Dispatches from the Robot Wars; Or, What is Posthuman Security?

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Audra Mitchell discussing her work on posthuman security. Could our security as humans be premised on the the idea that humanity is a fundamentally insecure category? From the blog:

“The ‘human’ is intersected, conditioned and co-constituted by many other beings, and vulnerable to the shocks and reverberations that affect them. But our imbrication with these other beings also opens up possibilities for experience, attachment, attunement and transformation that far exceed the limitations of the dominant, modern, Western secular notion of the ‘human’.”

The Disorder Of Things

Audra MitchellA guest post from Audra Mitchell, who is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of York. Audra is a Fellow of the Independent Social Research Foundation (2014-15) and has held or will hold visiting fellowships at the Universities of Queensland, Edinburgh and Melbourne. She is the author or editor of three books: International Intervention in a Secular Age: Re-enchanting Humanity? (Routledge, 2014); Lost in Transformation: Violent Peace and Peaceful Conflict in Northern Ireland (Palgrave, 2011) and (ed. with Oliver Richmond) Hybrid Forms of Peace: From the ‘Everyday’ to Postliberalism (Palgrave, 2011), as well as articles in Security Dialogue, Review of International Studies, Millennium, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Third World Quarterly, and Alternatives, amongst others. She blogs at Worldy IR. Audra’s current research project explores how mass extinction challenges the ontological and ethical underpinnings of ‘security’.

“So when are the intergalactic robot…

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7 thoughts on “Dispatches from the Robot Wars; Or, What is Posthuman Security?”

  3. I’ve just read Roberto Esposito’s latest called Third Person. It’s all about why human rights have failed through the concept and history of the person. He ends with Deleuze’s Immanence: a life. A very provocative book all in all.

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  4. http://makeworlds.net/node/97
    “The reverence that people display toward human rights — it almost makes one want to defend horrible, terrible positions. It is so much a part of the softheaded thinking that marks the shabby period we were talking about. It’s pure abstraction. Human rights, after all, what does that mean? It’s pure abstraction, it’s empty. It’s exactly what we were talking about before about desire, or at least what I was trying to get across about desire. Desire is not putting something up on a pedestal and saying, hey, I desire this. We don’t desire liberty and so forth, for example; that doesn’t mean anything. We find ourselves in situations.”

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  5. well when one sees how little practical clout “human” (as in human-rights) has in US politics (on say issues like healthcare or housing) it certainly seems like a bit of a hollow vessel/idol at best, but than I think that in general the time has past for focusing on (and or manufacturing) such abstractions (not that the zombies of the academy won’t keep churning them out as their institutions and even their own efforts are being Borg-ed by corporate interests as we speak) at least for people who actually want to be able to impact public policy/actions and not just trade in academic-speak, needless to say the conservative cog-biases run deep and far in the academic left:
    http://criticalanimal.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/simply-neoliberalism-or-algorithms-of.html

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  6. Thanks! I did not catch that blog…following now. This is a new research direction for me. Right now I am trying to create a framework for what the “posthuman” might be–if it makes any sense at all. I presented on dolphins in IL for the last two conferences and am now convinced that “personhood” is a thin and dangerous category to aspire to ultimately.

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