What happens when an emergent theoretical or critical approach stops being oppositional and becomes a dominant position in its own right? This is perhaps the status of posthumanism in the present conjuncture. Originally emerging as an oppositional position in the 1990s and in the first decade of the twenty-first century, posthumanism now finds itself, ten more years into the century, one of the dominant paradigms of literary studies in the present. No longer a challenge to the common sense of postmodernism and social construction, it now has articulated its own version of materialist and ontological common sense.
What was once a challenge to doxa starts to feel like the workings of doxa itself, a set of theoretical moves that now begin to verge on the routine. It is unsurprising, then, that our own present moment has seen the emergence of a number of critiques of posthumanist doxa, often from the...
