Given our conversations over the past year, I think this book sits very close to your own project. It is not primarily asking “What is posthumanism?” but rather “What happens when posthumanism becomes a way of working, teaching, creating, and living?” That practical orientation is exactly what distinguishes it from many earlier posthumanist texts.
The book is edited by Christine Daigle and Matthew Hayler, both of whom are interested in moving posthumanism beyond abstract critique. Instead of arguing for one unified theory, they gather artists, philosophers, educators, scientists, and curators to show how posthumanist thinking actually changes practice.
I would summarize the book under eight major themes.
1. From “What is posthumanism?” to “How do we practice it?”
Earlier books by thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe and N. Katherine Hayles largely established the theoretical foundations.
This volume says:
enough definitions.
Show us what changes.
How do museums change?
How does education change?
How does science change?
How does artistic creation change?
How do we make different ethical decisions?
That practical turn is the book’s defining contribution.
2. Humans are participants rather than masters
The editors repeatedly challenge one assumption inherited from the Enlightenment:
the human is autonomous,
separate,
superior.
Instead they describe humans as always existing within networks involving
- animals
- microbes
- forests
- oceans
- machines
- algorithms
- infrastructures
- climates
Agency becomes distributed rather than exclusively human.
This resonates strongly with ideas from Karen Barad on intra-action and with contemporary new materialism.
3. Knowledge becomes relational
One chapter that I think would especially interest you concerns education.
Rather than asking
How can individuals acquire knowledge?
the contributors ask
How do humans learn together with animals, technologies, and environments?
Learning becomes an ecological process.
Knowledge is no longer simply inside one person’s head.
It emerges from relationships.
This is remarkably close to your repeated phrase:
“the conditions for one to be one cannot be taken for granted.”
In both cases, the individual is not self-sufficient.
4. Art becomes experimentation
Many contributors come from artistic practice.
Art is treated less as producing beautiful objects than as creating situations in which new relationships can emerge.
Artists become experimenters.
Museums become laboratories.
Installations become ecosystems.
Art asks
What happens if humans cease being the center?
instead of
What beautiful object shall we make?
5. Ethics becomes ecological
Instead of rights belonging primarily to humans,
ethical concern extends toward
- animals
- plants
- AI
- ecosystems
- infrastructures
- future generations
The question changes from
What benefits humans?
to
What enables flourishing across interconnected systems?
This is perhaps the most significant ethical shift in contemporary posthumanism.
6. Disciplines begin dissolving
One chapter explicitly argues for postdisciplinarity.
Traditional academic boundaries—
- philosophy
- biology
- psychology
- literature
- engineering
are themselves products of humanist assumptions.
Many contemporary problems—AI, climate change, synthetic biology—simply refuse to stay inside one department.
7. Technology is neither savior nor enemy
Unlike transhumanism,
this book is not celebrating technology.
Nor is it condemning it.
Technology becomes another participant in larger ecologies.
AI, robotics, biotechnology and digital media are examined alongside fungi, rivers, microbes, and animals.
The important question is not
Is technology good?
but
What kinds of relationships does this technology produce?
That is a very different question.
8. Practice matters more than theory
Perhaps the deepest message is this:
Posthumanism should be judged
not by its vocabulary,
but by the practices it enables.
Does it
- improve education?
- change conservation?
- reshape museums?
- alter artistic creation?
- transform scientific research?
- produce better ethics?
If not,
then it remains merely another theory.
Why I think this book intersects with your own work
Across our conversations, your project has increasingly shifted away from constructing a grand metaphysical system toward articulating what you call 菊次郎十六式—small, repeatable gestures in clinical life.
That move parallels this book surprisingly closely.
There is, however, one important difference.
The contributors largely remain within what might be called an ecology of relations: they show how humans are entangled with animals, technologies, and environments.
Your recent work has been moving toward something more phenomenological and existential. When you speak of “follow the fragments,” “strange attractor,” “algorithmic self vs. analogical self,” or “為岩中花樹所見”, your concern is not only what networks humans inhabit, but how a life gradually comes into being through unforeseen encounters. In other words, your emphasis is less on distributed agency than on the emergence of a singular path.
If Posthumanism in Practice asks,
“How can we live after human exceptionalism?”
your recent seminars seem to ask an additional question:
“How can a singular human life still emerge within a posthuman world?”
That, in my view, is the philosophical frontier where your work begins to diverge from—and potentially extend—the posthumanist conversation.
