ALTERHUMANISM (UN)BOUND: METAFORMATIVE SUBJECTIVATION BEYOND TRANS-, POST-, AND METAHUMANIST TYPOLOGIES Aleksandar Talovic A dissertation submitted to Faculty 03 – Social Sciences and Cultural Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Dr. phil.) Justus Liebig University Giessen 2026 _____________________________ With the approval of Faculty 03 – Social Sciences and Cultural Studies Justus Liebig University Giessen Examination Committee: Prof. Dr. Andreas Langenohl (Chair) Prof. Dr. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner Prof. Dr. Jörn Ahrens apl. Prof. Dr. Michael Basseler Date of the Disputation: 29 January 2026 i Abstract This dissertation reconceives subjectivity for conditions in which neither anthropocentric sovereignty nor its familiar post-anthropocentric dispersals adequately describe how agency, responsibility, and world-making are presently composed. It develops alterhumanism not as an identity label, but as a method: a practice of reading and designing subjectivation as an open, recursively self-modifying process whose coherence is continuously negotiated across technogenic, ecological, and institutional environments. In this framework, subjectivity is treated less as a possessed property than as a metaformative achievement—an effects-field produced through infrastructures, affects, protocols, materials, and relational intensities that train what can count as a self and what can count as action. At the center of the argument stands Altersub: an operator rather than a person, a formal-pragmatic device for tracking how a “subject” intermittently contracts into decision, expands into milieu, and re-stitches itself through heterogeneous couplings. Altersub names a tidal coherence—a patterned, revisable rhythm of individuation that avoids the twin failures of sovereign humanism (false closure) and formless diffusion (false openness). It emerges through polividual constellations: collective selves composed of interlaced bodies, code, sensors, minerals, institutions, and atmospheres, whose agency is articulated through rhythm, latency, and constraint rather than stable identity. Methodologically, the dissertation proposes a post-cartographic mode of inquiry that integrates Foucauldian archaeology, feminist science and technology studies, and Deleuzoguattarian topology, moving across genealogical, infrastructural, phenomenological, and improvisational registers. Its guiding ontological claim is deliberately procedural: “ontology” is approached as onticology—the study of operative conditions by which beings become legible and actionable within specific assemblages, rather than a metaphysical inventory of what ultimately exists. Through this lens, the dissertation builds a typological and compositional account of alterhuman alliances and ecological subjectivities, culminating in an onto-textual synthesis that tests alterhumanism against contemporary sites where subjectivation is palpably re-engineered by data regimes, biosciences, financial infrastructures, and machine-learning environments. Keywords: Alterhumanism; Altersub; polividuality; metaformative subjectivation; distributed agency; posthuman diplomacy; feminist STS; technogenic environments; ecological entanglement ii Zusammenfassung Diese Dissertation rekonstruiert Subjektivität unter Bedingungen, in denen weder anthropozentrische Souveränität noch ihre geläufigen post-anthropozentrischen Zerstreuungen hinreichend erfassen können, wie Handlungsmacht, Verantwortlichkeit und Weltkonstitution gegenwärtig verfasst sind. Alterhumanismus wird dabei nicht als Identitätsbezeichnung, sondern als Methode entwickelt: als Praxis des Lesens und Entwerfens von Subjektivierung als offenem, rekursiv selbstmodifizierendem Prozess, dessen Kohärenz fortlaufend über technogene, ökologische und institutionelle Umwelten hinweg ausgehandelt wird. In diesem Rahmen erscheint Subjektivität weniger als statische Eigenschaft denn als metaformativer Vollzug – als Wirkungsfeld, das durch Infrastrukturen, Affekte, Protokolle, Materialitäten und relationale Intensitäten hervorgebracht wird und jene Bedingungen formiert, unter denen etwas als Selbst und etwas als Handlung gelten kann. Im Zentrum der Argumentation steht Altersub: kein personales Subjekt, sondern ein Operator – ein formal-pragmatisches Instrument zur Nachzeichnung jener Bewegungen, in denen sich ein „Subjekt“ situativ in Entscheidung verdichtet, sich in Milieus ausweitet und durch heterogene Kopplungen neu verschränkt. Altersub bezeichnet eine gezeitenhafte Kohärenz – einen strukturierten, revidierbaren Rhythmus der Individuation, der die Doppelverfehlung souveränen Humanismus (falscher Abschluss) ebenso vermeidet wie die einer formlos-diffusen Auflösung (falsche Offenheit). Es bildet sich in polividuellen Konstellationen heraus: kollektiven Selbstgefügen aus verschränkten Körpern, Code-Architekturen, Sensoren, mineralischen Komponenten, Institutionen und Atmosphären, deren Handlungsmacht sich nicht über stabile Identität, sondern über Rhythmus, Latenz und Begrenzung artikuliert. Methodisch entwickelt die Arbeit einen post-kartographischen Untersuchungsmodus, der foucaultsche Archäologie, feministische Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung sowie deleuzoguattarianische Topologie integriert und sich genealogisch, infrastrukturell, phänomenologisch und improvisatorisch bewegt. Ihr leitender ontologischer Anspruch ist bewusst prozedural gefasst: „Ontologie“ wird als Ontikologie verstanden – als Untersuchung jener operativen Bedingungen, unter denen Seiendes in spezifischen Gefügen lesbar und handlungsfähig wird, statt als metaphysisches Inventar dessen, was letztlich existiert. Vor diesem Hintergrund entfaltet die Dissertation eine typologische und kompositorische Darstellung alterhumaner Allianzen und ökologischer Subjektivitäten, die in einer onto-textuellen Synthese kulminiert. Diese prüft Alterhumanismus an gegenwärtigen Schauplätzen, an denen Subjektivierung durch Datenregime, Biowissenschaften, finanzielle Infrastrukturen und maschinelle Lernumgebungen sichtbar neu verfasst wird. Schlüsselbegriffe: Alterhumanismus; Altersub; Polividualität; metaformative Subjektivierung; verteilte Handlungsmacht; posthumane Diplomatie; feministische Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung (STS); technogene Umwelten; ökologische Verflechtungen iii Acknowledgements No work is ever written alone. Each line of thought is inscribed within relations that precede intention and exceed authorship. What appears as solitary labor rests upon networks of trust, interruption, correction, and care. A dissertation is not an isolated construction but a passage through a field of presences that steady the mind long before an argument coheres. The ground one walks on is never one’s own. My sincere gratitude begins with the DAAD, whose scholarship made this project materially possible. I am especially thankful to Ms. Laura Mendelssohn who, in her role at the DAAD, guided the administrative and institutional aspects of this undertaking with clarity, professionalism, and unfailing reliability, ensuring that procedures remained enabling rather than obstructive. My deepest thanks belong to Prof. Dr. Andreas Langenohl. His intellectual rigor, conceptual discipline, and unwavering confidence shaped this work at its core. His supervision did not merely accompany the project; it refined its argumentative architecture and sharpened its theoretical stakes. The clarity to which these pages aspire owes much to his example. I remain profoundly grateful for a form of mentorship that united scholarly exactness with rare generosity of mind. I am also sincerely thankful to Prof. Dr. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner for his openness, encouragement, and for the philosophical impulses that productively unsettled and expanded my thinking at decisive moments of this research. The GCSC community at JLU Giessen provided more than institutional affiliation; it offered an environment of sustained exchange and intellectual seriousness. I am equally grateful to my companions in Giessen and beyond: Denis, Rade, Stefan and MC, Zoran and Danijela, Alex, Jonas, Marija, Zerina, Nikola, Stefano, Mustafa, Mario, Melchior, and Katarina. My friends and colleagues at the Faculty of Political Science and the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade formed the early scaffolding without which this work would not have found its initial structure. Above all stands my family, the quiet horizon against which everything else became possible. To my mother, who changed her aggregate state a decade ago and whose presence persists beyond that transformation: this dissertation, in its deepest strata, carries her imprint. If this work understands subjectivity as emergence rather than possession, it is because that lesson was lived before it was thought. Many others remain unnamed here, not from omission but because their influence exceeds enumeration. Their traces endure throughout these pages. iv Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................... i Zusammenfassung ........................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... iii 1. Introduction: Spectral Beginnings ............................................................................................................ 1 1.1 A Spectre with Unfinished Business ......................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Why Begin—Again? ................................................................................................................................. 2 1.3 The First Fold: Polividual Preludes ........................................................................................................... 3 1.4 Typologies Without Thrones ..................................................................................................................... 4 1.5 Guiding Questions and Methodological Compass .................................................................................... 6 1.5.1 Research Matrix ........................................................................................................................................ 6 1.5.2 Methodological Orientation ....................................................................................................................... 7 1.6 The Quiet Center: From Centrality to Gatherality .................................................................................. 10 1.7 The Hinge: Opening the Spiral ............................................................................................................... 12 2. Interrogating the Onto-Epistemological Ramifications of T-Posthuman Subjectivity Frameworks 14 2.1 Prolegomena: The Synthesis and Dialectics of Subjectivity Modalities and Technological Augmentation within the T-Posthuman Ontological Landscape ..................................................................................... 14 2.2 Two General Typologies of T-Posthuman Subjectivation ...................................................................... 16 2.2.1 T1: Conceptual Configurations ............................................................................................................... 16 2.2.2 T2: Technocultural Vectors of Actualization .......................................................................................... 17 2.3 T1a: Humanimal–Cyborg (HAC) as Ontological Interface .................................................................... 20 2.4 T1b: Higher Human–Transhuman (HHT) as Morphogenetic Program .................................................. 24 2.5 T1c: Overhuman–T-Posthuman (OHTP) as Ontological Rupture .......................................................... 