Here, in “Ambivalent Posthumanism,” I made my first bridge from psychoanalytic theory to another branch of philosophy, posthumanism. I found and, I confess, still find the whole effort of the posthuman movement to be pretentious: certainly true that humanism has been decisively shaped by patriarchy, xenophobia, ableism — does this mean that our imaginations can be posthuman so suddenly in any meaningful sense?

In any event I may have, as a colleague once said, peaked at my title. Steven’s capacity for dwelling in and moving through ambivalence in his poetry gives a record of an imagination trying out posthumanism, subsuming the self, or trying to subsume the self, into the domain of the animal. Emotional honesty and imaginative freedom — Stevens’s contributions to posthumanism, at least two of them.

I remember the moment of discovery in relation to Stevens’s poem “Autumn Refrain” as I was drafting this essay — to realize that Stevens says he shall never hear the nightingale, not because he will never travel to Europe but because he will never hear birdsong in that essentializing or totalizing way — in retrospect, this may be the most useful contribution of the essay to posthumanism.