Lorin Ghiman

Abstract

The rapid institutionalization of “transhumanism”, promoted from the status of subculture to ‘intellectual movement’, to the point in which its interests have gained academic traction becoming a research and reflection field cannot conceal the many methodological and epistemic shortcomings it still suffers today. I intend to go through the most striking of them in order to claim that in order to properly respond to its self-imposed mission and tasks, transhumanism must either adopt a critical, philosophical posthumanism, as its own method, or renounce its claims altogether. The point is that critical posthumanism is already the immanent critique of transhumanism, and the latter cannot continue to ignore it without losing touch with its own content – which equates to the catastrophic loss of academic credibility and the relegation in the sphere of popular culture. Conversely, the transhuman as a field of actual transformations is the proper one for posthumanist research, without which its efforts to gain institutional ground are pointless.