31 2.6 T2a: Enhanced Subjectivity (ES) ........................................................................................................... 37 2.6.1 Philosophical Foundations and Conceptual Domains ............................................................................. 38 2.6.2 Modalities in Practice: Cognitive, Genetic, Neurotechnological, and Sensory Enhancement ................ 40 2.6.3 Ethical Horizons, Transformative Risks, and Future Trajectories .......................................................... 48 2.6.4 Governing Enhanced Subjectivity: Toward a Pluralist Bio-Social Contract .......................................... 50 2.6.5 Synthesis and Trajectory ......................................................................................................................... 51 2.7 T2b: AI-Driven Subjectivity (ADS) ....................................................................................................... 52 2.7.1 From “Weak AI” to “Strong AI”: Conceptual Thresholds...................................................................... 53 2.7.2 Emergent Qualities of AI: Self-Modelling, Autonomy, and Theory of Mind ......................................... 55 2.7.3 Ontological and Ethical Status: Subjugated Machines or Co-Agentic Beings? ..................................... 57 2.7.4 Alignment, Governance, and T-Posthuman Trajectories ........................................................................ 60 2.8 T2c: ‘Uploaded’ Subjectivity (US) ......................................................................................................... 63 2.8.1 The Cerebral–Cognitive Conundrum: An Exegesis of the Brain–Mind Controversy ............................. 63 v 2.8.2 Embodied, Enactive, and Extended Turns .............................................................................................. 65 2.8.3 Metaphysical Architectures and the Fragility of “I”-Continuity ............................................................ 68 2.8.3.1 Metaphysical Trifurcation: Functionalism, Materialism, and Dualism .................................................. 68 2.8.3.2 Parfit and the Puzzle of Teletransportation ............................................................................................ 70 2.8.3.3 Implementation and the Irreducibility of Lived Form ............................................................................ 70 2.8.3.4 Time and the Grain of Consciousness .................................................................................................... 71 2.8.4 Embodied Absence, Virtual Flesh: Ontologies of the Digital Elsewhere ............................................... 72 2.8.5 Narrative Laboratories: Fictional Allegories of Post-Biological Personhood ........................................ 76 2.9 Pivoting Beyond Emulation: Closing the Transhumanist Frame ........................................................... 79 3. (Re)framing ‘P-Posthuman’ Subjectivity: A Multidimensional Topology.......................................... 81 3.1 From Stratified Selves to Relational Cartographies ..................................................................................... 81 3.1.1 Gradients and Tensions within the P-Field ............................................................................................. 83 3.1.2 Charting the Terrain: Scope and Trajectory ............................................................................................ 84 3.2 Foundational Gradient (P1): Onto-Infrastructural Re-Inscription of the Subject .................................... 85 3.2.1 P1a: Convergent Web-Assemblage (CWA)—Agency as Circuitry ........................................................ 85 3.2.1.1 The Ontological Rewiring of Subjectivity: From Actor-Networks to Assemblage ................................. 85 3.2.1.2 Circuits of Perception, Vibrant Matter, and the Stratification of Agency ............................................... 90 3.2.1.3 Posthuman Diplomacy: CWA as Diplomatic Operator ........................................................................... 93 3.2.2 P1b: Eco-Gaian Subjectivity (EGS)—From Hyposubjectivation to Kenotic Resonance ....................... 96 3.2.2.1 Mortonian Apertures: Opening Subjectivity to the Eco-Gaian Field ...................................................... 96 3.2.2.2 Gaian Feedback: Lovelock’s Horizons and the Praxis of Eco-Gaian Subjectivity .................................. 99 3.2.2.3 Margulisian Deep-Time Intimacies: Symbiogenesis and the Undoing of the Individual ...................... 102 3.2.2.3.1 Microbial Machineries and the Fabric of Gaia ..................................................................................... 103 3.2.2.3.2 The Holobiont: Undoing the Individual ............................................................................................... 104 3.2.2.3.3 Sym-Technics: Designing with Microbial Wisdom ............................................................................. 105 3.2.2.3.4 Margulis’s Critique of Gaia: Harmony, Conflict, and Evolutionary Ethics ......................................... 107 3.2.2.3.5 Synthesis: The Deep-Time Ethics of EGS ............................................................................................ 108 3.2.2.4 Kenosubjectivity: Eco-Theoretical Unfoldings .................................................................................... 109 3.2.2.5 From Kenotic Earthliness to the Cosmo-Relational Horizon ............................................................... 111 3.2.3 P1c: Entangled Becomings—P-Subjectivity as the Cosmo-Relational ‘Queer’(CRQ) ........................ 112 3.2.3.1 From Eco-Gaian Contingency to Quantum Subjectivity: Relational Ontologies and the Dissolution of Classical Selfhood ................................................................................................................................. 112 3.2.3.2 Diffractive Methodologies: Reconfiguring Knowledge, Innovation, and Governance ........................ 115 3.2.3.3 Ontological Cuts and Ethical Response: The Politics of Indeterminacy and Distributed Agency ....... 118 3.2.3.4 Beyond Relationality: Cosmo-Relational Queer and the Object-Realist Turn ..................................... 120 3.2.4 P1d: Object-Realist Subjectivity (ORS) ............................................................................................... 122 3.2.4.1 Ontological Withdrawal and Machinic Capacity: The Dynamic Dialectic of Objectal Agency .......... 122 3.2.4.1.1 Withdrawal versus Capacity ................................................................................................................. 122 3.2.4.1.2 Factiality and the Time of Assemblage ................................................................................................ 124 3.2.4.1.3 Zero-Person Stance and the Politics of Humility.................................................................................. 125 3.2.4.1.4 Interim Synthesis .................................................................................................................................. 126 vi 3.2.4.2 From Descriptive Portrait to Operative Matrix .................................................................................... 127 3.2.4.2.1 Mapping the Three Registers: Epistemic, Technopolitical, Aesthetic .................................................. 128 3.2.4.2.2 Syntheses and Methodological Imperatives ......................................................................................... 131 3.2.4.3 Strata and Lines of Flight: Deleuze, Guattari, and the Ontological Mechanics of ORS ....................... 132 3.2.4.4 Corridors, Torsion, and Recursive Governance: From Stratigraphic Capture towards Rhizomatic Adjudication .......................................................................................................................................... 136 3.2.4.5 From Ontological Humility to Vibrant Attunement ............................................................................ 139 3.3 Empirical Gradient (P2): Embodiment, Symbiosis, and Technogenic Flesh........................................ 141 3.3.1 P2a: Vibrant Subjectivity (VS) as Assemblos—Polividual Agency, Material Expressivity, and the Emergence of Assemblocratic Politics .................................................................................................. 141 3.3.1.1 Compositional Energetics and the Ethics of Relational Worlds: Polividuality, Assemblos, and the Expressive Field of VS .......................................................................................................................... 147 3.3.1.2 From Enchantment to Co-Enchantment: Polividual Praxis and the Ecological Horizon of Vibrant Subjectivity ........................................................................................................................................... 150 3.3.2 P2b: From Symbiogenesis to Symbiomentality—Holobiotic Subjectivity (HS) and the Microbial Fabric of Mind .................................................................................................................................................. 152 3.3.2.1 Symbiogenesis: Networks, Mergers, Subjects ...................................................................................... 152 3.3.2.2 Holobiotic Subjectivity: Composite Lives and Microbial Genealogies ................................................ 154 3.3.2.3 Symbiomentality: Microbial Minds, Cognitive Entanglement, and the Ethics of Co-Existence ......... 162 3.3.3 P2c: Cyborgian Subjectivity (CS) as Posthuman Ontopolitics............................................................. 164 3.3.3.1 Boundary Collapse, Ontological Stakes, and the Harawayan Inheritance ............................................ 164 3.3.3.2 Necropolitics, Infrastructural Extraction, and Differential Cyborg Futures ........................................ 167 3.3.3.3 Algorithmic Governmentality and the Diffusion of Culpability ........................................................... 169 3.3.3.4 Extractive Temporalities and Posthuman Debt .................................................................................... 170 3.3.3.5 Situated Counter-Infrastructures........................................................................................................... 172 3.3.3.6 The Reparative Mandate: Towards a New Cyborgian Ontopolitics ..................................................... 174 3.3.4 P2d: Be(com)ing Algorithmic Flesh—The Posthuman Reconfiguration of Techno-Embodied Subjectivity (TES) .................................................................................................................................................... 176 3.3.4.1 From Boundary-Crash to Micro-Capture ............................................................................................. 176 3.3.4.2 Technogenetic Vectors: Pattern-Randomness and the Neuropoetics of Code ...................................... 178 3.3.4.3 ‘Elastic’ Culpability: Algorithmic Reflexivity and the Market as Micrological Court ....................... 181 3.3.4.4 Pharmako-Design: Reclaiming Temporal Agency ............................................................................... 186 3.4 Trans-Narrative/Topo-Poietic Gradient (P3): Culture, Story, and Earth Writing the P-posthuman ..... 187 3.4.1 P3a: Cartographies of Entanglement—Toward Transcultural Relational Subjectivity (TRS) ............. 188 3.4.1.1 Diasporic Drift and Algorithmic Currents: Re-Situating Mobility after the Human ........................... 191 3.4.1.2 Predictive Corridors and the Politics of Latency .................................................................................. 