Avril Tynan // Throughout the nineteenth century, degeneration theory associated certain behaviours and physical and psychological pathologies with a pseudo-Darwinian atavism of primitive traits and characteristics. One need only think of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, and particularly his 1890 novel La bête humaine (The Beast in Man or The Beast Within), to note the parallels…
Tag: Posthumanism
Must the Medical Subject be “Human”? Normativity, Humanism, and the Medical Humanities
Erik Larsen // “He is the object of information, never a subject in communication” (200). With this pithy formula, Foucault summarizes the prisoner’s situation within the panoptic prison. The prisoner is everywhere observed and monitored, made into an object of study and manipulation, while never communicating personally with their panoptic observer. Foucault’s description of modern…