From Dasein to the Posthuman, Or toward a Rhizomatic-Coexistence-in-an-Open-World

Abstract

This article presents a brief mapping of Martin Heidegger’s theory of Dasein within the critical posthumanism framework. Adopting a cartographic analysis, it maps some similarities and differences between Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and critical posthumanism. It relies especially on Braidotti’s posthumanist arguments and theories to explain both the relational and transversal features of Dasein (in the posthumanist framework) and the weak anthropocentrist ones (in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology). In this paradigm, the Heideggerian concept of Dasein is situated both beyond and between classical humanism and weak anthropocentrism, given that Heidegger is deconstructing the metaphysical dialectic of binary oppositions (between human and animal), while remaining anchored in some type of weak anthropocentrism. Relying on a posthumanist and post-anthropocentrist methodology, the posthuman convergence twists the existential inquiry of Dasein and opens up a vitalist–materialist and immanent approach to the posthuman. This attracts the conceptual deterritorialization of Dasein (from its existential paradigm) and its reterritorialization in an open materialist process ontology of becoming, toward the posthuman, which is situated on the basis of an immanent, rhizomatic, transversal, and symbiotic movement given by our multiple belongingness to this material world, which relies on relational assemblages with human/non-human others, the environment, the Earth, and so on.