European Posthumanism and the Critique of Anthropology, or, Posthumanism Explained to Children [in progress]
Collected Essays on Critical Posthumanism IV
Planned contents:
Preface: What is CPH for?
1. Introduction: Whatever Happened to Cultural Studies?
2. Posthumanist Education 2.0: The Posthuman Child
3. Posthumanism and the Future of Memory
4. Posthumanism, Language and the Future of Translation
5. Posthuman Vulnerability, Robot Care and Empathy
6. Strategic Biocentrism
7. Cosmopolitanism and the Future of Europe
8. For the Victims of Posthumanism and Posthumanisation
9. For a European Posthumanism, or, Does Anthropology Have a Future?
9.1. French “Anti”-Humanism and Existentialism
9.2. Posthumanism’s German Genealogies (early draft)
Extract:
In the scheme of the international, global, English-speaking and writing Theory industry driven by Anglo-American publishers and academies, posthumanism is the latest, maybe last, of a series of postisms – postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism, postmarxism, postnationalism, postgender etc. Each of these posts harbours the deconstruction of its root concept. Posthumanism raises the stakes since it deconstructs humanism and its concept of the human. Like any discourse it derives legitimation from
explanatory power linked to institutions, practices, ideologies, identities, strategies and political systems. To simplify greatly, the “accepted” self-legitimatory narrative of posthumanism seems to discern three phases (which are not necessarily successive but overlapping): let’s call them cybernetic posthumanism, biopolitical posthumanism and geopoetical posthumanism. Usually, three female figures are said to somehow found the posthumanist dynamic: Donna Haraway, who never self identified as posthumanist but nevertheless wrote posthumanism’s best-known manifesto, The Manifesto for Cyborgs, in 1985 (Haraway 1991). The central metaphor of the cyborg revives the question concerning technology raised by Heidegger for the so-called “information society”, the rise of cybernetics and the process of generalised digitalisation – a process commented on by Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman (1999), who links it to a critique of transhumanist phantasies of disembodiment and thus introduces the ambivalent figure of the posthuman. Ambivalent because, on the one hand, the posthuman is what transhumanists wish to achieve by surpassing, transcending the human and its
limitations, either through enhancement or replacement by an AI successor species. On the other hand, the posthuman is used as a radical political figure, like Haraway’s cyborg before it, and is reclaimed by the third of the triumfeminate of posthumanism’s
founding figures, Rosi Braidotti. For her, the posthuman becomes the political focus of an ongoing struggle for liberation and resistance in our current “posthuman” age (Braidotti 2013), situated between the fourth industrial revolution and the sixth mass extinction (Braidotti 2019: 2). Haraway subsequently shifted her focus from the cyborg to other
(biological) companion species, especially dogs and, most recently, “critters”, which parallels a shift towards an increasingly dominant bio- or even microbiopolitical paradigm within posthumanist thought. Braidotti’s work also belongs to the third wave of posthumanism prompted by the ever more prominent discussion of the so-called Anthropocene and the “nonhuman turn”. The realisation that human-induced climate change has turned (at least some parts of) humanity into the most important geological actor at a planetary level prompts the most radical phase of what, arguably, was a
fundamentally postanthropocentric drive behind posthumanism from its beginnings.
As a sketch, this will have to suffice. Of course, within this discourse of posthumanism there is significant conflict and disagreement about political priorities, strategies, constituencies, allies and enemies, methodologies, styles and so on. As with any discourse, there is an intersection with other competing or complementary discourses like critical animal studies, decolonialism, ecocriticism. However, there are also common enemies: transhumanism in particular, with its technoeuphoria over the future achievements of strong AI, bio- or geoengineering. While technology remains of course an important
concern for posthumanism, there is considerable disagreement, however, about its centrality, its “autonomy” and its “originarity”. Just as important, especially for a critical posthumanism is the question of the “animal”, of animality and “life” in general. The great
political confrontation here concerns what one might call the “construction of the future”, connected to the question of the role of science and technology in society, the search for a different form of governmentality, and the extension of agency and subjectivity in the
context of a postanthropocentric understanding of social justice. It is here that the need for a “European posthumanism” without technology arises, in the form of a challenge to the dominant Anglo-American version of the discourse, with its politics of translation and
its collusion with neoliberalism. It is a posthumanism “without” technology, obviously, not in a literal sense, but in offering a critique and an alternative to the largely techno-euphoric or techno-salvific discourse that dominates the nexus of neoliberal economic
globalisation and transhumanist ideology. And, equally obviously, it cannot be European in the sense that the European Union operates today, namely as a mainly regulatory and
economic body without a proper political project and without a people. It is a Europe that remains to come, in Derrida’s and also Esposito’s sense, one that needs to renegotiate its “inside”, its “outside” and its borders especially given recent geopolitical developments. It is European, finally, not in the classic Kantian cosmopolitan sense, nor in its post-imperialist, post-colonial, post-universalist “provincialized” one, but a Europe that re-members, literally, its national and regional multiplicity and its different but
converging traditions and values.
9.3. Posthumanism, Biopolitics and the Italian “Difference” (early draft)
10. Conclusion
