The Posthuman

Rosi Braidotti

Polity
 Contents

Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Post-Humanism: Life beyond the Self 13
2 Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species 55
3 The Inhuman: Life beyond Death 105
4 Posthuman Humanities: Life beyond Theory 143
Conclusion 186
References 198
Index 214
 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 Insti- tutes 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 sup- ported me
throughout the process, all my love, as ever.
 Introdution

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 main- tains 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?goseib 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 eco-
nomic concerns. After the postmodern, the post-colonial, the post-industrial, the post-
communist and even the much con- tested 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
2 Introduction

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 c 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, neu- roscience and bio-genetic capital to fuzzier new age
visions of trans-humanism and techno-transcendence. Human enhance- ment 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 pro- vokes 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
contemporary provides robust foundations to study and critique the social mechanisms
that support the construction of key identities, institutions and practices. In progressive
politics, social con- structivist 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.
3 Introduction

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 cul- tural 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. Con- versely, 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 sub- jectivity 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 func- tion 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 suit- able 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 dis- missed as failed
historical
4 Introduction

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 meth- odological 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 intrin- sically 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 posthu- man condition, especially in
relation to genealogies of critical thought. It is as if, after the great explosion of theoretical
cre- ativity of the 1970s and 1980s, we had entered a zombified landscape of repetition
without difference and lingering mel- ancholia. 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
5 Introduction

specifically, posthu- man 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