Since the late 1990s, the posthuman has emerged as a major area of academic enquiry investigating the extent to which notions of ‘the human’ are being redefined by the increasing imbrication of the human with the technological. Recent developments within cybernetics, informatics and genetics are not simply the tools by which the human agent sustains itself, posthumanism argues; rather, they have a transformative impact upon both the concept and the experience of subjectivity.

However, engagement between posthumanism and psychoanalysis has thus far been relatively limited. Even critical discourses on the posthuman that are guarded about the emancipatory promise of technology have nonetheless claimed that psychoanalytic models of subjectivity have been rendered obsolete by more recent ‘informational’ theories of the human, and by the contemporary knowledge economy with its emphasis on network and entropy over the linear structure of the Lacanian signifying chain. Psychoanalytic thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek, meanwhile, have more often found alarming ethical consequences in the cultural shift that new technologies represent towards an elision of sexual difference and a ‘flattening out’ of the other. Rarely has the engagement with psychoanalysis by the posthuman taken full account of the evolution in psychoanalytic thought since Lacan’s early writings, and psychoanalysis has seldom engaged with the notion of the posthuman as a means to contextualize its own work in the clinical setting.

The purpose of this conference is to prompt a more balanced dialogue between critical posthumanism and psychoanalysis. Participation has already been secured for Jerry Aline Flieger and Véronique Voruz. The organizers will be pleased to receive any proposals relating to the intersections of psychoanalysis and the posthuman, although contributions in any of the following areas would be particularly welcome:

• The ‘human’ of posthumanism and psychoanalysis
• Posthuman and psychoanalytic ethics
• Language, information and consciousness
• Embodiment and sexual difference
• New clinical phenomena in a ‘posthuman’ age
• Science and technology in a psychoanalytic perspective
Proposals of no more than 400 words should be sent by 27th March 2009 to either colin.wright@nottingham.ac.uk or suzanne.dow@nottingham.ac.uk