Ep. 32: Arts-Based Collective Reading of Existential Posthumanism: A Manifesto with Francesca Ferrando

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Hosted by Stephen Julich (EWP adjunct faculty, program manager) and Jonathan Kay (PhD student, EWP assistant)

Today’s podcast features a collective reading of Francesca Ferrando’s new text Existential Posthumanism: A Manifesto. This text builds upon Dr. Ferrando’s last book, Philosophical Posthumanism, and calls for a radical paradigm shift aiming to critique and overcome Euro-centric humanism and power structures deployed through global capitalism. Through re-imagine and re-making ourselves from post-human, post-anthropocentric and post-binary perspectives, how can we collectively build a sustainable and ethical planetary future?

This texts addresses these questions specifically:

When did existential posthumanism arise?

What is existential posthumanism?

How to enact existential posthumanism?

What is the difference between spirituality and existential posthumanism?

This reading is set to a drone instrument called a sound bed, made up on a hundred strings, with live musical interludes played on the esraj by myself. The podcast ends with my own transcultural re-imagination of the jazz standard Nature Boy. In the next episode of the podcast we take a deep dive in unpacking this text with Francesca.

Dr. Ferrando (pronouns: they/them) teaches Philosophy at New York University (US), NYU-Program of Liberal Studies, as an Adjunct Assistant Professor. Dr. Ferrando holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy (University of Roma Tre, Italy), to which the European Doctoral Fellowship was granted. They received an M.A. in Gender Studies (Utrecht University, Holland), Director of the Program: Prof. Rosi Braidotti. Dr. Ferrando was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University (US) twice, and an Independent Researcher at the University of Reading (England), working on Cyborg Theory with Prof.Kevin Warwick. Recipient of the Philosophical Prize “Premio Sainati”, with the Acknowledgment of thePresident of the Italian Republic, Dr. Ferrando is the author of several publications; their latest book is Philosophical Posthumanism (Bloomsbury). Their work has been translated into a dozen languages, including (in alphabetic order): Chinese, Hungarian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, Spanish and Urdu. Dr. Ferrando is the Founder of the Global Posthuman Network. In the history of TED talks, they were the first speaker to give a talk on the subject of the posthuman.