Review by Choice Review
MacCormack (Continental philosophy, Anglia Ruskin Univ., UK) extends contemporary literary theory's appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari through posthumanism into ahumanism--the affirmation of nonhuman life through the intentional extinction of Homo sapiens sapiens. In the first part MacCormack explores how human exceptionalism has degraded what Michel Serres termed "biogea" to the demise of other animal life. In the second part she recommends two realms of pragmatic activism to affirm life after the human. First, it embraces the occult, a spiritual, feminist, and queer artistic practice of the weird--a pursuit of a multiplicity of desires through ritual that affirms the constant task of becoming. Second, it recommends the death/extinction of the human, a celebration of the corpse. Human life has no hierarchical privilege over any animal life and blocks no other forms of life. Human death and extinction affirm the life of the other as "the only available creative outlet in an impossible situation" (p. 165). The book extends posthumanism from a technobiological human exceptionalism in order to affirm the possibility of new forms of animal life on the other side of the Anthropocene. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --John Wesley Wright, independent scholar
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
