The ideal of the Western white Man as the universal representative of humanity has repeatedly been subject to critique. For several decades the Jamaican author and philosopher Sylvia Wynter – the book’s title refers to her formulation ‘Towards Human after Man’ – has advocated a decolonial concept of the human decoupled from its Western normalized and racialized configurations. Current neo-materialist, post-humanist or ecological discourses see the most pressing impetus for a rethinking of the human above all in climate change, mass extinction, the tightening fusion of the living and the technical and their associated mechanisms of capitalist exploitation. This book interrelates these different approaches and brings them into dialogue with artistic positions projecting alternative forms of the human in radical and sometimes highly speculative ways. The publication is the result of the seventh annual programme of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.

With contributions by Morehshin Allahyari, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Bracha L. Ettinger, Louisa Gagliardi, Maja Gunn, Luciana Parisi, Istvan Praet, Kathrin Thiele, Alexander G. Weheliye, Zairong Xiang and others.