The Posthuman: Without It, Nothing Else is Possible

The concept of the 'posthuman' seems to represent both a threat to our inherited understanding of the human and a challenge to the humanities as the academic disciplines best equipped to understand the human. Traditionally, the claim of the humanities was based on the premise that human beings are distinctive for their singular ability to use language, an ability that machines cannot duplicate. However, a review of the most influential accounts of language of the last two hundred years, including philology, structuralism, deconstruction, Chomskyan linguistics, and even the account given by evolutionary psychology reveals that an element of mechanism is a standard feature of this most human of attributes. In other words, the key element of posthumanity has always been incorporated into accounts of human language, and thus human being.