The Posthuman E-Book

Rosi Braidotti

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 372

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The Posthuman offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. Digital 'second life', genetically modified food, advanced prosthetics, robotics and reproductive technologies are familiar facets of our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. This has blurred the traditional distinction between the human and its others, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human. The Posthuman starts by exploring the extent to which a post-humanist move displaces the traditional humanistic unity of the subject. Rather than perceiving this situation as a loss of cognitive and moral self-mastery, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities. Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria. These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future? The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities. Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 Post-Humanism: Life beyond the Self

Anti-Humanism

The Death of Man, the Deconstruction of Woman

The Postsecular Turn

The Posthuman Challenge

Critical Posthumanism

Conclusion

Chapter 2 Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species

Global Warning

The Posthuman as Becoming-animal

Compensatory Humanism

The Posthuman as Becoming-earth

The Posthuman as Becoming-machine

Difference as the Principle of Not-One

Conclusion

Chapter 3 The Inhuman: Life beyond Death

Ways of Dying

Beyond Bio-politics

Forensic Social Theory

On Contemporary Necro-politics

Posthuman Theory on Death

Death of a Subject

Becoming-imperceptible

Conclusion: On Posthuman Ethics

Chapter 4 Posthuman Humanities: Life beyond Theory

Institutional Patterns of Dissonance

The Humanities in the Twenty-first Century

Posthuman Critical Theory

The ‘Proper’ Subject of the Humanities is not ‘Man’

The Global ‘Multi’-versity

Conclusion

Posthuman Subjectivity

Posthuman Ethics

Affirmative Politics

Posthuman, all too Human

References

Index

Copyright © Rosi Braidotti 2013

The right of Rosi Braidotti to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4157-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4158-4 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6996-0 (Multi-user ebook)

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank my publisher John Thompson for suggesting the idea of this book to begin with. I am proud of being a long-standing Polity author. My sincere thanks also to Jennifer Jahn for her advice and support. I benefited greatly from conversations with my colleagues on the CHCI Board (Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes) and within ECHIC (European Consortium of Humanities Institutes and Centres). Henrietta Moore and Claire Colebrook, Peter Galison and Paul Gilroy proved to be formidable readers and I thank them for their critical comments. My research assistant Goda Klumbyte helped me greatly especially with bibliographical work. All my gratitude to Nori Spauwen and to Bolette Blaagaard for their insightful critical comments. My thanks also to Stephanie Paalvast for critical and editorial assistance. To Anneke, who endured, commented and supported me throughout the process, all my love, as ever.

Introduction

Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that. Some of us are not even considered fully human now, let alone at previous moments of Western social, political and scientific history. Not if by ‘human’ we mean that creature familiar to us from the Enlightenment and its legacy: ‘The Cartesian subject of the cogito, the Kantian “community of reasonable beings”, or, in more sociological terms, the subject as citizen, rights-holder, property-owner, and so on’ (Wolfe, 2010a). And yet the term enjoys widespread consensus and it maintains the re-assuring familiarity of common sense. We assert our attachment to the species as if it were a matter of fact, a given. So much so that we construct a fundamental notion of Rights around the Human. But is it so?

While conservative, religious social forces today often labour to re-inscribe the human within a paradigm of natural law, the concept of the human has exploded under the double pressure of contemporary scientific advances and global economic concerns. After the postmodern, the post-colonial, the post-industrial, the post-communist and even the much contested post-feminist conditions, we seem to have entered the post-human predicament. Far from being the nth variation in a sequence of prefixes that may appear both endless and somehow arbitrary, the posthuman condition introduces a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet. This issue raises serious questions as to the very structures of our shared identity – as humans – amidst the complexity of contemporary science, politics and international relations. Discourses and representations of the non-human, the inhuman, the anti-human, the inhumane and the posthuman proliferate and overlap in our globalized, technologically mediated societies.

The debates in mainstream culture range from hard-nosed business discussions of robotics, prosthetic technologies, neuroscience and bio-genetic capital to fuzzier new age visions of trans-humanism and techno-transcendence. Human enhancement is at the core of these debates. In academic culture, on the other hand, the posthuman is alternatively celebrated as the next frontier in critical and cultural theory or shunned as the latest in a series of annoying ‘post’ fads. The posthuman provokes elation but also anxiety (Habermas, 2003) about the possibility of a serious de-centring of ‘Man’, the former measure of all things. There is widespread concern about the loss of relevance and mastery suffered by the dominant vision of the human subject and by the field of scholarship centred on it, namely the Humanities.

