The Ultimate Post-humanist Nostalgia in the TV Show Being Human US: Monstrous Home as an Allegory of the Human

Abstract

This article interrogates a tension between post-humanist and humanist modalities of home created by hybrid monsters featured in the TV show Being Human US: a ghost, vampire and a werewolf  (pair). The uncanny home emerges as a palimpsest of architectural and allegorical space, while the monstrous cohabitation gives rise to an allegorical model of the human; a model that wistfully gestures at the utopian vision of the future post-humanist world, and is simultaneously pulled back by the nostalgically traditional humanist conception of the person. By living together, the ghost, the vampire, and the werewolf function as an ensemble that dramatizes the humanist notion of what it means to be human. However, the humanity invoked in the TV show is interrogated from the point of view of  critical post-humanism, which is based on the notion of the “post-human” that indicates a perspective where the abiding question of what it means to be human is not only addressed and re-articulated, but also critically assessed and transcended towards an as-yet-unrealizable utopia, promoting altogether new, post-speciesist, post-animist, or even post-global (in the sense of cosmic) ways of inhabiting the world. The momentary utopia of the monstrous cohabitation provides evidence that post-humanist utopian model of a human person is feasible; yet, only if  “the impurity” of post-human creatures also becomes a part of the definition of the post-humanist human—a human who is a monster.