Posthumanism

Posthumanism, as it appears in Žižek's reading of Soviet utopian literature (Platonov, Bogdanov) in Hegel in a Wired Brain, names a specific ideological configuration in which the overcoming of the human is articulated through two interlocking moves: (1) the technological manipulation of the human organism as a vector of passage to a "post-human stage," and (2) the elevation of the transformed human to a quasi-divine status. Žižek frames this not as an innocent futurist dream but as a symptomatic ideological knot, one that repeats a theological structure (the Fall and redemption) under the guise of scientific materialism. The posthumanist fantasy promises to resolve the constitutive gap in the human — the gap opened by sexuality, lack, and the "labour of life" — through technical mastery, thereby suturing the subject's fundamental incompleteness.

What makes this concept theoretically decisive in the passage is that posthumanism is diagnosed as the ideological form through which the dialectic between sexuality and the collective utopian project is managed and ultimately betrayed. Platonov's Soviet utopianism initially proposes the annihilation of sexuality as the precondition for collective sublimation; when this fails, sexuality is "rehabilitated" and the utopian project is sutured into the heterosexual couple — a Stalinist/Hollywood formula. Posthumanism, in this reading, is thus not a genuine sublation of the human but a fantasy screen that conceals the irreducible remainder: jouissance, the gap, and the impossibility of the sexual relationship. It offers the imaginary resolution of what dialectics shows to be structurally irresolvable.

In slavoj-zizek-hegel-in-a-wired-brain-bloomsbury-publishing-2020, the concept of posthumanism appears as a critical object rather than an endorsed position. Žižek situates it within an argument about how Soviet utopian thought (specifically Platonov and Bogdanov) handled the tension between collective emancipatory projects and the disruptive force of sexuality and bodily life. Posthumanism becomes the name for the fantasy resolution of this tension — a fantasy in the strict Lacanian sense: a structural frame that promises to cover over the constitutive gap (manque-à-être) in the human by replacing the lacking subject with a technically perfected, divinized post-human. This aligns with the canonical concept of Fantasy as a screen that conceals the Real impossibility of the sexual relationship, offering imaginary coordinates for desire while suppressing what cannot be symbolized.

The concept is equally implicated in the logic of Jouissance and Sublation. Posthumanism promises a world cleansed of the compulsive, self-undermining surplus-enjoyment that jouissance names — the bodily remainder that no symbolic project can fully absorb. Its gesture of "passing to the post-human through technological manipulation" is precisely the fantasy of abolishing the gap that jouissance inhabits. Yet, as the cross-referenced concepts of Dialectics and the Labour of Life suggest, this is not a genuine sublation (Aufhebung) but a foreclosure: instead of preserving-and-elevating the contradictions of human sexuality and lack, posthumanism imagines their elimination. Žižek's critical deployment of the term thus positions posthumanism as the ideological inverse of the Lacanian insight that the gap, lack, and jouissance are not defects to be overcome but the very conditions of subjectivity, desire, and any genuine emancipatory project.

Hegel in a Wired BrainSlavoj Žižek · 2020 (p.53)

All the main ingredients of posthumanism are here: the passage to post-human stage through technological manipulation of humans; the idea that, in this way, humans will become divine

The phrase "passage to post-human stage through technological manipulation" condenses the two defining moves of the posthumanist fantasy: technology as the operator of transformation, and "divine" as its telos — revealing that posthumanism repeats a theological structure (the Fall redeemed through ascent to the divine) under a materialist, futurist disguise. The word "ingredients" is equally loaded: it signals that Žižek is performing a symptomatic reading, identifying the constituent ideological elements of a formation rather than endorsing it, and anticipating its critical decomposition through the dialectic of sexuality, lack, and sublation that follows.