My task here in Posthuman Space is to come to an understanding of what I am calling the posthuman subject as it is figured in the short and late prose. To do so I am situating the idea of the posthuman subject within a series of critical theoretical terms: space, world, ecology. My argument is that to understand the being of the subject in works like Texts for Nothing, Lessness, Fizzles, Ill Seen Ill Said, or Worstward Ho requires us to begin to understand what it means for the subject to ‘be’ in its world. As the speaker of Texts for Nothing 4 puts it: ‘What counts is to be in the world, the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth’ (CSP 116). My attempt, to speak in general terms, is to unfold how the subject comes to an understanding of its world, its place in its world, its place on earth. This process will involve the development of a phenomenology of the subject as it emerges in a critical ecological relation to its world. Ecology here will mean a variety of things, but fundamentally it requires us to see how the subject situates itself in space, in its world. Of course the subject, as it develops over this series of texts, stands in a variety of postures to its world: in Texts for Nothing the subject emerges from what I will call a positionless space, a space that defines the posthuman subject as grounded in a radically pluralised state of being. My fundamental interest here in my reading of Texts for Nothing is to begin to come to some understanding of how the world can claim a discontinuous and positionless subject; more precisely, I wish to understand how the posthuman subject can, in its turn, stake a claim on a world that seems fundamentally out of reach.

To begin to answer this central question – what does it mean to ‘be in the world’? – we must first understand the condition of the subject in the texts that follow The Unnamable (1953).