I’d rather be a sage than a cyborg: re-theorizing posthumanism through religious wisdom literature

The topics of identity and subjectivity are well-trodden paths in posthuman
thought, and the trend has been to reduce the self to its material, social, and technoscientific components. Yet the posthuman model of subjectivity—influenced by the tenets of postmodernism—tends to be disabling because it does not focus on the subject’s agency or the possibility of liberation from social tyranny. In this thesis, I use a sampling of what I call “religious wisdom literature”—specifically, the wisdom books of the Old Testament and contemporary Buddhist writings—to challenge the assumption that the self is indistinguishable from the ideologies that produce it. I provide models from religious texts that instead, emphasize critical agency, flexibility, and resistive power. I also suggest that focusing on these qualities may ultimately be useful in the composition classroom, where we can use “self-centered” expressivist techniques (reflective assignments, emotional awareness) to meet the social-epistemic goal of ideological critique. Ultimately, posthumanism, with its emphasis on the construction of subjectivity, is better suited to question strict materialism and inquire into the inspiring possibilities of ancient wisdom.