In my paper, I will concentrate on the realms of the weird and the grotesque in human- animal relation. Posthumanism, by decentering human position, tends to bring our focus to non-humans understood as active and conscious actors with their own particular point of view. In doing so, posthumanism allows certain weirdness or even grotesque of our condition to come forth (Braidotti 2019). It seems that even if we are inclined to think according to posthumanist terms, the basic difficulty of applying them to our self-knowledge still remains. How can we properly recognize and understand the myriads of different intersections, relations, co-dependences with creatures we usually can’t even see? How can we really acknowledge them as crucial co-creators of our shared world?

I want to ask those questions alongside the Charles Darwin’s Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms. Darwin enthusiastically and consequently blurs the human-animal border, he is always ready to point yet another example of animals’ abilities and to criticize human hybris. Worms however is perhaps his most “proto-posthumanist” work, in which he proves our strict dependency on the earthworms, constantly devouring, digesting and thus fertilizing the mould: “Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first suppose (Darwin 1882: 308). Earthworms arise to be the closest and most faithful human companions (for example their castings preserve ancient heritage). Darwin mingles high- and low-level orders: thought, culture, heritage and materiality, digestion, defecation. In doing so he evokes the realms of grotesque and weird accompanying our (post-)human being in the world (Ulin 1992, Smith 2009, Philips 2000).

Recently, Donna Haraway’s notion of Chtulucene (Haraway 2016) and Timothy Morton’s analysis of weird in his dark ecology project (Morton 2016), brought forth the aspects of weirdness and strangeness inscribed in human – non-human relations. Their analyses tend to attune to the Darwinian vision. I want to consider whether the realms of weird and grotesque belong to the order of thinking and representing (as transcendental conditions of our knowledge), or the mode of being (as ontological determinants of our experience). In other words, whether we describe our co-dependence with some non-humans as weird, because we are accustomed to think of human as the only active subject, or are we ontologically entwined in multispecies knots or rhizome and so constantly entering relations with strange others.

This paper explores the role of fictionality in the field of critical posthumanism. Identifying a set of different appropriations of fictional discourse in writings by, amongst others, Astrida Niemanis, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Rebekah Sheldon, and Donna Haraway, the paper asks why scholars united by a common interest in “getting real”, to use Karen Barad’s phrase (1998), often utilize a type of discourse that is defined precisely by not committing itself to reality. What, in other words, do genres and rhetorical devices that deliberately and explicitly make stuff up allow thinkers within critical posthumanism to do that traditional academic styles of writing do not? To answer this question, the article adopts key concepts from fictionality theory (Richard Walsh, Simona Gjerlevsen, and Henrik Skov Nielsen) and utilize these in order to trace three distinct modes through which fictional discourse is put to use in critical posthumanism. These modes are distinguished by fictionalizing non/human entanglements, scientific knowledge, and future societies respectively; yet all of them, the paper argues, fictionalize with the primary aim of imaginatively and affectively grasping phenomena that in principle reside beyond the limits of intelligibility. On this basis, the paper intervenes in recent debates on the modes of argumentation in critical posthumanism, arguing that fictionality – as opposed to “literature”, “fabulation”, “speculation” or “wor(l)ding” – is a particularly attractive tool for attempts to move beyond anthropocentric regimes of truth.

Posthumanism, like postmodernism, implies a before and after, and so the term has the shape of a narrative, a story of significant change. In this paper, I highlight how this narrative kernel connects posthumanism to a broader set of science-adjacent discourses including the Anthropocene, the Singularity, and the Noosphere. After exploring how posthumanism relates to this set, I identify the “Epic of Evolution”(/“Big History”) and the “Great Transition” as key attempts to unfold this same narrative dimension across two different timescales: the deep time of evolutionary science and the compressed time of the twentieth century’s “Great Acceleration.” I propose that taking such a panoramic view of six discourses—posthumanism, the Anthropocene, the Singularity, the Noosphere, the evolutionary epic, and the Great Transition— allows us recognize them as fragments of an emerging “grand narrative” responsive to the natural sciences, technological development, and the ecological crisis. Finally, I suggest that posthumanism’s role in this grand narrative, which may or may not coalesce further, is to critique and balance it: i.e. to keep the grand narrative of globalizing humankind from lapsing into the extremes of self-congratulation and self-flagellation.