Lyotard and the Inhuman (Postmodern Encounters)

by Stuart Sim

For Jean-Francois Lyotard, the cyborg is a symbol of fear, Mankind already inhabits a world which views machine implantation in humans as normal and necessary. It implies a future, Lyotard warns,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1840462353
• Release Date: February 1997
• Publisher: Icon Books
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.9" x 0.3" x 4.4"

Customer Reviews

Well-written, researched, and argued little book

I agree with Bob Swain's review that this is a great book, but not with his assertion that it's great because it somehow sides with Lyotard. The beauty of this book is that it manages to very dispassionately weigh Lyotard's anti-inhumanism against feminist pro-cyborg, post-humanist thought. Sim remains a lucid but fair interpreter of postmodern feminism AND Lyotard's own brand of postmodernism. I found both Lyotard and Haraway to have equally compelling points. Swain's review was oddly one-sided and by being so shows he perhaps read the book too fast (40 minutes) and didn't quite get it. Sim is *not* siding with Lyotard, but showing all facets of humanism, inhumanism, post-humanism, etc. Some of the books in the Postmodern Encounters series hit the mark more than others, but this one is a model for what the series strives for. Pertinent, well-written, fair, and evocative, it touches on deep, essential questions for our times. However, I disagree with a statement made in the book that inhumanism/posthumanism/humanism is the greatest debate-challenge of the 21st century: I believe that peak oil, energy depletion, resource wars, and potential global economic collapse from running out of energy to be the biggest challenge facing humanity. For without electricity and power, all of the technology discussed in Sim's "little" book -- Internet, cyborgs, cyberspace, Artifical Intelligence, Artificial Life, techno-science, etc -- is nothing. The debate in Sim's book is meaningless outside of an oil-powered, highly technological, developed society/world. Strangely, Sim, Lyotard, Haraway, and all the thinkers involved miss this point, that techno-science, cyborgism, post-humanism, etc, all depend on energy and power, which the world is running out of at an alarming rate. In this sense, Sim's book is great for the here-and-now of the EARLY 21st century -- but what threatens life on earth (humanity especially) more than the sun's eventual heat death is peak oil, global warming, resource wars, overpopulation, and energy depletion. Peak oil/peak coal/peak natural gas/etc should be the topic of a Postmodern Encounters book!

Great small book

This is a great small book that packs a lot into 80 pages. For those who find Lyotard daunting and his arguments inaccessible Sims' summation of Lyotard's book The Inhuman will be invaluable. Like capital cyberspace attempts at universal control. Lyotard argues for difference rather than uniformity. This includes gender difference. Against the cyborg revolution of Donna Haraway Lyotard is in favor of the ineradicable differend between the genders as they currently exist and not for the sexless gender-free robot universe of the near future as outlined by Haraway. It only took me about 40 minutes to read and it was clear as a lightning bolt illuminating Lyotard's continuous Augustinian humanism against the bleak backdrop of the Sadean left.