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MODERN PHILOLOGY
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MODERN PHILOLOGY
good for avoiding binary oppositions. I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been
used to signify a leap out of the marked body (677).4
Luhmann and the insights of systems theory make plausible but not
always compelling frameworks for every chapter. The strength of What Is
Posthumanism?its ranginess, its thoroughness in examining the system
(what Wolfe thinks of as a detotalized totality)is also in some parts a deficit, and the book, although evidently learned, can be repetitive. This collection is not one to sit down and read from start to finish, but it is a book in
which to sampleespecially its passionate posthumanist grapplings with
animals, which constitute an intellectual core of the studyand Wolfes
ambitions for enacting and widening the purview of systems theory is admirable and ambitious. In the end, one does in fact come away with a useful
series of propositions about posthumanism. Perhaps the most simple unites everything Wolfe is interested in: we are not we. . . . Rather, we are
always radically other, already in- or ahuman in our very beingnot just in
the evolutionary, biological, and zoological fact of our physical vulnerability . . . but also in our subjection to and constitution in the materiality and
technicity of a language (89). The human is always heterogeneous to the
human.
Hillary Chute
University of Chicago
4. Donna Haraway, The Persistence of Vision, in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment
and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 28395.
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