‘By Means Other Than Life’

Abstract

This essay argues that literature can help us understand posthuman dimensions of memory. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical anthropology of technics, and from the field of cultural memory studies, this new materialist approach challenges the conception of posthumanism that describes contemporary technologies as “transcending” the human. Rather, I maintain that an immanent perspective situates the human as already existing outside of itself, “by means other than life,” as Stiegler puts it. I illustrate this with two examples from postcolonial literature that model an affirmational approach to traumatic material history by way of texts. Instead of posing as detachment or transcendence, these metafictional references foreground present continuities with the past, recovering that which has been forgotten or repressed.