The Mimetic Posthuman.

The posthuman’ is a generic term that denotes speculations for what is next for our species, but also the reconceptualisation of what it means to be human that can emerge from these speculations. ‘The Mimetic Posthuman’ carries out a study of the posthuman through the perspectives provided by a contemporary reframing of mimesis, whose scope goes beyond realistic representation to recover mimesis’ (from mimos, actor, performance) original roots in imitative behavior (mimicry, identification, contagion, and mirroring influences, among other). Looking back to the ancient realisation that humans are fundamentally mimetic creatures, this project accounts for the mimetic nature of the plastic transformations constitutive of the posthuman subject, which in turn allows for its move away from definitions of the human as a pure, bounded, and stable being. The relevance of a mimetic perspective on the posthuman is confirmed by the significant theoretical and methodological overlaps between the two fields, overlaps that have so far remained largely unnoticed by both scholarships. This project fills this gap by establishing, for the first time in a systematic way, the considerable relevance of mimesis for narrative and theoretical developments of the posthuman, eventually building a mimetic theory of the posthuman. In doing so, it will participate in furthering our understanding of the posthuman, mimesis and incidentally the cognitive, epistemological and anthropological value of fiction.

Keywords:posthuman, mimesis, science fiction

Disciplines:Comparative literature studies, Contemporary literature, Literary theory, Philosophical aesthetics