In my view, the common denominator for the posthuman condition is an assumption about the vital, self-organizing and yet non-naturalistic structure of living matter itself. This nature–culture continuum is the shared starting point for my take on posthuman theory. Whether this post-naturalistic assumption subsequently results in playful experimentations with the boundaries of perfectibility of the body, in moral panic about the disruption of centuries-old beliefs about human ‘nature’ or in exploitative and profit-minded pursuit of genetic and neural capital, remains however to be seen. In this book I will try to examine these approaches and engage critically with them, while arguing my case for posthuman subjectivity.

What does this nature–culture continuum amount to? It marks a scientific paradigm that takes its distance from the social constructivist approach, which has enjoyed widespread consensus. This approach posits a categorical distinction between the given (nature) and the constructed (culture). The distinction allows for a sharper focus in social analysis and it provides robust foundations to study and critique the social mechanisms that support the construction of key identities, institutions and practices. In progressive politics, social constructivist methods sustain the efforts to de-naturalize social differences and thus show their man-made and historically contingent structure. Just think of the world-changing effect of Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that ‘one is not born, one becomes a woman’. This insight into the socially bound and therefore historically variable nature of social inequalities paves the road to their resolution by human intervention through social policy and activism.

My point is that this approach, which rests on the binary opposition between the given and the constructed, is currently being replaced by a non-dualistic understanding of nature–culture interaction. In my view the latter is associated to and supported by a monistic philosophy, which rejects dualism, especially the opposition nature–culture and stresses instead the self-organizing (or auto-poietic) force of living matter. The boundaries between the categories of the natural and the cultural have been displaced and to a large extent blurred by the effects of scientific and technological advances. This book starts from the assumption that social theory needs to take stock of the transformation of concepts, methods and political practices brought about by this change of paradigm. Conversely, the question of what kind of political analysis and which progressive politics is supported by the approach based on the nature–culture continuum is central to the agenda of the posthuman predicament.

The main questions I want to address in this book are: firstly what is the posthuman? More specifically, what are the intellectual and historical itineraries that may lead us to the posthuman? Secondly: where does the posthuman condition leave humanity? More specifically, what new forms of subjectivity are supported by the posthuman? Thirdly: how does the posthuman engender its own forms of inhumanity? More specifically, how might we resist the inhuman(e) aspects of our era? And last, how does the posthuman affect the practice of the Humanities today? More specifically, what is the function of theory in posthuman times?

This book rides the wave of simultaneous fascination for the posthuman condition as a crucial aspect of our historicity, but also of concern for its aberrations, its abuses of power and the sustainability of some of its basic premises. Part of the fascination is due to my sense of what the task of critical theorists should be in the world today, namely, to provide adequate representations of our situated historical location. This in itself humble cartographic aim, that is connected to the ideal of producing socially relevant knowledge, flips over into a more ambitious and abstract question, namely the status and value of theory itself.

Several cultural critics have commented on the ambivalent nature of the ‘post-theoretical malaise’ that has struck the contemporary Human and Social Sciences. For instance, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller (2012) emphasize the positive aspect of this ‘post-theory’ phase, namely the fact that it actually registers the new opportunities as well as the threats that emerge from contemporary science. The negative aspects, however, are just as striking, notably the lack of suitable critical schemes to scrutinize the present.

I think that the anti-theory shift is linked to the vicissitudes of the ideological context. After the official end of the Cold War, the political movements of the second half of the twentieth century have been discarded and their theoretical efforts dismissed as failed historical experiments. The ‘new’ ideology of the free market economy has steamrolled all oppositions, in spite of massive protest from many sectors of society, imposing anti-intellectualism as a salient feature of our times. This is especially hard on the Humanities because it penalizes subtlety of analysis by paying undue allegiance to ‘common sense’ – the tyranny of doxa – and to economic profit – the banality of self-interest. In this context, ‘theory’ has lost status and is often dismissed as a form of fantasy or narcissistic self-indulgence. Consequently, a shallow version of neo-empiricism – which is often nothing more than data-mining – has become the methodological norm in Humanities research.

The question of method deserves serious consideration: after the official end of ideologies and in view of the advances in neural, evolutionary and bio-genetic sciences, can we still hold the powers of theoretical interpretation in the same esteem they have enjoyed since the end of the Second World War? Is the posthuman predicament not also linked to a post-theory mood? For instance, Bruno Latour (2004) – not exactly a classical humanist in his epistemological work on how knowledge is produced by networks of human and non-human actors, things and objects – recently commented on the tradition of critical theory and its connection to European humanism. Critical thought rests on a social constructivist paradigm which intrinsically proclaims faith in theory as a tool to apprehend and represent reality, but is such faith still legitimate today? Latour raised serious self-questioning doubts about the function of theory today.

