Posthuman or post-human is a concept originating in the fields of science fiction, futurology,contemporary art, and philosophy that means a person or entity that exists in a state beyond beinghuman. The concept addresses questions of ethics and justice, language and trans-speciescommunication, social systems, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity.
       In critical theory, the posthuman is a speculative being that represents or seeks to re-conceive thehuman. It is the object of posthumanist criticism, which critically questions humanism, a branch ofhumanist philosophy which claims that human nature is a universal state from which the human beingemerges； human nature is autonomous, rational, capable of free will, and unified in itself as the apexof existence. Thus, the posthuman position recognizes imperfectability and disunity within oneself,and understands the world through heterogeneous perspectives while seeking to maintain intellectualrigor and dedication to objective observations. Key to this posthuman practice is the ability to fluidlychange perspectives and manifest oneself through different identities. The posthuman, for criticaltheorists of the subject, has an emergent ontology rather than a stable one； in other words, theposthuman is not a singular, defined individual, but rather one who can “become” or embody differentidentities and understand the world from multiple, heterogeneous perspectives.  Critical discourses surrounding posthumanism are not homogeneous, but in fact present a seriesof often contradictory ideas, and the term itself is contested, with one of the foremost authorsassociated with posthumanism, Manuel de Landa, decrying the term as “very silly.” Covering theideas of, for example, Robert Pepperell’s The Posthuman Condition and Hayles’s How We BecamePosthuman under a single term is distinctly problematic due to these contradictions.
        The posthuman is roughly synonymous with the “cyborg” of A Cyborg Manifesto by DonnaHaraway. Haraway’s conception of the cyborg is an ironic take on traditional conceptions of thecyborg that inverts the traditional trope of the cyborg whose presence questions the salient linebetween humans and robots. Haraway’s cyborg is in many ways the “beta” version of the posthuman,as her cyborg theory prompted the issue to be taken up in critical theory. Following Haraway, Hayles,whose work grounds much of the critical posthuman discourse, asserts that liberal humanism —which separates the mind from the body and thus portrays the body as a “shell” or vehicle for themind — becomes increasingly complicated in the late 20th and 21st centuries because informationtechnology puts the human body in question. Hayles maintains that we must be conscious ofinformation technology advancements while understanding information as “disembodied,” that is,something which cannot fundamentally replace the human body but can only be incorporated into itand human life practices.        The idea of post-posthumanism (post-cyborgism) has recently been introduced. This body ofwork outlines the after-effects of long-term adaptation to cyborg technologies and their subsequentremoval. For instance, what happens after years of constantly wearing computer-mediating eyeglasstechnologies and subsequently removing them； what happens after decades of long-term adaptationto virtual worlds followed by a return to “reality.”                Posthuman political and natural rights have been framed on a spectrum with animal rights andhuman rights. Posthumanism broadens the scope of what it means to be a valued life form and to betreated as such (in contrast to certain life forms being seen as less-than and being taken advantage ofor killed off)； it “calls for a more inclusive definition of life, and a greater moral-ethical response, andresponsibility, to non-human life forms in the age of species blurring and species mixing….[I]tinterrogates the hierarchic ordering — and subsequently exploitation and even eradication — of lifeforms.”
【題組】46. According to the passage, which statement is NOT true?
(A) Posthuman as a concept is derived from various sources such as science fiction,futurology, and philosophy.
(B) The posthuman concept exclusively concerns issues about human outer-spaceexploitation.
(C) The posthuman position sees the world through heterogeneous perspectives rather than afixed and stable one.
(D) A posthuman is not a singular, defined individual.