The Posthuman Nineteenth Century

Originally traces, and reflects critically on, nineteenth-century British debates about evolutionary becoming, anthropocentrism, and scales of historical time. These “subversive humanisms” lend new, and much needed, historical perspective to our contemporary posthuman predicament.

Our unprecedented times go by various names—posthuman, post-postmodern, the Anthropocene—each of which breaks decisively with the alleged stupidities of the nineteenth century and its dreams of human mastery and progress. In response, this book excavates from nineteenth-century British thought various “subversive humanisms” that complicate the intellectual genealogy of critical posthumanism without losing sight of historical context. Using new and neglected sources, it brings together well-known figures such as the liberal utilitarian John Stuart Mill and the positivist Henry Buckle, as well as lesser-known philosophers, scientists, and poets, including Constance Naden, Julia Wedgwood, May Kendall, Henry Stephens Salt, and Edward Carpenter. In different ways, these thinkers subverted from within the ontological, epistemological, historical premises of nineteenth-century humanism. Their reflections on evolutionary becoming, scales of historical time, anthropocentrism, statistics, subject-object boundaries, and humanity’s relationship to the natural environment demonstrate the ways in which thinking about time ontologically constituted “the human”—a question that is central to today’s posthuman predicament.

The book’s subtitle, Composing the Human in Time, speaks to this central argument. When subversive humanists grappled with multiple orders and magnitudes of time—from the vast scales of geological deep time to the competing temporalities of natural evolution, historical progress, and individual experience—they were not merely locating in time an ontologically prior human subject. They recognized that different modes of theorizing and staging time carried profound ontological implications, determining who or what counted as human, what forms of agency humans individually and collectively possessed, and how humanity related to the non-human world. These temporal shocks thus precipitated ontological maneuvers that composed and recomposed, and sometimes decomposed, the human subject itself.

By tracing these nineteenth-century debates in their unfolding complexity, the book demonstrates that critical posthumanism cannot and should not attempt to transcend humanism entirely. Instead, it must deconstructively inhabit humanism’s troubled and elastic history, finding unexpected resources in the very historical moment—the nineteenth century—that it seeks to escape.