Human, All Too Human (Essays from the English Institute)

The question of what it means to be human has never before been more contested. The human, with a complicated social history that has rarely been examined, remains entrenched in traditional Enlightenment thinking. Human, All Too Human considers how we radicalize our notion of the human. Can the human be thought outside humanism? Any rethinking of the human places us immediately inside an ever-widening field of contrasting labels: animated and inanimated, natural and artificial, living and dead, organic and mechanistic. These and other boundary confusions at the frontier of the human are the subject of this volume, as each essay takes up one of three disputed border indentities: animals, things or children. Human, All Too Human examines how we explain our interest in anthropomorphism and our fascination with species categorizations. Essays explore what we mean by "things" and how the integrity of the human may already be compromised by them. The nine essays in this volume all attempt to rethink the category of the human, challengeing some of our most cherished cultural classifications. By inviting us to place the traditional subject of knowledge in the unsettling position of object, these writers interrogate the boundary distinctions that, until now, have exempted the human from the vigilant analysis it so urgently requires.