, 1979. Painting. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía collection, Madrid. © Luis Gordillo, VEGAP, Madrid, 2015
Luis Gordillo. Payseyes, 1979. Painting. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía collection, Madrid. © Luis Gordillo, VEGAP, Madrid, 2015

The Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre organises this encounter around the thinking of Rosi Braidotti, in reference to the publication of her book The Posthuman (Polity Press, 2013). The intervention sees Rossi Braidotti explore the “posthuman turn”, understood as an event based on the convergence of posthumanism and postanthropocentrism.

The first term is a critique of the universalist position on the idea of man as the assumed measurement of everything. The second calls into question the hierarchy of the species and the axiom of human exceptionalism. Both schools of thought have evolved in the context of cutting-edge technological innovations and are found linked to the current wave of economic globalisation that encompasses new and exciting perspectives as well as unprecedented structural injustices. What are the perspectives for ethical subjectivity and posthuman politics? And what kind of ethical interaction is possible in the posthuman age that concerns non-human agents, whether organic (animals, plants, bacteria, etc.) or non-organic (technological)? Is the agency behind these extensive processes of mediation possible?   

Rosi Braidotti is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Utrecht. She was the Founding Professor of Gender Studies in the Faculty of Humanities (1988–2005) and the Centre for the Humanities in the same city (2007), and the First Scientific Director of the Netherlands Research School of Women's Studies. Her works include: The Posthuman (2013); Nomadic Theory. The Portable Rosi Braidotti (2011); Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (2006) and Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002).

Programme:

Introduction: Rosi Braidotti, thinking about difference and limits

Montserrat Galcerán, professor of philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Lecture: What do posthuman subjects dream about?

Rosi Braidotti.