| dc.description.abstract | The genre of uplift fiction deals with speaking and intelligent animals and their relationship with humans, critiquing the humanist conceptions of the categories human and animal, the boundaries between these categories and human exceptionalism. Its ideological critique can be related to a post-humanist philosophical discourse that includes the question of the animal (as considered by Jacques Derrida): how to think about non-human perspectives and how to rethink our ethical treatment of non-humans. Moreover, uplifted animals can be regarded as cyborgs (as described by Donna Haraway): cross-species mixtures of the organic and the technological that transgress all presupposed boundaries. The uplift fiction novel consists of a paradoxical nature: it uplifts animals in the first place, assuming a hierarchal picture of humans above all other life, and then focusses mainly on the differences and similarities between species. At the same time, however, uplift fiction questions the anthropomorphic and anthropocentric structures that precede these conceptions of humans and animals by a critical anthropomorphism: it mirrors the way in which traditional anthropomorphic (and subsequently anthropocentric) structures are manifested and it opens up a space in which communication between different kinds of subjectivity becomes possible. This is especially true for Adam Roberts’ novel Bête, that is concerned with responding to the question of the animal specifically and emphasizing man’s misrecognition of himself as exceptional, by providing a post-humanist scenario that incorporates non-human subjectivity and the urgent need for renewed ethical standards. | |
