Posthumanism is an intellectual current that questions the idea of the human as a privileged subject and rethinks the relations between humans and the nonhuman. In media theory, it develops from Marshall McLuhan’s view of media as environment and is advanced by Donna Haraway’s critique of anthropocentrism. Haraway challenged modern Western binaries such as human/animal, nature/artificial, and body/machine, and helped shift attention away from the image of the human as a self-contained, exceptional being toward a view of humans as one element within broader networks that include animals, machines, and the earth environment.
Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” introduced the cyborg as a metaphor for hybrid subjectivity and for resisting established myths of “the human.” In the 2000s, she proposed “Companion Species” as a new keyword, emphasizing coexistence between humans, animals, and environments. Her work stresses that humans and nonhumans, both living and nonliving, mutually shape the world, and that boundaries such as “human versus environment” or “human versus machine” should be relativized. Posthumanism differs from transhumanism, which seeks to enhance and extend humans through technology and to transcend biological limits. Instead, posthumanism focuses on coexistence, coevolution, and the circulation of life, including the entanglement of life and death.