The COVID-19 pandemic is a man-made disaster, caused by undue interference in the ecological balance and the lives of multiple species. Paradoxically, the contagion has resulted in increased use of technology and digital mediation, as well as enhanced hopes for vaccines and biomedical solutions. It has thereby intensified humans’ reliance on the very high-tech economy of cognitive capitalism that caused the problems in the first place. This combination of ambivalent elements in relation to the Fourth Industrial revolution and the Sixth Extinction is the trademark of the posthuman condition. This essay explores this condition further, offering both critical and affirmative propositions for moving forward.

There has never been a more urgent time to engage with the Environmental Humanities and the other Posthumanities. This engagement is creative as well as critical and it touches upon some fundamental issues within what I have called the posthuman convergence. That is the intersection of two concurrent but contradictory phenomena: the unprecedented technological developments that have also become known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the acceleration of the climate change emergency, also known as the Sixth Extinction. This complex intersection of events triggers multiple fractures, ethical dilemmas, affective perturbations, political concerns, and critical lines of inquiry. I have summarized them as the convergent critiques of Humanism on the one hand and the rejection of anthropocentrism on the other. This is neither a simple nor a harmonious intersection of critical lines, but rather an encounter fraught with painful contradictions and challenging problems

Transversal Posthumanities emerge within the posthuman convergence of posthumanism and postanthropocentrism. Environmental, medical, and digital humanities reposition academic practice towards advanced technologies and climate change issues. A neomaterialist theoretical framework will help distinguish different kinds of Posthumanities: from the profit-oriented knowledge production practices of cognitive capitalism, to community-driven, non-profit experiments with minor knowledges.