TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

For the last twenty years, the concepts of post-human and post-humanism reframe our anthropological understanding by setting the idea of being human under question. At the same time, both terms presuppose the idea of humanity not only etymologically by the prefix (post-) but also as a repetition of being human, that is expressed either by the need to move beyond (humanism) or as an inescapable condition (human) that needs to be redefined.

   In the first condition of post-humanist discourse, the disposition to transcend humanity beyond itself, a new taboo begins to arise by the name “human”. According to this discourse, the latter is synonymous with technological (mis-) advancement, environmental destruction, and climate crisis.  In its second condition, the redefinition of being human relates to an attempt to discuss, organize, and predict new ways of ethics and living that will correspond to the avoidance of the first condition, i.e., the continuation of Anthropocenic elimination of the human species.

   My paper will argue that both conditions need to be discussed under the criticism of the decolonization discourse since what it means to be human in post-humanist studies is the completion of human ineffectiveness that results in catastrophe. But by proposing this human definition, post-humanists actually sketch a way of being that corresponds to Western, white colonial development. In other words, they draw a definition of human that splits the responsibility of colonial history and its repressive development equally among the colonialized.        

    Consequently, the second condition of post-humanism which strives for a re-shape of humanism, without a close circumspection by decolonial discourse, faces the risk of bringing the old colonial taboo of the “pre-human” primitive Other that needs to be reshaped in the form of a new taboo, that of being human, and its alteration by post-human forms of biopolitics.