The Posthuman Imperative: From the Question of the Animal to the Questions of the Animals

Much work in the wake of posthumanism focusses on questions which emphasise and interrogate technology as the key element calling for novel understandings of the world in which we live. In this chapter, we focus on ‘the animal question’ in geography and philosophy as the provocation setting in motion other than purely technologically inspired rethinking of existence. We first define posthumanism as an emerging wave of contemporary thought. Second, we discuss how a strand of research in human geography has preferred to mark its work primarily as more-than-human, rather than posthuman. Third, we consider the question of the animal in Jacques Derrida’s late production to highlight three interrelated themes (the critique of ‘the animal’ category, the uniqueness of individual existence and violence), which we use as roadmap for considering how animal geography has been at the vanguard in calling scholars to rethink and rewrite the world by challenging humans’ exceptionalism. We conclude by briefly recalling the need to interrogate what animals want.