192 3.4.1.3 Imagination as Predictive Clay: Recasting Cultural Worlds Beyond Anthropos Optics ..................... 195 3.4.2 P3b: Narrative-Constructed Subjectivity (NCS) and the Planetary Re-configuration of Self .............. 198 3.4.2.1 Cartographies of Narrative Becoming: Toward a Posthuman Grammar of Story ................................ 198 3.4.2.2 Churn, Drift, and Polyphonic Memory ................................................................................................. 201 3.4.2.3 Ritual Code, Slow Harm, and the Ethics of Signal ............................................................................... 204 3.4.2.3.1 Interfaces as Ritual Engines ................................................................................................................. 205 3.4.2.3.2 Slow Violence beneath the Pulse of the Feed ....................................................................................... 207 vii 3.4.2.3.3 Archives that Refuse to Die .................................................................................................................. 209 3.4.2.3.4 Signal Ethics and the Conducting Self ................................................................................................. 210 3.4.3 P3c: Landscaped Subjectivity (LS) and the Inscriptional Unfolding of Terrestrial Personhood .......... 211 3.4.3.1 Cartographies of Terrestrial Inscription: From Landscape to Planetary Sensorium ............................. 211 3.4.3.2 Algorithmic Terrains, Hydrolithic Drift ............................................................................................... 214 3.4.3.2.1 Protocol as Geography ......................................................................................................................... 215 3.4.3.2.2 Tempo-Climates of Daily Life ............................................................................................................. 216 3.4.3.2.3 Climate Drift and the Diminishing Promise of Prediction ................................................................... 217 3.4.3.2.4 The Hydrolithic Archive ....................................................................................................................... 218 3.4.3.2.5 Tactical Re-inscription ......................................................................................................................... 219 3.4.3.3 Necropolitical Terrains and the Hydrolithic Memory of World-Making ............................................. 220 3.4.3.4 Hinge of Becoming: From Planetary Palimpsest to Metahuman Synthesis ......................................... 224 4. M-posthuman Subjectivity: Overcoming the Conceptual Impasses of T- and P-Models through Typological Synthesis ............................................................................................................................. 225 4.1 The Metahuman Turn: Movement Ontology and the Trash-Human Critique ....................................... 226 4.2 Tensions and Convergences: The Emergence of M-Typologies .......................................................... 228 4.3 Radical Movement and Earth Liberation: Reading Ontohackers into Metahuman Typologies ............ 229 4.4 Unfolding the Typology: Toward a Choral Metahumanism ................................................................. 231 4.5 M1: Neo-Cyborgian Subjectivity (NCS)—Continuity, Enhancement, and the Liberal Metahuman ... 233 4.6 M2: Radical-Metahuman Subjectivity (RMS): Indeterminacy, Movement, and Becoming-Other ....... 237 4.7 M3: Toward the Hybrid Metahuman Subjectivity (HMS)—Integrative Ontologies and Planetary Praxis….. ............................................................................................................................................... 244 4.8 The End of Typological Cartography: Event, Rupture, and the Genesis of Alterhumanism ................. 252 5. Conclusion as the Gatheral Open: Alterhumanism in its Event ........................................................ 254 5.1 Alterhumanism as Method: The Refusal of Closure ............................................................................. 254 5.2 Exhaustion as Birth-Point: The Architecture of Altersub ...................................................................... 257 5.2.1 Ontospine: From Flesh to Gatheral ....................................................................................................... 259 5.2.2 Kenosub: Strategic Emptiness ............................................................................................................... 260 5.2.3 Assemblos and the Logic of Spiral-Plus ................................................................................................ 261 5.2.4 Polividual Agency ................................................................................................................................. 261 5.2.5 Beyond the (Post)Subaltern Misreading ................................................................................................ 262 5.2.6 Distinctiveness in Summary .................................................................................................................. 262 5.3 Alterhuman Infrastructures: Hosting the Kenotic Gatheral ................................................................... 263 5.3.1 From Format to Metaformat: Why Institutions Must Now Jam ............................................................ 263 5.3.2 Metaformance Labs: Pre-Legal Choreograph........................................................................................ 263 5.3.3 Multispecies Parliaments and Proprioceptive Justice ............................................................................ 264 5.3.4 Technics as Poietic Catalysis ................................................................................................................. 265 5.3.5 Economies of Enabling Constraint ........................................................................................................ 265 5.3.6 Geo-Ethical Finance .............................................................................................................................. 266 viii 5.3.7 Education as Improvisatory Circuit ....................................................................................................... 267 5.3.8 Methodological Interlude: Why Typologies Were Necessary ............................................................... 267 5.4 The Alter-Open: Planetary Ontojazz and the Future of Articulation ...................................................... 268 6. The (Un)binding of Aleksandar: An Onto-Textual Becoming ........................................................... 270 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 274 1 1. Introduction: Spectral Beginnings 1.1 A Spectre with Unfinished Business To risk what has long since become a camp trope: A spectre is haunting early twenty-first-century thought—the spectre of subjectivity.1 It drifts through lecture theatres where Kant’s “I think,” the command center of Western selfhood, still sets the rhythm of epistemic authority, then re- materializes beside GPU clusters that promise to think faster than retinas can refresh. The trouble is not that the old subject has died; it lingers like a house-spirit, half-forgotten yet forever rearranging the furniture at night. We livestream debates on “posthuman kinship,” upload consciousness-adjacent profiles to medical clouds, and sequence coral microbiomes in search of planetary diagnostic, and still the reflex question returns: What does this mean for the human? That reflex, part muscle memory and part metaphysical habit, ignited the present intervention. The term subject keeps bobbing to the surface long after successive waves of critique, as though modernity’s principal actor refuses to quit the stage. Efforts to crown and de-crown it proliferate: mainstream transhumanism equips it with titanium upgrades; certain posthumanisms dissolve it into lively matter; radical metahumanisms puncture the throne altogether.2 Still, every gesture leaves an afterglow of privileged centrality. The result is less a clean break than a complicated haunting, a spectral persistence that both demands explanation and resists easy obituary. Rather than seeking to exhume the “true” subject or consign the term to ash, in the pages ahead we practice (un)binding: loosening the inherited knot that equates subject with both human and sovereign, thereby making space for new articulations of centrality to unfold. Picture slipping the score for Beethoven’s Fifth onto a jazz stand. The melody remains recognizable, but trumpets riff, the drummer toys with the bar-line, and no section is compelled to dominate. In a similar key, the project keeps the tune audible while refusing to let it ossify into dogma. The wager is simple: by making room for improvisation, one hears harmonics that the original score could never foresee. 1 Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (London: Penguin, 2002), 14; Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 275– 92. 2 For residual anthropocentrisms across trans-, post-, and metahumanisms, see N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2–3; Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. 2 1.2 Why Begin—Again? “Do we really need another overture chastising anthropocentrism?” The query is understandable. Decades of posthuman and decolonial writing have dissected that hubris with surgical precision. Nevertheless, the social circuitry tells a different story. Algorithmic finance still channels liability through the legal fiction of the person; border regimes translate flesh into biometric code; platform algorithms decide what content appears and disappears, working on the assumption that language is (still) an exclusively human prerogative.3 Even the most exuberant manifestos promising to swap carbon for silicon quietly reinstall Renaissance individualism inside a chrome chassis. Beginning again, then, is not indulgence but necessity: a renewed cartography for a landscape whose coordinates keep shifting. How, though, to begin without looping back into the same sermon? The approach adopted here is rhizomatic rather than prescriptive. This analysis erects a suite of navigational instruments—typologies that chart zones of subject-formation without crowning any single zone an evolutionary apex. They resemble geological strata more than ladders: layers may compress, tilt, invert, or fold back on themselves, but none is intrinsically “higher.” Such post-cartography preserves the vigilance needed to track spectral anthropocentrisms as they mutate, while sustaining the methodological rigor demanded. The introductory chapter therefore unfolds in three movements: 1. Polividual Preludes—tracing subjectivity as an improvisatory event rather than a marble-solid core; 2. Typologies Without Thrones—outlining three overlapping gradients (T, P, M) that refuse hierarchy en route to Altersub; 3. The Quiet Center—sketching a politics of strategic self-emptying that sidesteps both metaphysical hubris and academic resignation. Each of these movements functions as a site of methodological testing, not as a discrete stage. Their boundaries remain porous by design, allowing motifs and conceptual pressures to migrate between them. 3 On algorithmic personhood and biometric governance, see Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 112–19. 3 1.3 The First Fold: Polividual Preludes We begin with a deliberate dis-definition. Instead of declaring what subjectivity is, this inquiry follows how it comes to matter. Classical metaphysics reserved this function for the Greek ὑποκείμενον (hypokeimenon), the bearer that “lies beneath” properties.4 Here, the platform itself swings: call it ontojazz—a substrate that riffs, modulates, and occasionally drops the beat.