On the Death of Human and Its History

Abstract

The question that continually returns is therefore the following: if the forces within man compose a form only by entering into relation with forms from the outside, with what new forms do they now risk entering a relation, and what new form will emerge that is neither God nor Man? Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (1) But ... this was the proper task of a history of thought, as against a history of behaviors or representations: to define the conditions in which human beings 'problematize' what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (2) If Foucault was wrong to write, in the twentieth century, that perhaps, one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian, (3) we certainly live in the Deleuzian century now, in the twenty first century. What does it mean to be human for us and live in a Deleuzean century? Is human whatness or howness? If human is not something whatness but howness, how is the human possible? Which outside forces (4) acted out with coextensive inside forces (5) in life in order to define what is human? How such practices actually make our question 'what is human?' irrelevant and force us to rethink the question instead in different way: How is the human possible? Does human no longer exist in life? Does the death of human mean that the human is irrelevant? If not, what is the relevant form of human? Is history still possible? In what way and not otherwise? Is the death of the human and history is mere celebration of capitalist ideology? Or is this a practical humanist concept only if we agree to understand what is human and humanist beyond the Hegelian-Marxian schema? These are some of the contemporary issues in the field of current humanistic studies I am trying to address in this editorial. But because of the polemical nature of the debate at stake, I want to make clear in the very beginning that my sense of death of human and its history does not at all mean human and history is irrelevant (so one cannot easily overlooked me as an anti-humanist) but it means the traditional idea of human as a realized essence is insufficient to 'preserve' the 'goodness' in human. The traditional idea of human even does not tell a single thing about the nature of internal forces at work within life. What such idea of human teaches to be human entails the inversion of active forces in life (I am avoiding the discussion of how that inversion was made because that is not my purpose here. See Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy); therefore it is 'nothing but nihilism.' However, my sense of human is not a virtual (even if, I sometimes find reasons insufficient to conceive virtual as unreal) human or posthuman. It is still 'human too human,' our own, 'the earth's.' That's why I am taking a Spinozian-Nietzschean turn at the end wavering away from Foucauldian suprahistorial genealogical project of posthuman to prevent my sense of human to be virtual (my sense of human is not an unactualized possible but resist actualization) and return again and again to Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze in order to preserve the dignity of human intact. This is my modernist commitment to what is human and humanist. I find human identical with striving forces in body, never a realized concept. So I have been simultaneously identifying human with body, forces, events and becomings. I love human, and that's why I want to put it to death, not to lose it forever but to resurrect a new form of human which is practically of this 'earth.' My sense of death used here is not death as the end of life but a kind of essence of metamorphosis in life. My use of the terms 'Human' signifies essence of forces in 'Man-form' and 'Overhuman' a human released from the 'Man-form' in order to cross the borderline of past and present to meet never ending future. And I believe in essence but my sense of 'essence' is never a concept but an active affect/force. And also, my unMarxian turn is not at all a celebration of capitalism that one may vilify. …