An Interview with Karen Raber: Reflections on Posthumanist Shakespeares

Karen Raber (later as KR): “Posthuman” refers to a being, object, or other entity that lies outside of definitions of “the human”—that is, it might be something like an amoeba or a dog, both of which are considered less than human; it might be a ghost or god, considered more than human; or it might be a robot or android, whose relationship to what we call “the human” is unresolvably vexed. Posthuman beings can be multiple in ways that contradict our notion of discrete, individuated identities, or they might have no fixed boundaries that allow us to recognize their contours (think of something like the hyperobjects that Timothy Morton names, including global warming, that are so massively distributed that it is impossible to think about them in the usual way). Posthumans are enmeshed with other forms of life (and death) in a web of relations; they cannot be reduced to binaries, but are rather entangled with matter of all kinds. What links these entities is that they present an ontological challenge to concepts of “the human” either by indicating the unstable nature of its ontology, or demonstrating its inadequacy to account for experience, phenomena, or forms of subjectivity. You’ll notice I put “the human” constantly in scare quotes to signal that I’m interrogating the claims that that two-word phrase inevitably smuggles under the radar—that there is such a thing as a human being who is all the things humanism says he is: male, of course; white and Western and probably Christian; autonomous, rational, perfectible, endowed with free will, all of which