⁴ To navigate such shifting grounds, we introduce polividuality,5 a label describing many-voiced coherences that emerge when disparate agencies co-compose a single, if temporary, refrain. Consider two quick vignettes.6 In a coastal laboratory, marine biologists, machine-learning models, and reef-dwelling microbes collaborate on real-time health indices. The coalition’s pronoun is a grammatical tangle: neither “we humans” nor “it, the algorithm” suffices. Or picture a dancer at Berlin’s KitKat, smartwatch pulsing in sync with the infra-bass, her proprioception subtly recalibrated by lithium-ion sensors, haptic feedback, or even microdosing as much as by muscle memory. Both scenes feature quasi-subjects—polividuals, kaleidoscopic events whose components reciprocally enact one another, dissolving neat partitions of subject and object. Charting those events requires tools without disciplinary passports: neuroscience maps millisecond rhythms of synaptic anticipation; feminist STS offers protocols for epistemic hygiene and situated accountability; critical finance parses markets that trade at picosecond velocities. Even the recontextualization of theology, often overlooked in such contexts, contributes the ancient notion of kenosis: an “emptying-out” that makes space for radical alterity without dissolving difference. No single field anchors the expedition; each offers a lens, then steps aside when another perspective becomes urgent. The methodology is processual: it follows the phenomenon wherever it wanders and refuses to bolt the conceptual gates too early. Two clarifications require emphasis at this stage. First, why retain the loaded term subject at all? Abandonment would cede strategic ground to frameworks that continue to wield the word as 4 Aristotle, Categories, 1a20–1b10, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1, trans. J. L. Ackrill (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 3–4. 5 “Polividuality” here marks a strategic departure from both the classical “individual” and Deleuzian “dividual,” a conceptual inflection whose full stakes and implications will unfold as the argument develops. 6 While most empirical examples are drawn from existing scholarship and scientific reports, some are original scenarios that we devise for theoretical illustration; both serve as interpretive anchors within a primarily theoretical inquiry. 4 property; by occupying and renovating the term from within, the analysis exposes its seams, residues, and potentials in a way mere avoidance never could. Second, is this merely “metaphysics rebooted”? The answer is clearly no. Rather, it is a kind of “cynical metaphysics” (in Sloterdijk’s sense): the inquiry is always aware of its own provisionality and makes this explicit as part of its method.7 Concepts are held lightly, always open to revision as the world modulates key. This methodological cynicism, far from a weakness, is precisely what shields the inquiry from both dogmatic entrenchment and ironic paralysis. 1.4 Typologies Without Thrones The “cartographic” commitment made earlier now finds its demonstration. Where the first movement unsettled and loosened conceptual habits, in this section we consolidate the argument by demonstrating how typology, so often mistaken for taxonomy, can operate as a method of critique rather than a system of ranking. The central move is to treat transhumanist, posthumanist, and metahumanist projects not as points on a single ladder, but as overlapping sites within what could be called a historical diagram of the present. This diagram, rather than offering a smooth narrative of progress or decline, captures the entanglement and mutual interference of their gestures, slogans, and material conditions.8 Such an approach resists the old habit of tracing development as a series of ascending steps (from chrysalis to butterfly, from steam to silicon), by refusing to assign value in terms of evolutionary “advance.”9 Instead, each formation (T, P, M) is analyzed as a living diagram whose boundaries bend and fold, sometimes merging, sometimes splitting apart. Drawing inspiration from Foucault’s archaeology and from Deleuzoguattarian mapping,10 the work here seeks to keep the structure of the present open, rendering its recurring patterns visible without reducing them to a single story. 7 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5–11. 8 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), 3– 17. 9 For a critique of modernity’s progressive hierarchies and linear accounts of development, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), especially 93– 121. 10 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 10–16; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 12–15. 5 To keep this theoretical mapping anchored, the text provides occasional examples, just enough to prevent abstraction from drifting into vagueness. For instance, transhumanism’s discourse of “morphological freedom” may promise radical choice, but in reality it depends on networks of capital, intellectual property, and supply chains.11 Posthumanist visions of “lively matter” gain sharper meaning when read beside the operations of environmental sensors or the global trade in metals that enable new forms of agency.12 These cases serve to clarify the ongoing exchange between ideology and infrastructure, without collapsing analysis into anecdote. The aim is not to construct a closed system but to trace the spiral movement by which these typologies influence and revise one another. The dynamics between T, P, and M never resolve into a final synthesis. Instead, each shift leaves behind residues, producing what this study will later call Altersub—a motif or rhythm that has always been present, signaling openness to further revision rather than culmination. The rigor of this approach lies in its method of triangulation. Claims are sustained only when philosophical, empirical, and experiential registers converge without being forced into artificial unity. Where contradictions persist, they remain visible, since premature consensus too often breeds conceptual sclerosis. By refusing to settle too quickly, the project aligns with Latour’s view that matters of concern should remain available for collective reconsideration.13 Taken together, the typologies serve not as monuments or static classifications but as analytical tools for perceiving the tensions and potentialities of contemporary subject- formation. Their purpose is to clarify, to complicate, and, above all, to make space for emergent modes of coexistence: conceptual experiments that the remainder of this work will pursue in greater detail, a trajectory that will later be formalized under the name “gatherality.” 11 Nick Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values,” Journal of Philosophical Research 30 (Supplement) (2005): 3–14; Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 19–26. 12 See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 3–6; and Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. 13 See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 114–24. 6 1.5 Guiding Questions and Methodological Compass 1.5.1 Research Matrix Before proceeding, it is necessary to clarify both the operational questions guiding this inquiry and the methodological foundation that ensures every subsequent claim can withstand the highest demands of scrutiny. The argument is not merely thematic or speculative; it is anchored by four research questions which, though not displayed as a checklist, quietly orchestrate each analytic turn: 1. How do contemporary transhumanist (T), posthumanist (P), and metahumanist (M) discourses each configure what counts as a subject? 2. Through which infrastructures, practices, and material circuits are those configurations enacted and contested? 3. Where and how do the T, P, and M diagrams buckle when confronted with the lived complexity of technogenic, ecological, and affective domains? 4. What conceptual and political work is accomplished by alterhumanism and its methodological keystone, Altersub, in responding to the shortcomings revealed at those limits? The framing of these questions is itself methodologically symptomatic: “posthuman” is treated not as a settled position but as an umbrella term—a necessary, if provisional, containment. Following Ferrando’s influential formulation, yet reconfiguring it, T-, P-, and M-posthuman operate here as distinct typological instruments.14 This umbrella gathers them under a single epochal roof, registering their persistent (if differentiated) orientation around the problem of the human. The umbrella does not dissolve their differences, but it does mark their conceptual proximity and their shared incapacity to offer a final break with anthropocentrism. Alterhumanism, in contrast, arrives not as a fourth sibling, but as an internal insurgent: a beneficial intruder, more symbiotic bacterium than imported pathogen, gradually transforming the house from the inside out until its foundations are refigured. 14 Francesca Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 1 et passim. 7 1.5.2 Methodological Orientation The methodological stance is as much about how to travel as about where to arrive. Rather than securing theory and then seeking empirical proof, the analysis is recursive: each interpretive move is already alterhumanist in that it folds prior typologies back upon themselves, refusing a fixed vantage. Method and theory are inseparable, with typologies serving as provisional instruments— tools for inquiry, not trophies of possession. This dissertation proceeds from an alterhumanist orientation that is methodological rather than ontological in scope. Alterhumanism is not introduced as a claim about what entities exist, nor as a proposal for new subjects, actors, or moral agents beyond the human. Instead, it functions as an analytical posture concerned with how being is procedurally enacted. Throughout the dissertation, ontology is therefore consistently understood as onticology: not a doctrine of existence, but an inquiry into the conditions, operations, and arrangements through which entities, relations, and subject-positions come to count as real, actionable, or governable.15 Accordingly, whenever the term ontology appears hereafter, it designates this onticological register alone: procedurally situated configurations of order, rather than any appeal to metaphysical foundations. From this perspective, agency, responsibility, and subjectivity are not treated as intrinsic properties of discrete beings, but as effects of mediation produced through institutional dispositifs, technological infrastructures, legal procedures, and ecological entanglements. Alterhumanism, as deployed here, suspends the presumption of pre-given subjects in order to analyze how subject-effects are staged, stabilized, and redistributed under conditions of distributed causality and non-sovereign governance. This methodological commitment does not negate human agency, nor does it dissolve political accountability. Rather, it reframes both as outcomes of procedural composition. The task of analysis is therefore not to identify who acts in a metaphysical sense, but to examine how acting becomes possible, legible, and contestable within specific configurations of mediation. 15 The term onticology is used here in a qualified sense. While most prominently associated with Levi Bryant, where it designates a realist ontology of autonomous objects, the present usage does not advance a doctrine concerning the fundamental furniture of reality. Rather than naming a metaphysics of objects, onticology here denotes an operator- level analysis of ontical conditions of intelligibility: the processes through which distributed agencies condense into coherent, addressable formations. The emphasis thus shifts from what beings fundamentally are to how agential coherence becomes legible without presupposing a sovereign subject or ontological ground. 