Posthuman, All too human_Rosi Braidotti

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ7GnwelrM0

What kind of subjects are we in the process of becoming?

Convergence of posthumanism and postanthropocentrism

What is the human in the humanities?

Quick flashback, p. 13-16

Classical idea of what humans should be: bodily perfection in a set of mental, discursive and moral virtues

*Protagoras: man is the measure of all things –>

*Leonardo da Vinci: visualization of ideal in Vitruvian Man

*Humanism as a civilizational model: shaped a certain idea of
Europe as coinciding with the universalizing powers of sel-freflrexive reason –>

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.
This 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.

– notion of ‘difference’ as pejoration

-subjectivity is equated with consciousness, universal rationality, and selfregulating ethical behaviour

-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’. We are all humans, but some of us are just more mortal than others.

Anti-humanism is a critic of this humanist ideal because of its exclusive character. p. 16-25

The end of humanism as the end of the ideology of European supremacy.

The connection between reason and violence/horror, which was made by philosophers due to the events of 20th century, is crucial to the critic of humanism

Anthropos is used to regard the human as a species. This perspective is present in bio- and life-sciences but not in human and social sciences.

The idea of a human life (bios) that colonizes and capitalizes on non-human life (zoe)

For human and social science it is almost unthinkable to think of human as not the measure of all things, even for anti-humanists it is still unthinkable.

Institutional answers to the question of human/post-human

1. Trans-humanism: human enhancement through a combination of mediums. The human brain is obsolete –> the human brain functions are slower than the computitional networks that we have created. What to do? –> accelerate human brains. Trans-humanists defend human enhancements on the grounds of post-anthropocentrism (computers are better than human, hence we have to catch up). If we reverse this argument, we see that they are still defending the ideas of Enlightenment, which promised the perfectability of the human through the use of reason
2. Post-humanities Hub (swedish): accept the explosion of the category of the human. They accept the need to think in a post-human way, they experiment with what the post-humanities will look like
3. German Anthropocene, Project Berlin?: experimenting with art, language etc