Review of Patricia MacCormack, Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory

Early in Patricia MacCormack’s Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory, she explains “Posthuman Ethics could have been called Posthuman Bodies” (1). This switch, from ethics to bodies, is important. It lets the reader know that the book is not going to be concerned with a normative understanding of ethics. Instead, ethics here is a Spinozian ethics, in other words a moral physics, a relation-ship of bodies to each other and how they affect one another. If that is the ethics, the posthuman should be understood in two senses. First, it means a position that exists, as Cary Wolfe has put it, “both before and after humanism.”1 In this sense, MacCormack’s work should be read as part of a long line of posthumanist theory, including Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” and When Species Meet, N. Katharine Hayles How We Became Posthuman, Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism?, and Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman. However, posthuman should also be understood as the ways that all sorts of bod-ies, including non-human ones, end up entangled in and with each other. In this sense, we can see Posthuman Ethics as being part of a continuation that includes Mel Chen’s Anima-cies, Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie, and Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages. MacCormack forces us into the vortex of what Felix Guattari has referred to as “affective contamination,” which is the process by which other beings “start to exist in you, in spite of you.”2 Thus, we are treated to examinations of our entanglements with art and inhuman ecstasy, tattoos and the skin, nonhuman animals, marvelous monsters, mystic queers, and the nation of the dead. So far, so good. But also, I am sure you are asking, how is this book new? Is this just another book of posthuman theory combined with the au-thor’s preferred more-than-human objects of inquiry? This is where things get interesting, because despite MacCormack’s protests, there is still a normative ethical argument that is slowly developed throughout the present work. MacCormack is concerned with how “regimes of signification” create and produce domination (94). What emerges, then, is an ethics that cuts to the very core of what it means to do philosophy and theory.