There is an undeniably gloomy connotation to the posthuman condition, especially in relation to genealogies of critical thought. It is as if, after the great explosion of theoretical creativity of the 1970s and 1980s, we had entered a zombified landscape of repetition without difference and lingering melancholia. A spectral dimension has seeped into our patterns of thinking, boosted, on the right of the political spectrum, by ideas about the end of ideological time (Fukuyama, 1989) and the inevitability of civilizational crusades (Huntington, 1996). On the political left, on the other hand, the rejection of theory has resulted in a wave of resentment and negative thought against the previous intellectual generations. In this context of theory-fatigue, neo-communist intellectuals (Badiou and Žižek, 2009) have argued for the need to return to concrete political action, even violent antagonism if necessary, rather than indulge in more theoretical speculations. They have contributed to push the philosophical theories of post-structuralism way out of fashion.

In response to this generally negative social climate, I want to approach posthuman theory as both a genealogical and a navigational tool. I find it useful as a term to explore ways of engaging affirmatively with the present, accounting for some of its features in a manner that is empirically grounded without being reductive and remains critical while avoiding negativity. I want to map out some of the ways in which the posthuman is circulating as a dominant term in our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. More specifically, posthuman theory is a generative tool to help us re-think the basic unit of reference for the human in the bio-genetic age known as ‘anthropocene’, the historical moment when the Human has become a geological force capable of affecting all life on this planet. By extension, it can also help us re-think the basic tenets of our interaction with both human and non-human agents on a planetary scale.

Let me give some examples of the contradictions offered by our posthuman historical condition.

Vignette 1

In November 2007 Pekka-Eric Auvinen, an eighteen-year-old Finnish boy, opened fire on his classmates in a high school near Helsinki, killing eight people before shooting himself. Prior to the carnage, the young killer posted a video on YouTube, in which he showed himself, wearing a t-shirt with the caption ‘Humanity is overrated’.

That humanity be in a critical condition – some may even say approaching extinction – has been a leitmotif in European philosophy ever since Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the ‘death of God’ and of the idea of Man that was built upon it. This bombastic assertion was meant to drive home a more modest point. What Nietzsche asserted was the end of the self-evident status attributed to human nature as the common sense belief in the metaphysically stable and universal validity of the European humanistic subject. Nietzschean genealogy stresses the importance of interpretation over dogmatic implementation of natural laws and values. Ever since then, the main items on the philosophical agenda have been: firstly, how to develop critical thought, after the shock of recognition of a state of ontological uncertainty, and, secondly, how to reconstitute a sense of community held together by affinity and ethical accountability, without falling into the negative passions of doubt and suspicion.

As the Finnish episode points out, however, philosophical anti-humanism must not be confused with cynical and nihilistic misanthropy. Humanity may well be over-rated, but as the human population on earth reaches its eighth billion mark, any talk of extinction seems downright silly. And yet, the issue of both ecological and social sustainability is at the top of most governmental programmes across the world, in view of the environmental crisis and climate change. Thus, the question Bertrand Russell formulated in 1963, at the height of the Cold War and of nuclear confrontation, sounds more relevant than ever: has Man a future indeed? Does the choice between sustainability and extinction frame the horizon of our shared future, or are there other options? The issue of the limits of both humanism and of its anti-humanist critics is therefore central to the debate on the posthuman predicament and I will accordingly devote the first chapter to it.

Vignette 2

The Guardian reported that people in war-torn lands like Afghanistan were reduced to eating grass in order to survive.1At the same point in history, cows in the United Kingdom and parts of the European Union were fed meat-based fodder. The agricultural bio-technological sector of the over-developed world had taken an unexpected cannibalistic turn by fattening cows, sheep and chickens on animal feed. This action was later diagnosed as the source for the lethal disease Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), vulgarly called ‘mad cow disease’, which caused the brain structure of the animals to corrode and turn to pulp. The madness here, however, is decidedly on the side of the humans and their bio-technological industries.

Advanced capitalism and its bio-genetic technologies engender a perverse form of the posthuman. At its core there is a radical disruption of the human–animal interaction, but all living species are caught in the spinning machine of the global economy. The genetic code of living matter – ‘Life itself’ (Rose, 2007) – is the main capital. Globalization means the commercialization of planet Earth in all its forms, through a series of inter-related modes of appropriation. According to Haraway, these are the techno-military proliferation of micro-conflicts on a global scale; the hyper-capitalist accumulation of wealth; the turning of the ecosystem into a planetary apparatus of production, and the global infotainment apparatus of the new multimedia environment.

