The Posthuman and the Shift Towards Ethics

In posthumanist theories, the political—that I understand as the practice of deciding in common with regard to the commons—shifts toward questions of ethics. This shift is present in critical posthumanism and transhumanism alike, whereas they have very little in common—besides the term “posthuman” that they construe widely differently. I find it intriguing that two widely different conceptions of posthuman subjectivity, the transhumanist one that reiterates the autonomous subject of liberal humanism, on the one hand, the critical posthumanist one marked by its questioning of autonomy and sovereignty, on the other, both lead to a privileging of ethics as a way of understanding sociality.