Some Introductory Thoughts in Advance of Much Reading

I am coming to this course with a set of disparate readings and only a vague notion of the shape of these discussions. From beginning to read the Badmington reader, I get that sense that I am coming to this world reasonably well versed in at least several sets of the foundational material. Initially it strikes me that the destabilizing of the concept 'human' as a unifying and unproblematic figure has somewhat permeated our culture. Neil Badmington himself makes the point that the concern over the stability of human-ness as natural erupted simultaneously in both the academic and entertainment worlds (7-8). This simultaneous concern, which Badminton links to a series of Copernican revolutions, leads us to examine and trouble the concept 'human' at all levels. Are we to seek out, stake out and then defend what it is we have been calling human? Does this examination lead us towards thinking about machines and artificial consciousness? Or rather, towards a better understanding of our relationship as animals with other animals, as living organisms with other living organisms, or at (maybe) the furthest reaches as matter with other matter?

My own reading and thinking here is currently largely tied to Jacques Derrida. Specifically, in The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida works to understand the form and function of the division we have created for ourselves as humans from animals. Derrida, with his standard delicacy, is quick and careful to dismiss anyone who would erase the difference between humans and animals in favor of pure unity. Instead, Derrida drives at defining the means and purposes for our insistence on a staunch distinction, as well as our continual repression of the knowledge of this as a continual process held only by fragile threads.

Anyways. These are some of my initial thoughts in advance of much reading. I am excited to explore the 'digital humanities' side of this course, with which I have very little knowledge or contact (except perhaps for an overactive internet addiction). As someone completely enthralled by issues of narrative, I am excited both to learn more about community narratives through online gaming and also the effects of these new thoughts and technologies on my own true literary love, the novel.

Works Cited

Badmington, Neil, ed. Posthumanism. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2000.

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. trans. Davis Wills. New York, NY: Fordham
UP, 2008.