Posthumanism and the Limits of Ability
November 3 - 4, 2022
3:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Nov 3 Daley Library 1-470, Nov 4 UIC Institute for Humanities
Calendar
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This year, the UIC Department of Germanic Studies Max Kade Colloquium will consider how notions of dis/ability
signify in the post-pandemic contemporary and how they have developed historically. What is the
relation between ability and the human? What moral assumptions accompany the use of these terms?
How do theoretical considerations of the limits of the human informed by posthumanism intersect
with reflections on ability and disability? The extension of life and the optimization of health stand as the
highest ideals of the contemporary West: any human who lives long enough will experience their “ability”
as dependent upon prosthetics or technology, tools that are primarily available to the global rich—who
consequently displace their anxieties about vulnerability and dependence onto the poor, onto ethnic, sexual,
gender and racial minorities, and onto non-human beings. Within Germany and the U.S., contemporary
discourses about ability and humanness trace a history of eugenicist ideologies that conflict with narratives of
social justice progress.
The Humanities scholars and artists gathered for this event will consider the potentialities of live theater,
of narrative, of film, of literary aesthetics, and of art to help us rethink destructive binaries such as
human/non-human, dis/abled, valuable/waste, productive/parasitic, or organic/inorganic.
Additional funding provided by the Federal Republic of
Germany through the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
Date posted
Oct 20, 2022
Date updated
Nov 3, 2022