Beyond Human: Otherness and the Subject in Psychoanalysis and Posthumanism

This chapter aims at exploring changes in the notion of Other and Otherness in two currents of thought, operating in different historical-epistemological contexts: Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis in the twentieth century and critical posthumanism in the twenty-first century. In these contexts, the critique of humanism is centred on the subversion of the modern subject. Considering these two lines of theoretical thought, the chapter proceeds to analyse the way in which both conceive the Other as an entity that surpasses and decentralises the subject, both the subject of the unconscious and the subject beyond the human, to criticise the Western humanist tradition that places man at the centre of the world and as the measure of all things. Psychoanalysis and posthumanism invest the Other with different materialities and functions, whether symbolic and negative or substantial and positive. In the case of the former, the Other ensures that, for the human subject, the world is not an immediate given; in the case of the latter, the Other is the world, and, as such, it is diluted, like the subject, within the sphere of vital immanence. In the symbolic sense, the Other establishes a structural definition of the subject, whereas in the posthumanist sense it implies understanding the subject in terms of identity(ies). This analysis discusses the anthropocentric impasse in psychoanalysis as the cause of its present theoretical and conceptual shortcomings and the reason for the indifference with which its legacy is viewed in posthumanist circles. It also discusses the posthumanist promotion of two pre-Freudian humanist ideals: the subject of the consciousness and the macrocosmic-microcosmic harmony.