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Published online: 19 May 2025
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2025
Post-human studies has emerged as a central paradigm in the humanities over recent decades, encompassing animal and plant studies and now scholarship on artificial intelligence, as if we have somehow moved beyond the problem of the human (i.e., race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, war, etc.). These are not, however, a new line of inquiry but rather an extension of the meaning of the human as the principal object of this research is to redefine the meaning of human subjectivity amidst an ever-changing ecology and technology. Ricardo Espinoza Lolas’s Psychoanalysis for Intersectional Humanity: Sade Reloaded returns to this most fundamental question: “What is a human.” Lolas approaches the subject of the human by illuminating what he believes to be the most “non-human” of the human in dialogue with philosophy (Kant and Hegel) and psychoanalysis (Lacan), illustrated via extensive literary and cultural references. If we generally consider being human to be a natural phenomenon by virtue of the biological events of life, death, sex and reproduction, Lolas argues otherwise. He posits that the meaning of the human must be considered precisely against a “naturalized representation” of humanity, as elucidated by Hegel, remarking that a biological human is a product of a culture and not the other way around (p. 12). For Lolas, to rethink the human in this way—the urgency of which exceeds mere philosophical epistemology—is to account for the problem of the clinic today, which for me is the question of the ethics of psychoanalysis. The human we encounter in this book is a figure no less frightening than non-human, namely, the monster. In Psychoanalysis for Intersectional Humanity, the monster cannot be reduced to a literary trope or an allegory of evil that works to renew the good of the human. On the contrary, in Lolas’s writing, the monster is the very essence of the human and