8 Onticological attention to these configurations allows political responsibility to remain analytically tractable even when no singular origin of action can be identified. The analysis proceeds through six interrelated methodological operations. 1. The research proceeds in the mode of slow brewing. Concepts are allowed to ferment alongside the phenomena they are meant to elucidate. Rather than treating T, P, M as a set of pre-existing doctrines to be catalogued, they are treated as shifting method-objects, their contours and efficacy always in flux as the corpus, infrastructures, and lived encounters evolve. Texts and artefacts are selected and retained only if they materially articulate or problematize the question of who, or what, counts as a subject. Each is annotated, rewritten in the margin, and juxtaposed until their own internal tensions are made audible. 2. Discursive, infrastructural, and onto-textual registers are kept in constant dialogue. Philosophical essays, patents, activist manifestos, speculative fiction, and field notes from published studies are all incorporated, but nothing is coded mechanically; instead, each is subjected to a process of manual rewriting, allowing their conceptual seams to surface. When a discourse draws upon a technological or material apparatus, be that a hedge-fund algorithm, a marine sensor network, or a haptic costume, its operational logic is reconstructed from primary materials in the public domain. The goal is not to harvest new “data,” but to observe how discourses and infrastructures attempt to stabilize one another. All fragments, whether citation, diagram, dialogue, or field vignette, are periodically woven together in a living “neural reef” document, where juxtapositions can either crack (and so force revision) or produce new resonances. Typologies are revised iteratively; method is nothing but this recursive pressure. 3. The typologies themselves (T, P, M) are not treated as external literatures to be reviewed or “applied,” but as heuristic lenses, critical foils, and provisional maps. Each diagram clarifies a distinct rhetoric of becoming (extension, dissolution, improvisation) and, when placed against the other two, illuminates its own blind spots: residual humanism in T, distributive vagueness in P, ontological vertigo in M. Because no typology ever stands against the full spread of empirical and theoretical material, the work is one of continual redrawing. Iteration and failure are not regrettable; they are evidentiary. 4. Alterhumanism is present in the mood and logic of the text from the outset. The analysis courts multiple temporalities, refuses sovereign vantage, and holds every claim contingent upon its 9 infrastructural and affective companions. And yet the term itself, though subtly announced a few times in the text, is withheld from full emergence until the accumulated evidence demonstrates the exhaustion of the T, P, M matrix. Only then can alterhumanism, no longer an authorial assertion, arrive as a necessary relay. Alterhumanism does not primarily set its question around its relation to humanship; it is the unfolding of an ontological gather, a parade of becoming without archē or telos, with a configuration that is far more symfigurative than solipsistic—an aspect of metaformativity that includes the ensemble of more-than-human sociality. Its methodological keystone, Altersub, indexes the moment when critique becomes design, contraction yields responsibility, and expansion holds room for inhuman interlocutors. Central to this shift is the understanding of Altersub not as an ontological entity but as an onticological operator. The term designates neither an alternative bearer of agency nor a collective super- subject. Rather, it functions as a conceptual instrument for tracing how subjectivity is procedurally staged within specific configurations of mediation. Altersub marks the analytic transition from asking who acts to examining how action becomes legible, attributable, and contestable across distributed arrangements of humans, infrastructures, ecologies, and code. When institutions, algorithms, or ecosystems appear to “act,” this appearance is not anthropomorphically affirmed, but onticologically reconstructed as the effect of translated signals, allocated responsibilities, and stabilized positions of addressability. In this sense, Altersub operates as a methodological lens for mapping the production of subject-effects without reintroducing metaphysical substrates or collapsing agency into abstract system dynamics. 5. Altersub is not a substitute subject. It is a metrical rhythm, audible only when the iterative folding and cross-testing of typologies completes its cycle. Altersub provides a beat for heterogeneous findings to synchronize, converts critique into design prompts for new companionships, and exemplifies the claim that viable politics after anthropocentrism depends on disciplined self-emptying—not louder affirmation. 6. The method developed here does not present itself as a fixed framework or as an eclectic assemblage. Its sufficiency and necessity emerge in practice, as each typological instrument (T, P, M, and ultimately Altersub) is brought to its limits and revised in response to conceptual 10 or empirical tension. No register or model is granted absolute authority; each remains open to challenge and modification. Altersub, as the rhythm that ultimately gathers these moves, operates less as an established form than as a horizon of “will have been,” so that even its temporality is marked by kenotic deferral. This methodological orientation is not a final position but an ongoing commitment to scrutiny and adjustment, ensuring that inquiry remains responsive, rigorous, and capable of accommodating what cannot yet be fully anticipated. 1.6 The Quiet Center: From Centrality to Gatherality Up to this point, the analysis has gently dismantled an automatic assumption: that the conceptual landscape must always have a single center. But as soon as a throne is vacated, others queue to claim it, inevitably replaying the same tired drama. We need something different—not a throne, nor its mere absence, but a structural rethinking of how multiple agencies might coexist. This is the move from centrality toward gatherality: a relational architecture whose very grammar refuses singular dominance.16 Gatherality is not merely the outward dispersal of power. Decentralization alone too often reproduces the very logic it aims to escape, scattering authority without altering its underlying structure. Gatherality, by contrast, transforms the grammar itself, holding open a shared space through strategic, intentional withdrawal.17 This is kenōsis, borrowed from patristic tradition and repurposed for planetary practice: a conscious relinquishment of conceptual or political occupancy, creating an interval, sustaining a pause, and leaving the atmospheric affordance for other tempos, other rhythms, other ways of mattering to emerge.18 16 Barad’s theory of “intra-action” decisively rejects the notion that entities or agencies pre-exist as autonomous centers, demonstrating instead that all agencies emerge only through dynamic relational entanglements. This conceptual shift from centrality to distributed agency directly supports our move toward a relational architecture, here termed gatherality, where the very conditions for dominance are structurally refused. See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), esp. 33. 17 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 47–52. 18 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 113– 17. For philosophical resources whose arguments are brought into dialogue with the transformative reading of kenosis developed in this analysis, see Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2015), 37–45; and Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2005), 12–13 11 This openness matters because centrality does not merely occupy space; it sets the tempo, deciding whose rhythms are amplified and whose are silenced. By intentionally vacating the metronome position, gatherality expands what is possible, transforming a fixed center into a field of negotiation. This is not drift or fragmentation, but a form of coordinated breathing, sustained by a rhythm that this study terms Altersub. Altersub is thus neither a new subject nor a simple erasure; it is the methodical practice of sustaining an open interval long enough for genuine negotiation to take place.19 Such a stance enables a distinct politics: diplomacy as shelter, understood here as a practice that provides protection and support for diverse agencies without imposing control or enclosure. Objects usually treated as passive, such as microbial sensors, forest fungi, and financial algorithms, are welcomed not simply as background props but as participants in collective processes. Their participation arises not from anthropomorphic projection, but from recognizing their capacity to exercise partial custodianship. This dynamic finds a powerful analogy in the ecological phenomenon known as “crown shyness,” in which tree crowns grow outward until their branches nearly touch, then pause and subtly withdraw, maintaining just enough distance to ensure mutual access to sunlight and the health of the collective canopy.20 In a similar way, the practice of kenotic restraint sustains collective health by declining to claim total occupation of any shared space. It is important to stress that keeping the center clear does not equate to rendering it empty as a final state. Rather, the act of clearing is generative, designed to hold open a space where new rhythms, negotiations, and forms of relation can continuously arise. Gatherality, then, is not an act of surrender but an intentional cultivation of responsiveness. Rather than installing a fixed center, this approach sustains a productive tension at the site traditionally reserved for centrality. In this way, non-centrality itself becomes the organizing function, continually inviting negotiation rather than imposing closure. This ensures that the typologies developed in the chapters ahead remain supple and attuned, never settling into rigid doctrines. The ongoing task is to maintain this generative tension in place of the old center, thus preparing the 19 See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 29–31. Nancy’s conception of “being-with” as the generation of shared intervals partly informs this study’s formulation of Altersub as an open, collective space for relational emergence. 20 Jens van der Zee, Alvaro Lau, and Alexander Shenkin, “Understanding crown shyness from a 3-D perspective,” Annals of Botany 128, no. 6 (2021): 725–36. 12 ground for the continuous negotiation described in Chapter 5 as metaformative. The following chapters set this ethos into motion, allowing it to animate the spiral that shapes the analysis as a whole. 1.7 The Hinge: Opening the Spiral With generative tension now holding the center, no longer anchored by a single authority, the composition stands poised at the hinge, ready to spiral outward. Properly understood, a hinge facilitates movement; if locked in place, it ceases to function. Thus, this section provides bearings rather than rails: a lightly sketched orientation, continually open to recalibration as new conceptual and material pressures emerge. