This paper situates Günther Anders’s diagnosis of a shift in the modes of human self-production from hermeneutic and educational practices to techno-scientific interventions in the broader context of observations concerning posthumanism and biopolitics. It proposes to reframe the problem of human self-production within the philosophy of media and traces a common anti-hermeneutic trajectory to which both technoscientific transhumanism and certain strands of posthumanism belong, insofar as they are based on an ontology that exclusively considers causally effective agency. With Anders and (...) Martin Heidegger it is argued that such a focus on agency neglects the dimension of meaning that irreducibly guides technoscientific interventions. The paper claims that, with regard to the escalating dynamics both of human enhancement and of the Anthropocene, neither a truly critical theoretical stance nor a practical subversion is possible without taking the horizons of meaning into account that drive these dynamics. The last section sketches an outline of the complex interrelations of humans, technologies and meaning that cannot be mapped in terms of causally effective agency. (shrink)

Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the early 1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and technoscience—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the “affective turn.” Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well-known critique, there are either more “paranoid” or more “reparative” approaches toward affect. Whereas the latter emphasize the (...) potentialities of affect, the former argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. Here, I suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacques Rancière's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Rancière takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebrating a politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and reframe it as the “distribution of emotions,” by which I develop a multilayered approach toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of affective politics. (shrink)