The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene

Description

We are in the midst of a growing ecological crisis. Developing technologies and cultural interventions are throwing the status of "human" into question. It is against this context that Patricia McCormack delivers her expert justification for the "ahuman". An alternative to "posthuman" thought, the term paves the way for thinking that doesn't dissolve into nihilism and despair, but actively embraces issues like human extinction, vegan abolition, atheist occultism, death studies, a refusal of identity politics, deep ecology, and the apocalypse as an optimistic beginning. In order to suggest vitalistic, perhaps even optimistic, ways to negotiate some of the difficulties in thinking and acting in the world, this book explores five key contemporary themes: * Identity * Spirituality * Art * Death * The apocalypse Collapsing activism, artistic practice and affirmative ethics, while introducing some radical contemporary ideas and addressing specifically modern phenomena like death cults, intersectional identity politics and capitalist enslavement of human and nonhuman organisms to the point of 'zombiedom', The Ahuman Manifesto navigates the ways in which we must compose the human differently, specifically beyond nihilism and post- and trans-humanism and outside human privilege. This is so that we can actively think and live viscerally, with connectivity (actual not virtual), and with passion and grace, toward a new world.

Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy, Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She is the author of Cinesexuality (2008), Post-Human Ethics (2012) and editor of The Animal Catalyst (Bloomsbury, 2014), Deleuze and the Animal (2017) and the upcoming Ecophilosophical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Patricia MacCormack goes relentessly beyond "just" deconstructing anthropocentrism and dismantling multispecies extinction caused by human dominance in the Anthropocene. The manifesto is not only theorizing, but com/passionately calling for direct abolitionist action for the other at the expense of the (human) self. Trembling with joyful energy and critically affirmative insights, this manifesto encourages us to engage in ahuman arts&activist practices, inspired by queer feminist (secular) spirituality), and death activism. * Nina Lykke, Professor of Gender Studies, Linkoeping University, Sweden * This beautiful book is both a passionate, insightful meditation on the world we actually live in, and a radical call to action. Is it even possible for us to stop being human, to let multiple beings flourish without reducing them to means for our own selfish ends? Reading this book, thinking with it and about it, and responding openly to it, is absolutely essential. * Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University, USA * This book is a delightful provocation and invitation: to imagine a world without humans and to think of what we can do to get there. It is an urgent call for action. A joyful, lucid, fiercely intelligent call to readers to hope and work for a future not for themselves, but for the thriving of all nonhuman life. Engaging with this book will be a transformative experience. One cannot see the world or oneself in the same way after reading it. * Christine Daigle, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Posthumanism Research Institute, Brock University, Canada * Patricia MacCormack's splendid refusal to nuance her intent in The Ahuman Manifesto will both intrigue and infuriate. As a vegan abolitionist/extinctionist, she provides an unrelenting and exacting take down of the violent self-interest of the human species, and offers a call to ethical action best described as eating the Anthropocene. * Margrit Shildrick, Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production, Stockholm University, Sweden * [A]n inspiring book ... [with] a more intellectual and philosophical approach to circling and testing questions. * MO Magazine (Bloomsbury Translation) *