The phenomenon of Dolly the sheep is emblematic of the complications engendered by the bio-genetic structure of contemporary technologies and their stock-market backers. Animals provide living material for scientific experiments. They are manipulated, mistreated, tortured and genetically recombined in ways that are productive for our bio-technological agriculture, the cosmetics industry, drugs and pharmaceutical industries and other sectors of the economy. Animals are also sold as exotic commodities and constitute the third largest illegal trade in the world today, after drugs and arms, but ahead of women.

Mice, sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, rabbits, birds, poultry and cats are bred in industrial farming, locked up in battery-cage production units. As George Orwell prophetically put it, however, all animals may be equal, but some are definitely more equal than others. Thus, because they are an integral part of the bio-technological industrial complex, livestock in the European Union receives subsidy to the tune of US$803 per cow. This is considerably less than the US$1,057 that is granted to each American cow and US$2,555 given to each cow in Japan. These figures look all the more ominous when compared to the gross national income per capita in countries like Ethiopia (US$120), Bangladesh (US$360), Angola (US$660) or Honduras (US$920).2

The counterpart of this global commodification of living organisms is that animals have become partly humanized themselves. In the field of bio-ethics, for instance, the issue of the ‘human’ rights of animals has been raised as a way of countering these excesses. The defence of animals’ rights is a hot political issue in most liberal democracies. This combination of investments and abuse is the paradoxical posthuman condition engendered by advanced capitalism itself, which triggers multiple forms of resistance. I will discuss the new post-anthropocentric views of animals at length in chapter 2.

Vignette 3

On 10 October 2011, Muammar Gaddafi, deposed leader of Libya, was captured in his hometown of Sirte, beaten and killed by members of the National Transitional Council of Libya (NTC). Before he was shot by the rebel forces, however, Colonel Gaddafi’s convoy was bombed by French jets and by an American Predator Drone which was flown out of the American Air Force base in Sicily and controlled via satellite from a base outside Las Vegas.3

Although world media focused on the brutality of the actual shooting and on the indignity of the global visual exposure of Gaddafi’s wounded and bleeding body, less attention was paid to what can only described as the posthuman aspect of contemporary warfare: the tele-thanatological machines created by our own advanced technology. The atrocity of Gaddafi’s end – his own tyrannical despotism notwithstanding – was enough to make one feel slightly ashamed of being human. The denial of the role played by the advanced world’s sophisticated death-technology of drones in his demise, however, added an extra layer of moral and political discomfort.

The posthuman predicament has more than its fair share of inhuman(e) moments. The brutality of the new wars, in a globalized world run by the governance of fear, refers not only to the government of the living, but also to multiple practices of dying, especially in countries in transition. Bio-power and necro-politics are two sides of the same coin, as Mbembe (2003) brilliantly argues. The post-Cold War world has seen not only a dramatic increase in warfare, but also a profound transformation of the practice of war as such in the direction of a more complex management of survival and of extinction. Contemporary death-technologies are posthuman because of the intense technological mediation within which they operate. Can the digital operator that flew the American Predator Drone from a computer room in Las Vegas be considered a ‘pilot’? How does he differ from the Air Force boys who flew the Enola Gay plane over Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Contemporary wars have heightened our necro-political power to a new level of administration of ‘the material destruction of human bodies and population’ (Mbembe, 2003: 19). And not only human.

The new necro-technologies operate in a social climate dominated by a political economy of nostalgia and paranoia on the one hand, and euphoria or exaltation on the other. This manic-depressive condition enacts a number of variations: from the fear of the imminent disaster, the catastrophe just waiting to happen, to hurricane Katrina or the next environmental accident. From a plane flying too low, to genetic mutations and immunity breakdowns: the accident is there, just about to unfold and virtually certain; it is just a question of time (Massumi, 1992). As a result of this state of insecurity, the socially enforced aim is not change, but conservation or survival. I shall return to these necro-political aspects in chapter 3.

Vignette 4

At a scientific meeting organized by the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences about the future of the academic field of the Humanities a few years ago, a professor in Cognitive Sciences attacked the Humanities head-on. His attacks rested on what he perceived as the two major shortcomings of the Humanities: their intrinsic anthropocentrism and their methodological nationalism. The distinguished researcher found these two flaws to be fatal for the field, which was deemed unsuitable for contemporary science and hence not eligible for financial support by the relevant Ministry and the government.

The crisis of the human and its posthuman fallout has dire consequences for the academic field most closely associated with it – the Humanities. In the neo-liberal social climate of most advanced democracies today, Humanistic studies have been downgraded beyond the ‘soft’ sciences level, to something like a finishing school for the leisurely classes. Considered more of a personal hobby than a professional research field, I believe that the Humanities are in serious danger of disappearing from the twenty-first-century European university curriculum.

