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?

Stevens’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.