Posthumanist Responsibility
Posthumanist Responsibility
The issue of responsibility in connection with global climate change is especially challenging. “I didn’t melt that glacier.” And yet, very likely “we” did, even though there is no collective “we” that acted. The more we know about the excessively large typical Western carbon footprint, the more easily we each can feel guilty— bout travel, our lifestyle, our food, and so on. This experience cuts through the lack of a collective agent through some such idea as participation. Fundamental questions about responsibility are pursued, in the face of doubts about the agent-as-subject, from posthumanists, new materialists, Heidegger, Derrida, feminists, deep ecologists, and others. The landscape of such responsibilities as we may suppose we have is sketched out, arguing that we need both traditional accounts of responsibility that can charge CEOs with culpable negligence, as well as a deeper sense of response-ability, involving imagination, and a multi-faceted openness to the Other.
Keywords: agent, culpable negligence, Derrida, Heidegger, imagination, posthumanist, responsibility, “we”
Fordham Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