Another motivation behind my engagement with the topic of the posthuman therefore can be related to a profound sense of civic responsibility for the role of the academic today. A thinker from the Humanities, a figure who used to be known as an ‘intellectual’, may be at a loss to know what role to play in contemporary social public scenarios. One could say that my interest in the posthuman emerges from an all too human concern about the kind of knowledge and intellectual values we are producing as a society today. More specifically, I worry about the status of university research in what we are still calling, for lack of a better word, the human sciences or the Humanities. I will develop my ideas about the university today in chapter 4.

This sense of responsibility also expresses a habit of thought which is dear to my heart and mind, as I belong to a generation that had a dream. It was and still is the dream of actually constituting communities of learning: schools, universities, books and curricula, debating societies, theatre, radio, television and media programmes – and later, websites and computer environments – that look like the society they both reflect, serve and help to construct. It is the dream of producing socially relevant knowledge that is attuned to basic principles of social justice, the respect for human decency and diversity, the rejection of false universalisms; the affirmation of the positivity of difference; the principles of academic freedom, anti-racism, openness to others and conviviality. Although I am inclined towards anti-humanism, I have no difficulty in recognizing that these ideals are perfectly compatible with the best humanist values. This book is not about taking sides in academic disputes, but rather aims to make sense of the complexities we find ourselves in. I will propose new ways of combining critique with creativity, putting the ‘active’ back into ‘activism’, thus moving towards a vision of posthuman humanity for the global era.

Posthuman knowledge – and the knowing subjects that sustain it – enacts a fundamental aspiration to principles of community bonding, while avoiding the twin pitfalls of conservative nostalgia and neo-liberal euphoria. This book is motivated by my belief in new generations of ‘knowing subjects’ who affirm a constructive type of pan-humanity by working hard to free us from the provincialism of the mind, the sectarianism of ideologies, the dishonesty of grandiose posturing and the grip of fear. This aspiration also shapes my vision of what a university should look like – a universum that serves the world of today, not only as the epistemological site of scientific production, but also as the epistemophilic yearning for the empowerment that comes with knowledge and sustains our subjectivity. I would define this yearning as a radical aspiration to freedom through the understanding of the specific conditions and relations of power that are imminent to our historical locations. These conditions include the power that each and every one of us exercises in the everyday network of social relations, at both the micro- and macro-political levels.

In some ways, my interest in the posthuman is directly proportional to the sense of frustration I feel about the human, all too human, resources and limitations that frame our collective and personal levels of intensity and creativity. This is why the issue of subjectivity is so central to this book: we need to devise new social, ethical and discursive schemes of subject formation to match the profound transformations we are undergoing. That means that we need to learn to think differently about ourselves. I take the posthuman predicament as an opportunity to empower the pursuit of alternative schemes of thought, knowledge and self-representation. The posthuman condition urges us to think critically and creatively about who and what we are actually in the process of becoming.

Notes

1The Guardian Weekly, 3–5 January 2002, p. 2.

2The Guardian Weekly, 11–17 September 2003, p. 5.

3The Daily Telegraph, 21 October 2011.

Chapter 1

Post-Humanism: Life beyond the Self

At the start of it all there is He: the classical ideal of ‘Man’, formulated first by Protagoras as ‘the measure of all things’, later renewed in the Italian Renaissance as a universal model and represented in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (see figure 1.1). An ideal of bodily perfection which, in keeping with the classical dictum mens sana in corpore sano, doubles up as a set of mental, discursive and spiritual values. Together they uphold a specific view of what is ‘human’ about humanity. Moreover, they assert with unshakable certainty the almost boundless capacity of humans to pursue their individual and collective perfectibility. That iconic image is the emblem of Humanism as a doctrine that combines the biological, discursive and moral expansion of human capabilities into an idea of teleologically ordained, rational progress. Faith in the unique, self-regulating and intrinsically moral powers of human reason forms an integral part of this high-humanistic creed, which was essentially predicated on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century renditions of classical Antiquity and Italian Renaissance ideals.