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 each unfold along distinct gradients: T-posthuman, P-posthuman, and M- posthuman—not as enclosed territories, but as intersecting vectors charting subject-formation across technological infrastructures, ecological entwinements, and improvisational practices. The composition moves rhizomatically, intertwining genealogies of key tropes with infrastructural and phenomenological accounts, placed into critical dialogue with carefully chosen empirical fragments. None of these fragments settle into a final mono-voice; rather, each serves as a critical stress-test, challenging theory wherever it exceeds or unsettles established frames. At the spiral’s midpoint, these gradients deliberately converge in a way that favors productive collision over tidy resolution. This coming together creates a crucible where conceptual structures, lived intensities, and infrastructural realities press upon and provoke one another. Within this metaformative montage, theoretical fragilities become visible, prompting ongoing recalibrations. In this way, the text itself enacts the “case”: reflexive assemblages (anticipating the onto-political assembloi developed later in the analysis) that continuously test the resilience and adaptability of their own methodological procedures. Only after this pivotal intersection does alterhumanism come forward in explicit terms. By Chapter 5, its rhythm will already be resonating throughout the preceding movements. Its emergence, then, is not an abrupt revelation but, again, a gathering: a rhythmic convergence that clarifies how practices of self-emptying, radical hospitality, and posthuman diplomacy signal alterhumanist potentialities in concrete ways. Here, empirical 13 references do not function as final evidence; instead, they become interlocutors—active presences in the ongoing transformation of conceptual boundaries. Why such deliberate pacing, particularly when crises seem to demand immediate action? Because urgency is easily weaponized by powers that profit from speed and closure. The spiral method inserts intentional intervals, ensuring quieter agencies and plural tempos remain audible. Urgency, thus recalibrated, becomes not an obstacle to action but a precondition for more inclusive and enduring forms of response. Accordingly, the central contribution of this study is to bring alterhumanism into methodological focus—as a metaformative practice that unsettles inherited certainties while cultivating space for co-creative improvisation. By proposing gatherality, animated by the rhythm of Altersub as a compositional principle, this work offers a vocabulary and pragmatic orientation for moving beyond the exhausted binaries of sovereign humanism and its softer counterpart, passive diffusion. What emerges is not simply a theory, but an experimental toolkit for imagining, assembling, and sustaining more capacious modes of living and relating. As this introduction draws to a close, the spectral subjectivity haunting its opening returns—not as a menace, but as an invitation: an unfinished refrain, welcoming new voices and improvisations. Let the air remain circulating; let gatherality remain open; and may the cadence offered here accompany other experimental worldings yet to emerge. 14 2. Interrogating the Onto-Epistemological Ramifications of T-Posthuman Subjectivity Frameworks 2.1 Prolegomena: The Synthesis and Dialectics of Subjectivity Modalities and Technological Augmentation within the T-Posthuman Ontological Landscape In contemporary transhumanist discourse, subjectivity is no longer approached as a static anthropological constant but as an emergent construct, one undergoing perpetual transformation via its interaction with technoscientific mediation. Human experiential domains, traditionally understood through metaphysical or phenomenological lenses, are now increasingly viewed as sites of augmentation, optimization, and synthetic recomposition. These trajectories resist reduction to abstract speculation, as they are substantiated by concrete advances in biomedical, neurocognitive, and computational domains. The epistemic loyalty of these fields to STEM disciplines undergirds this shift, producing a technocultural paradigm wherein the boundaries of “the human” are no longer merely extended, but strategically refashioned. This dynamic convergence draws its conceptual fuel not only from rapidly evolving scientific practice but also from philosophical, cultural, and ideological formations dedicated to transcending the historically sedimented limits of human experience. As such, the emergence of what might be described as T-posthuman subjectivity signals more than a modification of existing anthropocentric models—it marks a paradigmatic reconfiguration of the subject itself. The traditional subject is both enhanced and epistemologically displaced by technologically enabled modalities of selfhood that are non-linear, modular, and morphogenetic. Subjectivity, in this transhumanist register, becomes a central ontological vector through which broader questions of personhood, agency, and ethical responsibility are reimagined. The inquiry into the nature of consciousness and selfhood extends beyond the confines of abstract theory to interrogate material and computational substrates that co-constitute the post-anthropogenic subject. This also renders subjectivity a crucible for addressing the broader ethico-political and biopolitical questions intrinsic to contemporary human futures. In this light, notions such as autonomy, privacy, moral accountability, and dignity are no longer fixed within traditional humanist ideas. Instead, they must be reconsidered in relation to new forms of life shaped by technology: forms that may be programmable, extended beyond the body, or even detached from biology altogether. 15 The present chapter therefore initiates an investigation of the conceptual morphology of subjectivity within the transhumanist imaginary. It will systematically delineate and analyze the foundational typologies through which the T-posthuman subject is envisioned, articulated, and contested. These models are not mere classificatory devices; they serve as theoretical instruments for elucidating the complex interplay between the promise of enhancement and the instability of the very categories such enhancement presumes to refine. This exploration also interrogates how transhumanism engages with, critiques, or repositions inherited conceptions of the self. While certain classical models are explicitly rejected, others are reconfigured through the prism of techno-ontological adaptation. Here, the distinction is not merely between theoretical models of pre- and post-human subjectivity, but between static ontologies of the self and those predicated on emergence, modulation, and iterative reconstitution. The subject is no longer a foundational presupposition; it is a site of engineering, inscription, and ontological redesign. Equally crucial to this investigation is the manner in which transhumanism weaves together empirical fact and speculative fiction. The imaginative component of transhumanist thinking is not ancillary or metaphorical but integrative and constitutive. Stefan Herbrechter describes this as a “science-factional” approach: an ontological entanglement of verifiable technoscientific advances with projective extrapolation drawn from cultural imaginaries and narrative scenarios.21 In this model, fiction operates as a form of pre-ontological design, shaping not only the language but the metaphysical architecture of what subjectivity might become. Accordingly, select examples drawn from visual culture, futurist fiction, and digital media will be mobilized throughout this analysis, not as illustrative afterthoughts but as epistemic artefacts. The cyborg, the neuro-enhanced transhuman, the synthetic mind, the algorithmic self—these figures are not merely anticipatory silhouettes cast into the Derridean à venir, but figural crystallizations of the possible. They resonate across the semiotic architectures that both prefigure and underwrite technological 21 Herbrechter’s invocation of the “science-factional” reflects a methodological provocation central to critical posthumanism: it displaces the epistemic divide between fiction and empirical knowledge, casting narrative as a constitutive force in shaping technocultural futures. Rather than treating speculative narratives as mere allegory, this approach positions them as formative discursive infrastructures that precede and often guide scientific development. The analytical yield of this perspective becomes particularly generative when examining transhumanist imaginaries, where the T-posthuman subject emerges through both technological design and anticipatory architectures of cultural semiotics. See Stefan Herbrechter, “Posthumanism and Deep Time,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, ed. Stefan Herbrechter, Ivan Callus, Manuela Rossini, Michael Grech, Miriam de Bruin-Molé, and Christina J. Müller (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 29–42. 16 actualization. As diagrammatic projections of emergent subjectivities, they demand critical- theoretical interrogation, functioning less as allegory than as constitutive elements within the ontosyntax of transhumanist thought. 2.2 Two General Typologies of T-Posthuman Subjectivation In this section, we introduce a dual-structured taxonomy of T-subjectivity, articulated through two analytically distinct yet interwoven typologies. The first, T1, delineates foundational conceptual configurations that articulate transhumanist modes of subject formation. The second, T2, maps the (quasi-)practical horizons within which these conceptual forms are instantiated, simulated, or anticipated. Taken together, these typologies do not offer an exhaustive classification of post- anthropocentric subjectivity; rather, they function as epistemological heuristics, designed to trace the evolving models across prefigurative, cultural, and material terrains. 2.2.1 T1: Conceptual Configurations The T1 typology isolates three paradigmatic modalities frequently referenced, whether explicitly or implicitly, within transhumanist discourse: • T1a: Humanimal-Cyborg—This mode refers to a techno-organic hybrid that emerges from the recursive coupling of biological embodiment and machinic extension. The humanimal- cyborg does not abandon its organic substrate but recalibrates it through prosthetic expansion, neural interfacing, and feedback-driven somatic recalibration. It operates within a framework where embodiment becomes modifiable without necessarily disrupting the ontological primacy of the human form. • T1b: Higher Human–Transhuman—This transitional configuration is premised on enhancement, self-modification, and optimization across cognitive, physiological, and affective registers. Here, the subject remains anchored to the category of “human,” but becomes a liminal figure of transformation, aspiring toward increased capacity, resilience, and control over its biological limitations. This mode radicalizes humanist ideals without fully escaping their structural inheritance. 17 • T1c: Overhuman–Posthuman (T-posthuman stricto sensu22)—This typology designates a projected form of subjectivity that exceeds humanist categories altogether. It gestures toward ontologies no longer dependent on biological continuity, anthropocentric constraint, or sovereign individuation. The T-posthuman stricto sensu exists in anticipatory tension with the other typologies: its emergence presupposes a decisive rupture with inherited metaphysical frameworks. Categories listed above are not intended to signify fixed evolutionary stages or discrete ontological demarcations. They function as ideal-typical forms constructed to illuminate structural tendencies in the reimagining of the subject within transhumanist frameworks. Their interaction is nonlinear and dynamic: earlier formations may persist, hybridize, or exert formative influence on subsequent constellations. Differentiation among them is thus not chronological, but thematic, rooted in shifting ontological assumptions concerning embodiment, agency, and continuity. 