Coda

This coda begins by reviewing how the relationship between human creativity and the possibility of an other-than-human vitality—between the cultural imaginary and the counterhuman imaginary—has taken a range of shapes across the texts that this book explores. The common result in each instance is the projection of a counterhuman realm just outside the region of human creative purpose, just beyond explicit acknowledgment, and just out of the reach of the human cultural imaginary. This realm of just beyond calls for a new understanding of symptomatic reading. The chapter then considers two recent positions on the relevance of symptomatic reading to the explication of this just beyond: Tobias Menely's “geohistorical contradiction” and Edna Duffy's “cosmological criticism.” In reading beyond the “alien” and even beyond the cosmological to wider forms of the unimaginable, the counterhuman imaginary sees the scope projected by “geohistorical contradiction” and “cosmological criticism” and seeks to give it a theory and a method.