Figure 1.1 Vitruvian Man, 1492, Leonardo da Vinci

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This model sets standards not only for individuals, but also for their cultures. Humanism historically developed into a civilizational model, which shaped a certain idea of Europe as coinciding with the universalizing powers of self-reflexive reason. The mutation of the Humanistic ideal into a hegemonic cultural model was canonized by Hegel’s philosophy of history. This self-aggrandizing vision assumes that Europe is not just a geo-political location, but rather a universal attribute of the human mind that can lend its quality to any suitable object. This is the view espoused by Edmund Husserl (1970) is his celebrated essay ‘The crisis of European sciences’, which is a passionate defence of the universal powers of reason against the intellectual and moral decline symbolized by the rising threat of European fascism in the 1930s. In Husserl’s view, Europe announces itself as the site of origin of critical reason and self-reflexivity, both qualities resting on the Humanistic norm. Equal only to itself, Europe as universal consciousness transcends its specificity, or, rather, posits the power of transcendence as its distinctive characteristic and humanistic universalism as its particularity. This makes Eurocentrism into more than just a contingent matter of attitude: it is a structural element of our cultural practice, which is also embedded in both theory and institutional and pedagogical practices. As a civilizational ideal, Humanism fuelled ‘the imperial destinies of nineteenth-century Germany, France and, supremely, Great Britain’ (Davies, 1997: 23).

This Eurocentric paradigm implies the dialectics of self and other, and the binary logic of identity and otherness as respectively the motor for and the cultural logic of universal Humanism. Central to this universalistic posture and its binary logic is the notion of ‘difference’ as pejoration. Subjectivity is equated with consciousness, universal rationality, and self-regulating ethical behaviour, whereas Otherness is defined as its negative and specular counterpart. In so far as difference spells inferiority, it acquires both essentialist and lethal connotations for people who get branded as ‘others’. These are the sexualized, racialized, and naturalized others, who are reduced to the less than human status of disposable bodies. We are all humans, but some of us are just more mortal than others. Because their history in Europe and elsewhere has been one of lethal exclusions and fatal disqualifications, these ‘others’ raise issues of power and exclusion. We need more ethical accountability in dealing with the legacy of Humanism. Tony Davies puts it lucidly: ‘All Humanisms, until now, have been imperial. They speak of the human in the accents and the interests of a class, a sex, a race, a genome. Their embrace suffocates those whom it does not ignore. […] It is almost impossible to think of a crime that has not been committed in the name of humanity’ (Davies, 1997: 141). Indeed, but it is also the case unfortunately that many atrocities have been committed in the name of the hatred for humanity, as shown by the case of Pekka-Eric Auvinen in the first vignette in the introduction.

Humanism’s restricted notion of what counts as the human is one of the keys to understand how we got to a post-human turn at all. The itinerary is far from simple or predictable. Edward Said, for instance, complicates the picture by introducing a post-colonial angle: ‘Humanism as protective or even defensive nationalism is […] a mixed blessing for its […] ideological ferocity and triumphalism, although it is sometimes inevitable. In a colonial setting for example, a revival of the suppressed languages and cultures, the attempts at national assertion through cultural tradition and glorious ancestors […] are explainable and understandable’ (Said, 2004: 37). This qualification is crucial in pointing out the importance of where one is actually speaking from. Differences of location between centres and margins matter greatly, especially in relation to the legacy of something as complex and multi-faceted as Humanism. Complicitous with genocides and crimes on the one hand, supportive of enormous hopes and aspirations to freedom on the other, Humanism somehow defeats linear criticism. This protean quality is partly responsible for its longevity.

Anti-Humanism

Let me put my cards on the table at this early stage of the argument: I am none too fond of Humanism or of the idea of the human which it implicitly upholds. Anti-humanism is so much part of my intellectual and personal genealogy, as well as family background, that for me the crisis of Humanism is almost a banality. Why?

Politics and philosophy are the main reasons for the glee with which I have always greeted the notion of the historical decline of Humanism, with its Eurocentric core and imperial tendencies. Of course, the historical context has a lot to do with it. I came of age intellectually and politically in the turbulent years after the Second World War, when the Humanist ideal came to be questioned quite radically. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s an activist brand of anti-Humanism was developed by the new social movements and the youth cultures of the day: feminism, de-colonization and anti-racism, anti-nuclear and pacifist movements. Chronologically linked to the social and cultural politics of the generation known as the baby-boomers, these social movements produced radical political, social theories and new epistemologies. They challenged the platitudes of Cold War rhetoric, with its emphasis on Western democracy, liberal individualism and the freedom they allegedly ensured for all.

Nothing smacks more like a theoretical mid-life crisis than to acknowledge one’s affiliation to the baby-boomers. The public image of this generation is not exactly edifying at this point in time. Nonetheless, truth be said, that generation was marked by the traumatic legacy of the many failed political experiments of the twentieth century. Fascism and the Holocaust on the one hand, Communism and the Gulag on the other, strike a blood-drenched balance on the comparative scale of horrors. There is a clear generational link between these historical phenomena and the rejection of Humanism in the 1960s and 1970s. Let me explain.

