“Companion Species” and Donna Haraway’s Critique of Post-Humanism

Abstract

“The posthuman”, as a cultural condition brought about by techno revolutions, should be discussed along with animals, which function as “the other” that helps with the configuration of posthuman subjectivity. By regarding human beings, animals and cyborgs as “companion species” in the broad sense, Donna Haraway creates new space for making an alternative critique of posthumanism usually associated with informatics and cybernetics. Haraway’s conception of animal, on the one hand, underscores the relationality between men and animals, which not only challenges the anthropocentric image of animals fostered since the Enlightenment, but stands as a counterpoint to the animal philosophies of Deleuze, Levinas and Derrida. On the other hand, Haraway’s posthuman ethics on animals, though derived from the frontier of modern biosciences, remains utopian when it comes to an on-the-ground practice in the lived world. The difficulties of carrying out Haraway’s animal ethics are manifest in her problematic engagement with Spivak’s postcolonial critique. This essay suggests that we need to perform empathic cross-species imagination which finds its embodiment in the domain of literary text. Only by doing so can we find a path to the so-called “Cosmopolitics” rooted in the corporeal and historical commonality of men and animals.