2.2.2 T2: Technocultural Vectors of Actualization Where T1 maps the conceptual architectures of transhumanist subjectivity, the T2 typology situates these forms within operative or emergent technocultural vectors. T2 pertains to the domains and processes through which transhumanist configurations are rendered at least partially operative, whether via direct material instantiation, projective anticipation, or infrastructural simulation. T2 should not be interpreted as a secondary layer imposed upon theoretical models; rather, it describes a co-constitutive relationship in which technological affordances retroactively inform, destabilize, or rearticulate the very conceptual premises of subjectivity. This orientation reflects a broader logic of mediation akin to that elaborated in postphenomenology, particularly in Ihde’s account of material-semiotic co-shaping.23 The subject does not encounter technology as 22 As opposed to the (T-, M-, or P-) posthuman we use as an umbrella term throughout this study. We will subsequently refer to this specific model as the Overhuman-T-Posthuman (OHTP) for greater conceptual precision and ease of reference. 23 Rather than treating artefacts as transparent tools, Ihde foregrounds their role in constituting perception, embodiment, and meaning. This relational ontology rejects essentialist binaries between subject and object, proposing instead that technological affordances and human intentionality are mutually emergent. For foundational elaborations, see Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and idem, Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). 18 an external modifier but is constituted through technicity from the outset. Accordingly, we delineate three principal T2 domains, each corresponding loosely to a T1 modality but exhibiting transversal intersections and, again, nonlinear feedbacks: • T2a: Enhanced Subjectivity—This vector encompasses the bio-tech augmentation of the human organism in its morphology, physiology, and neurocognitive capacities. It aligns predominantly with the T1a and T1b paradigms, reflecting a shared ethos of improving the given human form through technical modulation. From gene editing and neural implants to somatic recalibration, T2a manifests the technics of enhancement that preserve biological legibility while pushing its limits. • T2b: AI-Driven Subjectivity—This domain concerns the integration of artificial intelligence into the architectures of human cognition and behavior. It ranges from supportive or assistive “weak AI” to the envisioned threshold of “strong AI” capable of melding with or surpassing human intelligence. Bridging T1b’s aspiration toward cognitive expansion and T1c’s vision of supra-human subjectivity, T2b represents a pivotal axis of transformation, where autonomy, decision-making, and intelligence become distributed across hybrid assemblages. • T2c: ‘Uploaded’ Subjectivity—The concluding pattern of this typology refers to the migration of personhood from a biological substrate to a digital or alternative medium, encompassing mind uploading, consciousness emulation, and virtual embodiment. It resonates most directly with T1c’s T-posthuman stricto sensu, actualizing the possibility of subjectivity that is no longer tethered to organic morphology. T2c gestures toward radical decoupling: the abstraction of consciousness into code, the dispersal of identity into data-driven ecologies. These T2 categories are best understood as pattern-clusters: flexible yet structured trajectories that organize emergent configurations of transhumanist being. While treated analytically as discrete, they are not siloed. Rather, they frequently intersect, hybridize, and co-evolve. Advances in AI (T2b) may enable new modalities of bodily enhancement (T2a) or serve as scaffolds for upload scenarios (T2c), and vice versa. This entanglement reinforces the view that ontology and technology are reciprocally formative, shaping each other through ongoing feedback loops. Further, to underscore the point, the relation between T1 and T2 is not linear but reflexively co- constitutive. T2 developments feed back into the conceptual logics of T1, reformatting its categories in real time. For example, AI-driven and uploaded subjectivities (T2b, T2c) both emerge 19 as terminal articulations of the Humanimal-Cyborg (T1a) and simultaneously serve as transitional gateways toward the Overhuman-Posthuman (T1c). In these configurations, we begin to glimpse the dissolution of biological constraints, the abstraction of identity into algorithmic flux, and the proto-formation of non-human ontological registers. To elaborate further, both T2b and T2c may be regarded as distinct yet intersecting modalities of enhancement, even as they push toward the asymptotic limit of organic morphology. Their convergence marks the gradual transition into a contemplative zone of ontological projection, where embodiment is no longer prerequisite, and identity is increasingly situated within synthetic, distributed, or non-anthropocentric substrates. It is worth emphasizing that the typologies presented here (T1 as conceptual architecture and T2 as technocultural vectorization) are not proposed as rigid taxonomies. Offered as methodological instruments, they are presented as analytic devices designed to trace the iterative production of T-posthuman subjectivity across a metastable continuum of theory, technology, and anticipation. In fact, their permeability is not a methodological flaw but a theoretical insight: within conditio transhumana, subjectivity is neither pre-given nor stable, but co-emergent with the affordances that shape it. For this reason, the T1 and T2 typologies are fully articulated here at the outset of the chapter. In what follows, these configurations will be mobilized analytically but not recapitulated in full. Their function is infrastructural, not thematic: they provide the conceptual and operational architecture upon which subsequent sections build, refract, and critique. This decision reflects a broader commitment to conceptual density and reader autonomy, inviting engagement with the typologies not as fixed frameworks, but as generative platforms for ontological and epistemic experimentation. The following subsections unpack each modality within the T1 typology, beginning with the foundational figure of the humanimal–cyborg. This analysis will trace its ontological underpinnings, cultural resonances, and theoretical permutations as a precondition for emergent forms of subjectivity. Subsequent sections will move through the transitional configuration of the higher human–transhuman, and culminate in the overhuman–posthuman paradigm, which signals a decisive ontological rupture. Together, these three modalities form the analytical core for a sustained engagement with their T2 correlates and lay the conceptual groundwork for the emergent articulation of P- and M-posthuman subjectivities and beyond. 20 2.3 T1a: Humanimal–Cyborg as Ontological Interface The conceptual figure of the Humanimal–Cyborg (HAC) operates not merely as a metaphor for technocultural hybridity but as a fundamental ontological interface: a discursive mechanism through which the stable, humanist subject is dismantled and replaced by a recursive configuration of biological inheritance, machinic supplementation, and semiotic permeability. Within the triadic stratum of T-posthuman subjectivity, the humanimal–cyborg constitutes not an embryonic phase but an enduring ontological diagram: a domain in which subjectivity emerges through entwined dynamics rather than sovereign individuation. This transformation begins with Wiener’s foundational work in cybernetics, which reframes both organic and artificial systems as information-driven constructs governed by feedback and regulation. His insights dissolve the rigid boundaries between biology and technology, rearticulating the human as a cybernetic system co-constituted by its environmental and technological matrices. In this light, even primitive tool use is not simply instrumental but proto- cybernetic, a form of anticipatory interface signaling the co-constitutive emergence of technicity and embodiment.24 The articulation of the “cyborg” by Clynes & Kline in 1960, envisioned as an organism technologically modified to survive extraterrestrial conditions, concretizes this ontological shift.25 The cyborg is not an anomaly but a logical consequence of Wiener’s feedback paradigm: an organism modulated from within by systems of external technicity. Here, the body itself becomes a site of infrastructural intervention, no longer a sealed biological vessel but a modifiable interface. The human/tech boundary, once metaphysically guarded, now appears as a historically contingent artifact: fluid, porous, and subject to continual reconfiguration. This ontological destabilization is reframed with critical intensity in Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” which resituates the cyborg from a technoscientific construct to a semiotic insurgent.26 Haraway does not simply affirm hybridity; she weaponizes it. The cyborg becomes a catalyst for the fundamental deconstruction of binary taxonomies such as organism/machine, nature/culture, and male/female, with the logic of self-replication now traceable in every aspect of cultural life. 24 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950). 25 Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, “Cyborgs and Space,” Astronautics, September 1960. 26 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 149–81. 21 Her insistence that “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” reveals fiction not as escapist metaphor but as ontological infrastructure, prefiguring technoscientific realities before they materialize.27 Responding to Haraway’s critical posthumanism, Hayles reorients the discourse around embodiment and technogenesis. In “How We Became Posthuman,” she critiques the disembodied information fetish of early cybernetics, insisting instead on the material and historical specificity of bodies in code.28 Her assertion that “we have always been posthuman”29 signals a paradigmatic redefinition: posthumanity is not a rupture with the human, but a realization of what the human has always-already been—a techno- discursive construct co-evolving with its media.30 Therefore, to use a metaphor, Haraway opens the discursive battlefield, and Hayles ensures the body is counted among both casualties and survivors. Hansen extends this trajectory into the phenomenological milieu, arguing that digital media do not simply extend perception but recalibrate sensorimotor baselines and reconfigure the very conditions of embodiment.31 For Hansen, the interface is not supplemental but ontologically generative: it reconstitutes the embodied subject from the ground up. Subjectivity in this co- constitutive framework is best understood as a body-in-code—not post-biological, but post- integral. Instead of functioning as an apparatus of straightforward enhancement, the HAC is therefore a technosomatic event: an ongoing renegotiation of the boundaries of embodiment. Vita- More shifts the HAC discourse toward a more programmatic, transhumanist register. In her Platform Diverse Body model, she articulates the body as an editable platform: a site of aesthetic autonomy, morphological freedom, and systemic upgradeability.32 The HAC, in her terms, operates as an initial design-based subjectivity platform, a corporeal interface no longer 27 Ibid., 149. 28 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman. 29 Ibid., 279. 