At the levels of their own ideological content, these two historical phenomena, Fascism and Communism, rejected openly or implicitly the basic tenets of European Humanism and betrayed them violently. They remain, however, quite different as movements in their structures and aims. Whereas fascism preached a ruthless departure from the very roots of Enlightenment-based respect for the autonomy of reason and the moral good, socialism pursued a communitarian notion of humanist solidarity. Socialist Humanism had been a feature of the European Left since the utopian socialist movements of the eighteenth century. Admittedly, Marxist-Leninism rejected these ‘soft-headed’ aspects of socialist humanism, notably the emphasis on the fulfilment of the human beings’ potential for authenticity (as opposed to alienation). It offered as an alternative ‘proletarian Humanism’, also known as the ‘revolutionary Humanism’ of the USSR and its ruthless pursuit of universal, rational human ‘freedom’ through and under Communism.

Two factors contributed to the relative popularity of communist Humanism in the post-war era. The first is the disastrous effects of Fascism upon European social but also intellectual history. The period of Fascism and Nazism enacted a major disruption in the history of critical theory in Continental Europe in that it destroyed and banned from Europe the very schools of thought – notably Marxism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School and the disruptive charge of Nietzschean genealogy (though the case of Nietzsche is admittedly quite complex) – which had been central to philosophy in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Moreover, the Cold War and the opposition of the two geo-political blocks, which followed the end of the Second World War kept Europe split asunder and dichotomized until 1989, and did not facilitate the re-implantation of those radical theories back into the Continent which had cast them away with such violence and self-destruction. It is significant, for instance, that most of the authors which Michel Foucault singled out as heralding the philosophical era of critical post-modernity (Marx, Freud, Darwin) are the same authors whom the Nazis condemned and burned at the stake in the 1930s.

The second reason for the popularity of Marxist Humanism is that Communism, under the aegis of the USSR, played a pivotal role in defeating Fascism and hence, to all ends and purposes came out of the Second World War as the winner. It follows therefore that the generation that came of age politically in 1968 inherited a positive view of Marxist praxis and ideology as a result of socialists’ and communists’ opposition to fascism and to the Soviet Union’s war effort against Nazism. This clashes with the almost epidermic anti-communism of American culture and remains to date a point of great intellectual tension between Europe and the USA. It is sometimes difficult at the dawn of the third millennium to remember that Communist parties were the single largest emblem of anti-fascist resistance throughout Europe. They also played a significant role in national liberation movements throughout the world, notably in Africa and Asia. André Malraux’s seminal text: Man’s Fate (La condition humaine, 1934) bears testimony to both the moral stature and the tragic dimension of Communism, as does, in a different era and geo-political context, Nelson Mandela’s (1994) life and work.

Speaking from his position within the United States of America, Edward Said adds another significant insight:

Antihumanism took hold on the United States intellectual scene partly because of widespread revulsion with the Vietnam War. Part of that revulsion was the emergence of a resistance movement to racism, imperialism generally and the dry-as-dust academic Humanities that had for years represented an apolitical, unworldly and oblivious (sometimes even manipulative) attitude to the present, all the while adamantly extolling the virtues of the past. (2004: 13)

The ‘new’ Left in the USA throughout the 1960s and 1970s embodied a militant brand of radical anti-humanism, which was posited in opposition not only to the Liberal majority, but also to the Marxist Humanism of the traditional Left.

I am fully aware of the fact that the notion that Marxism, by now socially coded as an inhumane and violent ideology, may actually be a Humanism will shock the younger generations and all who are unschooled in Continental philosophy. Suffice it, however, to think of the emphasis that philosophers of the calibre of Sartre and de Beauvoir placed on Humanism as a secular tool of critical analysis, to see how the argument may have shaped up. Existentialism stressed Humanist conscience as the source of both moral responsibility and political freedom.

France occupies a very special position in the genealogy of anti-humanist critical theory. The prestige of French intellectuals was linked not only to the formidable educational structure of that country, but also to contextual considerations. Foremost among them is the high moral stature of France at the end of the Second World War, thanks to the anti-Nazi resistance of Charles de Gaulle. French intellectuals continued accordingly to enjoy a very high status, especially in comparison with the wasteland that was post-war Germany. Hence the huge international reputation of Sartre and de Beauvoir, but also Aron, Mauriac, Camus and Malraux. Tony Judt sums it up succinctly (2005: 210):

Despite France’s shattering defeat in 1940, its humiliating subjugation under four years of German occupation, the moral ambiguity (and worse) of Marshall Petain’s Vichy regime, and the country’s embarrassing subordination to the US and Britain in the international diplomacy of the post-war years, French culture became once again the centre of international attention: French intellectuals acquired a special international significance as spokesmen for the age, and the tenor of French political arguments epitomised the ideological rent in the world at large. Once more – and for the last time – Paris was the capital of Europe.

