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TRANSHUMANISM AND THE SUBLATION OF FRONTIER MYTH
Dissertation

TRANSHUMANISM AND THE SUBLATION OF FRONTIER MYTH

Arash Kazemi
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
2026
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PhD Dissertation- Arash Kazemi 4.20DownloadView
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Abstract

American Frontier Myth Enlightenment Rationality Sublation Transhumanism
Abstract Transhumanism is often perceived as a radically future-oriented discourse and as a sharp break from earlier conceptions of the human condition, progress, freedom, and destiny. This dissertation complicates that perception by bringing transhumanism into relation with American frontier myth and exploring how both discourses imagine transformation, renewal, and destiny. Rather than understanding frontierism as a merely historical phenomenon and transhumanism either as a purely technological discourse or as a straightforward extension of frontier logic, this study reads both as distinct mythic and ideological formations shaped by shared Enlightenment assumptions, particularly dualism, anthropocentrism, and technoscientific rationality. Through a comparative structural analysis, the project identifies an underlying continuity between frontierism and transhumanism in their shared anthropocentric logic of mastery. At the same time, this analysis reveals their fundamental discontinuity in the shift from external struggle to a procedural project of redesign oriented toward the elimination of finitude, contingency, and resistance, and from perpetual regeneration to a final destiny. Transhumanism thus emerges not as a complete rupture from frontier myth, but as its sublation, a form of continuity within discontinuity in which frontier aspirations are preserved, older means of renewal are canceled, and mastery is transformed into a logic of optimization, closure, and a permanent home.

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