Introduction to Focus: Posthumanism

Abstract

Page 3 January–February 2009 Posthumanism Introduction to Focus: Zahi Zalloua, Focus Editor What is posthumanism? How do we make sense of this concept which is increasingly infiltrating academia and popular culture? A look at its etymology might be useful as a point of departure. “Post-” signifies “after,” a diachronic succession, something that comes after a delineable and locatable event in a linear view of history. The attempt to define humanism as an event, however, or even a series of events, poses a problem. In the most abstract or general sense of the word, humanism refers to a set of beliefs that place the human subject at the center of reflection and concern. In antiquity, humanist sensibility can be found in Protogoras’s view that “man is the measure of all things.” In the Renaissance, humanism takes the form of an interest in identifying that which distinguishes humans from other beings, a concern with the condition and singularity of man. Take, for example, fifteenth-century Italian thinker Pico della Mirandola for whom man’s greatness and ontological specificity are tied to his malleability: “O great and wonderful happiness of man! It is given him to have that which he chooses and to be that which he wills.” With this portrait of the Renaissance self, Pico inaugurated the humanist myth of the self-made man, a man endowed with the capacity of cultivating himself and elevating himself to divine heights, particularly through the restoration of “good letters” (ancient literature, philosophy, rhetoric, philology, etc.). Only through the study of “good letters,” which became synonymous with the study of humanity (studia humanitatis), could human beings ever realize their full humanity. If the Renaissance tied man’s humanity to the powers of eloquence and the study of letters (powers and projects aimed at perfecting the self, in the etymological sense of “completing” that self), René Descartes and the Enlightenment foregrounded man’s reason and agency. In the Meditations (1641), Descartes embarked on the search for epistemological certainty, maintaining that beliefs must be infallible if they are to serve as a reliable source of human knowledge. His radical method led him to hypothesize the existence of an evil deceiver, causing him to question all knowledge of the external world— including knowledge of his own existence. In the face of unbearable skepticism, Descartes discovered an indubitable and self-evident truth, namely that he exists, since he cannot doubt and not exist simultaneously—hence was born the Cartesian subject, an autonomous and rational subject that was to serve as the metaphysical bedrock of many humanisms to follow. The legacy of Cartesian thought is even visible in the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. If existentialism is more often associated with concepts such as anguish and absurdity, we must also recall that Sartre did write Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), in which he underscored man’s radical freedom and posited human consciousness as the source of meaning in the world. This brief consideration of the term “humanism ” and its prefix “post” only begins to give us an entry, however, into a meditation on posthumanism. For one thing, does “post-” simply mean “after,” with the presumption that what comes after has moved beyond what preceded it, attesting to break with humanism? Related notions like post-theory and not have to accept old age, or rather the effects of old age. Cosmetic surgeries are being perfected and made available to a larger body of people, while Viagra and other drugs reconfigure prior understandings of sexuality. It is, however, gene therapy, along with cloning, which has set off alarm bells among liberal humanists who see biotechnology as threatening to change humanity at the ontological level. For some, biotechnology risks undermining the very structure of a liberal democracy grounded on the ethico-political ideal of human equality. “What will happen to political rights,” alarmingly observes Francis Fukuyama in Our Posthuman Future (2002), “once we are able to, in effect, breed some people with saddles on their backs, and others with boots and spurs?” As other critics have pointed out, Fukuyama’s objections to posthumanism rely on an idealized and static vision of human nature. Ironically, his version of posthumanism at the same...