Throughout the post-war years, Paris continued to function as a magnet that attracted and engendered all sorts of critical thinkers. For example, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was first published in France in the 1970s, after being smuggled out of the USSR in samizdat form. It was out of his Parisian retreat that the Ayatollah Khomeini led the Iranian revolution of 1979, which installed the world’s first Islamist government. In some ways, the French context of those days was open to all sorts of radical political movements. As a matter of fact, so many critical schools of thought flourished on the Left and Right Bank in that period, that French philosophy became almost synonymous with theory itself, with mixed long-term consequences, as we shall see in chapter 4.

Up until the 1960s, philosophical reason had escaped relatively unscathed from the question of its responsibilities in perpetuating historical models of domination and exclusion. Both Sartre and de Beauvoir, influenced by Marxist theories of alienation and ideology, did connect the triumph of reason with the might of dominant powers, thus disclosing the complicity between philosophical ratio and real-life social practices of injustice. They continued, however, to defend a universalist idea of reason and to rely on a dialectical model for the resolution of these contradictions. This methodological approach, while being critical of hegemonic models of violent appropriation and consumption of the ‘others’, also defined the task of philosophy as a privileged and culturally hegemonic tool of political analysis. With Sartre and de Beauvoir, the image of the philosopher-king is built into the general picture, albeit in a critical mode. As a critic of ideology and the conscience of the oppressed, the philosopher is a thinking human being who continues to pursue grand theoretical systems and over-arching truths. Sartre and de Beauvoir consider humanistic universalism as the distinctive trait of Western culture, i.e. its specific form of particularism. They use the conceptual tools provided by Humanism to precipitate a confrontation of philosophy with its own historical responsibilities and conceptual power-brokering.

This humanistic universalism, coupled with the social constructivist emphasis on the man-made and historically variable nature of social inequalities, lays the grounds for a robust political ontology. For instance, de Beauvoir’s emancipatory feminism builds on the Humanist principle that ‘Woman is the measure of all things female’ (see figure 1.2) and that to account for herself, the feminist philosopher needs to take into account the situation of all women. This creates on the theoretical level a productive synthesis of self and others. Politically, the Vitruvian female forged a bond of solidarity between one and the many, which in the hands of the second feminist wave in the 1960s was to grow into the principle of political sisterhood. This posits a common grounding among women, taking being-women-in-the-world as the starting point for all critical reflection and jointly articulated political praxis.

Figure 1.2 New Vitruvian Woman

Source: Friedrich Saurer/Science Photo Library

Humanist feminism introduced a new brand of materialism, of the embodied and embedded kind (Braidotti, 1991). The cornerstone of this theoretical innovation is a specific brand of situated epistemology (Haraway, 1988), which evolved from the practice of ‘the politics of locations’ (Rich, 1987) and infused standpoint feminist theory and the subsequent debates with postmodernist feminism throughout the 1990s (Harding, 1991). The theoretical premise of humanist feminism is a materialist notion of embodiment that spells the premises of new and more accurate analyses of power. These are based on the radical critique of masculinist universalism, but are still dependent on a form of activist and equality-minded Humanism.

Feminist theory and practice worked faster and more efficiently than most social movements of the 1970s. It developed original tools and methods of analysis that allowed for more incisive accounts of how power works. Feminists also explicitly targeted the masculinism and the sexist habits of the allegedly ‘revolutionary’ Left and denounced them as contradictory with their ideology, as well as intrinsically offensive.

Within the mainstream Left, however, a new generation of post-war thinkers had other priorities. They rebelled against the high moral status of post-war European Communist parties in Western Europe, as well as in the Soviet empire. This had resulted in an authoritarian hold over the interpretation of Marxist texts and their key philosophical concepts. The new forms of philosophical radicalism developed in France and throughout Europe in the late 1960s expressed a vocal critique of the dogmatic structure of Communist thought and practice. They included a critique of the political alliance between philosophers like Sartre and de Beauvoir and the Communist Left,1 which lasted at least until the Hungarian insurrection of 1956. In response to the dogma and the violence of Communism, the generation of 1968 appealed directly to the subversive potential of the texts of Marx, so as to recover their anti-institutional roots. Their radicalism was expressed in terms of a critique of the humanistic implications and the political conservatism of the institutions that embodied Marxist dogma.

Anti-humanism emerged as the rallying cry of this generation of radical thinkers who later were to became world-famous as the ‘post-structuralist generation’. In fact, they were post-communists avant la lettre. They stepped out of the dialectical oppositional thinking and developed a third way to deal with changing understandings of human subjectivity. By the time Michel Foucault published his ground-breaking critique of Humanism in The Order of Things