Posthumanism: The Overcoming and the Legacy of Postmodernism

In the focus of this article is one of the main directions of topical philosophy - posthumanism. The author distinguishes it from the concept of "transhumanism" and traces its origin, development and current state. If posthumanism was originally concerned with culture (the concept of Ihab Hassan's criticism), then later he adressed a new ontology. At this point posthumanism approaches such areas of modern philosophy and social theory as actor-network theory and object-oriented ontology. From the last two posthumanism differs in not being satisfied only with the new ontology, which proposes to move away from the traditional anthropocentric concepts such as "man" and turn to "individuals", and offers an ethical and political program (Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti). The author comes to the conclusion that posthumanism is an alternative to cultural postmodernism, which excluded nature from the object of its attention. Posthumanists insist that the concepts of culture and nature should be reconsidered. In this sense, posthumanism can be considered as one of the versions of "postmodernism". However, many researchers in the XXI century, referring to posthumanism, describe it directly through the products of popular culture, thereby weakening the program of posthumanism. But, despite this, the emphasis on the era of "anthropocene" allows posthumanism to abandon postmodern as a historical category, that is involved exactly in culture, and move to the discussion of completely new topics such as ecology, earth, etc.