LAUSR

Critical posthumanism, as distinguished from popular posthumanism (see Simon), troubles virtually every tenet of autobiographical practice and criticism—the autonomous self, the pact between author and reader, the foregrounding of the human—in favor of focusing on the relational, the material, and the umwelt to suggest a radical reconceptionalizing and reconstruction of life narrative, much less life writing. Life and narrative beg reconsideration in a critical posthumanist configuration. Lauding human life has been central to biography and autobiography since their inception, but posthumanism destabilizes human centrality in favor of considering matter, the non-human, and the surround in which beings interact. Likewise, in a posthumanist imaginary, writing would be decentered and destabilized as a technology controlled by humans to gain mastery in favor of a more expansive concept of narrative relating. That concept would deprivilege sight—the sense with which humans most identify and the one they most use—and qualitative cognition by equally favoring touch, taste, smell, and hearing as well as quantitative thinking, all ways of knowing the world that are just as or more important for non-human animal and mechanical relationality. For writers and theorists of life narrative, the challenges involve realizing that transhuman is not posthuman, for critical posthumanism does not envision a world where humans transcend their environment to float free, unmoored from earth; rather, critical posthumanism is firmly located in the material, whether that materiality involves human-animal interaction, human-machine interaction, or most likely both, given our increasingly interactive and interdependent world. That interactivity and interdependency presage a new kind of narrative and a new terminology to critique that new narrative while simultaneously honing a posthumanist lens to consider the representational shortcomings of popular posthumanist life narrative. A prime example of the last is the animalography, in which the human author ventriloquizes the animal’s voice allegedly to tell his story. This common practice in the memoir boom of stories about heroic companion animals achieving bestseller status concerns ethical questions that have long troubled life-writing theorists, namely who has the right to tell a story. Life-writing