Review: Posthumanism Glossary

Posthuman Glossary #

Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, Theory series

Braidotti, Rosi, and Maria Hlavajova, eds. 2018. Posthuman Glossary. Theory. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-350-03024-4 (hardback), 978-1-350-03025-1 (paperback), 978-1-350-03023-7 (ePDF).

A glossary promises definitions; Posthuman Glossary delivers something closer to a weather map of a field in the middle of a storm. Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, with 141 contributors and well over 100 alphabetized entries, the book sets out to chart the convergence of posthumanism (the critique of "Man" as the universal stand-in for the human) and post-anthropocentrism (the critique of species hierarchy). Its introduction opens with a genuinely disarming question: "What could terms such as 'altergorithm', 'rewilding', 'negentropy' and 'technoanimalism' possibly have in common?" The honest answer, which the book supplies without quite admitting it, is: a moment. In this review, I will argue that the volume succeeds as a cartography of what critical theory sounded like in 2018 and fails as a glossary, by showing how its rigorous introduction, its best entries, and its own terminological proliferation pull in different directions; the ambition and the unevenness arrive in roughly equal measure.

A cartography, not an argument #

The introduction does the most disciplined work in the volume. Braidotti and Hlavajova carefully distinguish the "non-human" (depreciated, naturalized others cast outside anthropocentric thought, including colonized peoples, animals, and genomic material) from the "inhuman" (the dehumanizing effects of structural injustice on people denied full humanity), and they root both in a biopolitics-to-necropolitics arc that runs from Foucault through Achille Mbembe. That distinction matters, because it gives the volume's best entries a shared theoretical spine even when their subject matter has nothing in common. The Necropolitics entry, working the same Foucault-to-Mbembe line as the introduction, is a compact, well-argued piece: it tracks the shift from sovereign "let live and make die" to biopolitical "make live and let die" to Mbembe's correction that biopower alone cannot account for a politics whose primary object is the murder of the enemy. It earns its four pages.

Other entries clear the same bar. Heather Houser's "Affective Turn" stages a real argument rather than a survey, working through Sianne Ngai's refusal to distinguish affect from emotion in Ugly Feelings and using that refusal to interrogate whether affect theory can survive contact with the posthuman, given that most affect theory still quietly assumes a human feeler. Donna Haraway's own "Capitalocene and Chthulucene" entry, unsurprisingly, is one of the sharpest pieces of compression in the book. When contributors treat their two or three pages as an essay rather than a dictionary entry, the format works.

The problem the format cannot solve #

The trouble is structural, not a matter of individual failures. An alphabetized glossary flattens conceptual hierarchy by design: "Necropolitics" sits between whatever happens to come before and after it alphabetically, disconnected from the biopolitics literature it depends on unless the reader already knows to go looking. More seriously, a volume built entirely from neologisms is, by its own admission, a machine for producing exactly the terminological proliferation it might otherwise be expected to sort through. The introduction lists its keywords with a kind of pride ("metadata society," "digital rubbish," "neuronal aesthetics," "exclusion zone") that reads, ten pages later, as the book unintentionally diagnosing itself. A glossary that coins as fast as it defines has stopped being a reference work and started being another primary source for the discourse it claims to be mapping; the map and the territory become flip sides of the same coin.

This proliferation produces real unevenness in quality, and not the kind easy to excuse as the cost of doing an edited volume. Some entries are compressed arguments; others are competent surveys that never rise above restating their keyword in five different registers. With 141 contributors writing in isolation from one another, cross-references stay sparse, and a reader who wants to follow, say, the throughline from "Anthropocene" to "Capitalocene" to "Necropolitics" must build that path alone. The book never quite decides whether it is a dictionary you consult or an argument you read, and it pays for that indecision in both directions: too disjointed to argue, too jargon-heavy to consult casually.

Showing its age #

Published in 2018, the volume's technology entries have aged hardest. Luciana Parisi's "AI (Artificial Intelligence)" entry, David Theo Goldberg and Jenna Ng's "Algorithmic Studies," and the various algorithm-adjacent entries predate the generative-AI moment that reorganized what "AI" means in public discourse. None of this datedness is the contributors' fault, and the entries remain useful as intellectual history of how critical theory thought about algorithms before large language models existed. But a reader picking this book up now for guidance on AI and critical theory will find a pre-history rather than a live map, which is a real limitation for a book whose stated ambition is to track "the current state of posthuman scholarship." The ecological and biopolitical entries have aged better, partly because Anthropocene discourse has moved less dramatically in eight years than AI discourse has.

What it is for #

Where the book earns its keep is as a roster and an index of a scholarly moment. The contributor list alone constitutes a who's-who of posthuman and new materialist theory circa the late 2010s: Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Donna Haraway, Achille Mbembe's influence throughout, Melinda Cooper, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Used as a starting point for a research question rather than a book to read cover to cover, it works well: pick an entry, follow its citations out, and you land in the specific corner of posthuman theory where the real argument is happening. Not coincidentally, this volume is also the companion in Bloomsbury's Theory series to Braidotti and Gilroy's Conflicting Humanities, which shares the series' "Theory is back" preface and its editorial ambition to cartograph an emerging field rather than settle it.

Verdict #

Posthuman Glossary is best understood as a reference tool masquerading, in its introduction, as a manifesto. Read the introduction closely (it is the volume's most rigorous piece of writing and the only part that tries to hold the whole project together); then use the rest as a browsing index rather than a sustained argument, following individual entries to their sources, expecting real variance in quality between them, and never expecting the alphabet to do any conceptual work for you. The book is honest about what it is in one place it may not intend to be: a glossary whose contributors cannot stop minting new terms even while defining old ones. That confession tells you something true about posthuman theory in 2018, the terminological churn of the field writ large; it just is not the kind of clarity a glossary is supposed to deliver.