The Eco-material Posthuman in the Age of the Anthropocene

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 7 explores the question of the human in the context of the “Anthropocene,” an epoch of environmental crisis that both elevates the human to the status of geological agent and strips the human of its foundational claims to mastery over the natural world. More specifically, it argues that the Anthropocene has given rise to what might be dubbed the “eco-material posthuman”—a specific iteration of critical posthumanism characterized by a renewed emphasis on the way our material bodies embed us in a more-than-human material world. It further argues that the theoretical preoccupations of the “eco-material posthuman” find echoes across a distinct body of feature films examining the fallout of the Anthropocene. The films in question are geographically and culturally diverse, ranging from Chinese drama 三峡好人/Still Life, to off-beat Icelandic-Ukrainian comedy Kona fer í stríð/Woman at War (Benedikt Erlingsson, 2018), and American horror Mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017). All, however, fully attend to the questions the Anthropocene raises about the interdependence of human and nonhuman worlds through their eco-materialist recourse to the materiality of the human body. While the models of human bodily materiality at issue here are manifold, this chapter zeroes in on three in particular: the body as cell, the body as affect, and the body as vital materiality. These models of the human body, it argues, cast the body not as a guarantor of human exceptionalism but as an aperture to the nonhuman outside.