30 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 31 Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York: Routledge, 2006), 20. 32 Vita-More presented a visionary proposition in the form of an impending body prototype, initially conceptualized as the “Primo Posthuman” (1996). This speculative framework articulated a comprehensive model of postbiological embodiment, integrating components such as the “connectome cloud,” the “metabrain,” layered across both extrinsic and intrinsic cognitive architectures, and “smart skin,” envisioned as an affectively responsive interface. These conceptual elements were later iterated in her models of the “Platform Diverse Body” and “Substrate Autonomous Persons” (2013), which together exemplify the layered evolution of transhuman corporeality. For a more detailed exposition of these constructs, see Natasha Vita-More, The Transhumanist Manifesto, Humanity+, 2013, https://www.humanityplus.org/the-transhumanist-manifesto, accessed June 23, 2025. https://www.humanityplus.org/the-transhumanist-manifesto 22 constrained by Darwinian inheritance, but shaped by its capacity for iterative self-modification. Where Haraway deconstructs the body and Hayles re-embeds it, Vita-More instrumentalizes it, rendering embodiment a substrate for technological authorship. Łukaszewicz Alcaraz deepens the theoretical stakes by integrating Margolis’ conception of the “enlanguaged” cultural self.33 Subjectivity here is not just biological or technological, but technolinguistic: co-constructed through language, culture, and hardware. Her notion of the bio- technological self reframes the HAC as a hinge between Darwinian evolution and a post- Darwinian, technogenetic paradigm.34 This epistemological pivot foregrounds the performative nature of identity as a reflexive interface of code, cognition, and culture. In parallel, resonating with the formative insights of Vattimo’s pensiero debole,35 Sorgner, further engaging Nietzsche’s legacy, advances an ontology of “weak transhumanism,” one that eschews the determinism of teleological futurism in favor of a radically open-ended process of perpetual becoming. In this Nietzschean inflection, the HAC is not a stepping-stone toward a perfected posthuman but a site of continual modulation. Drawing from such ontological bricolage, always-already in statu nascendi, Sorgner argues that enhancement must remain open-ended, pluralistic, and critically aware of its own ideological dangers.36 The HAC, thus, is not simply transitional but terminally recursive, far more a condition than a phase. Materializing this conceptual architecture, Warwick’s empirical interventions enact theory in the domain of embodied technoscientific praxis. His neural interface experiments, connecting his nervous system to computers and even another human’s nervous system, literalize the synergistic coupling theorized by cybernetics and posthumanism alike.37 Warwick’s oft-cited assertion that 33 For an in-depth philosophical exposition of culture and the constitution of the human self as a historically embedded, linguistically mediated entity, see Joseph Margolis, Towards a Metaphysics of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); and idem, Interpretation Radical but Not Unruly: The New Puzzle of the Arts and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 34 See Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz, “Evolutionary Continuity Between Humans and Cyborgs on the Basis of Joseph Margolis’ Concept of the Human Self as Enlanguaged Cultural Being Emergent from the Continuum of Nature–Culture,” CyberEmpathy: Journal of Multimedia 6, no. 2 (2016): 1–36. 35 Gianni Vattimo, Weak Thought, ed. Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti, trans. Peter Carravetta (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 1–2. 36 Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2021), 45–63. 37 See Kevin Warwick, I, Cyborg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 4–8; Another striking example of HAC subjectivity in practice is Neil Harbisson, a color-blind artist who famously implanted an “eyeborg,” a cybernetic antenna that translates color frequencies into auditory signals, enabling him to “hear” color through bone conduction. 23 being human is not a concluding terminus but an “accident of fate,” when placed in critical dialogue with Sorgner’s Nietzschean-inflected claim that “we have always been cyborgs,” evokes a temporality that arcs across the historical, the experiential, and the anticipatory.38 As proposed here, when read through the lens of the future perfect tense (“we will have been cyborgs”) this continuum discloses a retroactive inevitability, revealing that cyborgicity is not an emergent anomaly but a constitutive condition of subjectivity. Either way, the statement transcends rhetorical provocation and becomes a philosophical declaration of ontological status: subjectivity is already infrastructural, already distributed, already machinically entangled. It is, therefore, always-already both more and less than its definitional closure.39 The ethical and political implications of the HAC paradigm extend far beyond the boundaries of enhancement discourse, compelling a radical reconsideration of normative subjectivity itself. Turkle’s diagnosis of technologically saturated existence, encapsulated in her notion of being “alone together,” underscores the erosion of interiority in the context of digital mediation.40 In this reading, the subject is no longer the autonomous origin of agency or meaning but is increasingly shaped by algorithmic infrastructures that mediate, fragment, and redistribute attention, affect, and perception. The HAC, under such conditions, risks functioning not as an intentional agent but as a reactive node embedded in a machinic ecology of ambient control. Yet this apparent attenuation of subjectivity is met by an alternate trajectory in Braidotti’s posthuman ethics, which decisively abandons the metaphysical architecture of liberal individualism. Rather than attempting to rescue autonomy from technological saturation, Braidotti reconceptualizes subjectivity as a transversal assemblage: materially situated, affectively distributed, and ecologically embedded. Within her zoe-centered framework, the HAC is not diminished by its entanglements with nonhuman systems; Harbisson identifies not merely as a user of technology but as a cyborg in the ontological sense, arguing that the device constitutes a new sensory organ and an integral part of his selfhood. His case exemplifies how technological integration can extend body schema and reshape identity, supporting our HAC thesis that posits tool-mediated evolution as continuous rather than exceptional. Harbisson’s experience also foregrounds legal and institutional dimensions of morphological self-definition: he successfully petitioned to have his antenna recognized in his passport photograph, compelling governmental recognition of his post-anthropocentric form. See Neil Harbisson, Harbisson, Neil. “I Listen to Color.” TEDGlobal talk, June 2012. https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_harbisson_i_listen_to_color; see also Jasmine Erdener, “Human/Machine Fusions and the Future of the Cyborg,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory & Technoscience 7, no. 2 (2021), 2. 38 Kevin Warwick, “Cyborg 1.0,” Wired, February 1, 2000, https://www.wired.com/2000/02/warwick/, accessed June 23, 2025; Sorgner, We Have Always Been Cyborgs, passim. 39 Sorgner, We Have Always Been Cyborgs, 45–63. 40 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 155–56. https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_harbisson_i_listen_to_color https://www.wired.com/2000/02/warwick/ 24 it is constituted through them. Agency is no longer a function of isolated will, but a dynamic capacity to respond to the composite forces (biological, cultural, semiotic, and environmental) that structure the subject’s becoming.41 Together, these divergent theoretical orientations reposition the HAC not as a figure of ethical disintegration but as a productive site of ontological experimentation. The tension between fragmentation and interdependence, between interiority and distributed cognition, does not resolve into a stable normative paradigm. Rather, it demands new conceptual vocabularies capable of navigating mediation, recursion, and multiplicity. In sum, the HAC is not the embryonic figure of a linear evolutionary schema but a persistent ontological condition in the age of dynamic technogenesis. It reveals that subjectivity is neither bounded nor originarily human but emerges through the continuous interplay of biology, code, culture, and interface. In other words, dismissing any function as a precursor, it operates as the ontological fold that renders the posthuman conceivable, configuring the very conditions of possibility through which such forms of subjectivity emerge. The Humanimal–Cyborg does not represent an endpoint; rather, it stands as a locus of ongoing transformation. Through its intimate entanglement with technicity, a critical opening takes shape, rendering intentional self-modification ontologically explicit. This development neither abandons the HAC nor supersedes it; instead, it reorients its latent capacities toward heightened agency in the figure of the Higher Human–Transhuman. The affordances consolidated in the HAC are not discarded, but intensified within this reconfigured horizon. In such a context, subjectivity shifts from passive implication in technological systems to the deliberate pursuit of self-augmentation. Enhancement assumes a directed momentum, with optimization asserted as the principal trajectory of existence. 2.4 T1b: Higher Human–Transhuman as Morphogenetic Program While the T1a configuration reveals a techno-ontological awakening, a re-inscription of the subject as an always-already hybrid being whose flesh is threaded with code, whose cognition is ecologically situated, and whose machinic inheritance precedes any clean division between nature 41 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 60–61. 25 and artifice, T1b introduces an escalatory inflection in which hybridity ceases to be a descriptive condition and becomes an active teleological trajectory. Here, subjectivity is not merely entangled but becomes programmatic and projective. This mode gives rise to morphological intentionality, wherein the Higher Human–Transhuman (HHT) subject no longer simply inhabits the post- anthropocentric condition but begins to sculpt it. With tools of genetic modulation, cognitive recalibration, aesthetic sovereignty, and neurotechnological recursion, the HHT figure emerges as an ontogenetic interventionist—a being that does not accept inherited form but engages in the deliberate design of self as scaffold, dossier, and perpetually rewritten interface. This second conceptual mode centers on aspiration and self-surpassing. It is grounded in the idea that the human being can and should transcend itself by attaining a higher or more advanced form of existence. Where HAC emphasizes continuity with the machinic and ecological milieu, HHT privileges transformation and improvement. It offers perhaps the closest correspondence to classical transhumanism as an Enlightenment-inspired project of human perfectibility. The human subject is reconceived not as a finished product but as an evolving work, capable of radical augmentation in intellect, physical prowess, emotional range, and even ethical sensibility. The transhuman, in this schema, is not a rupture from Homo sapiens but a more developed phase of it, one that amplifies the species’ finest traits beyond their evolutionary limits. This shift is not without lineage. Its philosophical foundation lies in Julian Huxley’s seminal