Editing Posthumanism (section)

==Criticism==
Some critics have argued that all forms of posthumanism, including transhumanism, have more in common than their respective proponents realize.<ref name="Winner 2005">{{cite book | author = Winner, Langdon | editor = Harold Bailie, Timothy Casey| title = Is Human Nature Obsolete?| publisher =M.I.T. Press  | location = Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 2004| isbn = 978-0262524285 | pages = 385–411 | chapter = Resistance is Futile: The Posthuman Condition and Its Advocates| year = 2005| author-link = Langdon Winner}}</ref> Linking these different approaches, [[Paul James (academic)|Paul James]] suggests that "the key political problem is that, in effect, the position allows the human as a category of being to flow down the plughole of history":

{{blockquote|This is ontologically critical. Unlike the naming of 'postmodernism' where the 'post' does not infer the end of what it previously meant to be human (just the passing of the dominance of the modern) the posthumanists are playing a serious game where the human, in all its ontological variability, disappears in the name of saving something unspecified about us as merely a motley co-location of individuals and communities.<ref>{{Cite book | year= 2017 | last1= James | first1= Paul | author-link1= Paul James (academic) | chapter= Alternative Paradigms for Sustainability: Decentring the Human without Becoming Posthuman | title= Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times | editor1= Karen Malone|editor2=Son Truong|editor3=Tonia Gray | chapter-url= https://www.academia.edu/32388929 | publisher= Ashgate | page=21}}</ref>}}

However, some posthumanists in the [[humanities]] and the [[arts]] are critical of transhumanism (the brunt of James's criticism), in part, because they argue that it incorporates and extends many of the values of [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment humanism]] and [[classical liberalism]], namely [[scientism]], according to [[performance art|performance]] philosopher [[Shannon Bell]]:<ref name="Zaretsky 2005">{{cite journal|    author = Zaretsky, Adam|    title = Bioart in Question. Interview.|    year = 2005|    url = http://magazine.ciac.ca/archives/no_23/en/entrevue.htm|    access-date = 2007-01-28|    url-status = dead|    archive-url = https://archive.today/20130115125814/http://magazine.ciac.ca/archives/no_23/en/entrevue.htm|    archive-date = 2013-01-15}}</ref>

{{blockquote|Altruism, mutualism, humanism are the soft and slimy virtues that underpin liberal capitalism. Humanism has always been integrated into discourses of exploitation: colonialism, imperialism, neoimperialism, democracy, and of course, American democratization. One of the serious flaws in transhumanism is the importation of liberal-human values to the biotechno enhancement of the human. Posthumanism has a much stronger critical edge attempting to develop through enactment new understandings of the self and others, essence, consciousness, intelligence, reason, agency, intimacy, life, embodiment, identity and the body.<ref name="Zaretsky 2005"/>}}

While many modern leaders of thought are accepting of nature of ideologies described by posthumanism, some are more skeptical of the term. Haraway, the author of [[Cyborg Manifesto|''A Cyborg Manifesto'']], has outspokenly rejected the term, though acknowledges a philosophical alignment with posthumanism. Haraway opts instead for the term of companion species, referring to nonhuman entities with which humans coexist.<ref name=gane>{{cite journal|last1=Gane|first1=Nicholas|title=When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done?: Interview with Donna Haraway|journal=Theory, Culture & Society|date=2006|volume=23|issue=7–8|pages=135–158|doi=10.1177/0263276406069228|doi-access=free}}</ref>

Questions of race, some argue, are suspiciously elided within the "turn" to posthumanism. Noting that the terms "post" and "human" are already loaded with racial meaning, critical theorist Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues that the impulse to move "beyond" the human within posthumanism too often ignores "praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people",{{sfn|Jackson|2015|p=216}} including [[Frantz Fanon]], [[Aimé Césaire|Aime Cesaire]], [[Hortense Spillers]] and [[Fred Moten]].{{sfn|Jackson|2015|p=216}} Interrogating the conceptual grounds in which such a mode of "beyond" is rendered legible and viable, Jackson argues that it is important to observe that "blackness conditions and constitutes the very nonhuman disruption and/or disruption" which posthumanists invite.{{sfn|Jackson|2015|p=216}} In other words, given that race in general and blackness in particular constitute the very terms through which human-nonhuman distinctions are made, for example in enduring legacies of [[scientific racism]], a gesture toward a "beyond" actually "returns us to a Eurocentric transcendentalism long challenged".{{sfn|Jackson|2015|p=217}} Posthumanist scholarship, due to characteristic rhetorical techniques, is also frequently subject to the same [[Criticism of postmodernism|critiques commonly made of postmodernist]] scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s.