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Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

Limits of the Human

Debjani Ganguly & Fiona Jenkins
a a b

Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Sir Roland Wilson Building 120 McCoy Circuit, Acton, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
b

School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, Coombs Building Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia Published online: 04 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: Debjani Ganguly & Fiona Jenkins (2011) Limits of the Human, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 16:4, 1-4 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2011.641339

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ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities volume 16 number 4 December 2011

odernity defines its civilisation and epoch, its political desires and ethical norms through the value and meaning of being human. It is in terms of the rights, needs and nature of a common humanity that universal laws are conceived as valid and true. Today, however, the very concept of the human appears to be in crisis as we acknowledge our collective agency in precipitating a slide towards a catastrophic future for our planet, or register the aporias of the international human rights regime in the face of the multitudinous sites of geopolitical conflict and violence that have succeeded the Cold War. As the fundamentals of ethics are challenged by the anticipation of a post-human future, whether of an intelligence explosion, an event horizon termed singularity by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, or of a biologically re-engineered human subject enabled by advances in the human genome project and the technologies of mammal cloning, we face a pressing need to recalibrate for our times the conceptual weight that the category of the human has acquired over two centuries of critical reflection and representation. This special issue of Angelaki orients itself to a climate of contemporary critical thought that originates in the contemplation of such limit cases. At once sober, tremulous, wondrous, and inventive, such thought takes the measure of humanitys presence on this planet. It weighs the human capacity for transcendence with its predilection for annihilation. It ponders the fate of our non-human others, not just animals and living organisms but inert matter; and contemplates the fields of techno-mediation of suffering lifeworlds that constitute new public realms of visibility. Startlingly, it scales up human historicity to mark our intervention in

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EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION debjani ganguly fiona jenkins LIMITS OF THE HUMAN

geological space-time, thus heralding a new Earth era, the Anthropocene, a term that gives ominous credence to the indelible imprint of the human on our biophysical systems. If in ecological perspective, the human has become an element so disjoint with nature that it threatens to bring many forms and species of life to the threshold of extinction, then it may seem that all that has inspired modernitys self-conception as progressive, humane and historically necessary proves instead to have been an unmonitored and dangerous experiment with lifes very conditions of possibility. The same thought may apply to our encounter with the limits of the human in global media images of extreme violence. The differential impact of crisis and suffering, giving rise to

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/1 1/040001^ 4 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.201 1.641339

editorial introduction
what Achille Mbembe has termed a necropolitics politics as the work of death presents us with the inhuman face of catastrophe on multiple fronts, and in terms that call for invention and change beyond all that we hitherto knew as human. Running through these essays is both a frisson of horror at the human, in its hyperbolic capacity for destruction, and a profound desire to keep faith with the possibilities for transformation that inspired modernitys sense of promise. Our contributors explore these dynamics of threat and transformation along three vectors. Several essays take up the idea of the Anthropocene and what it entails for thinking human and non-human history, our relation to other species and the very idea of species-being. Paul Alberts also addresses the issue of responsibility to life in the Anthropocene by offering a critical re-reading of Hans Jonas and Michel Foucault as they focus on the way in which the forces of modern industrial society have brought the biological facts and potentials of human existence into ethical and political calculation. Yet as neither thinker sufficiently articulated the place of non-human species and ecological contexts in their perspectives, questions of responsibility to life need new approaches. This challenge is taken up by Krzysztof Ziarek, but fundamentally refigured as an ontological responsibility that must engage existence in excess even of the terms on which we think of life. Ziarek offers a Heideggerian reading of the emergence of the Anthropocene as an irreversible tech-anthropic imprint on the planet. If conceptualisations of biopower and biopolitics trace the ways in which power posits human life as technic and thus available to manipulation, the response cannot simply be to downgrade human sovereignty from its dominance over other forms of life. Rather, the thought of Da-sein crucially moves the emphasis away from life to attend to the importance of the non-human and the nonliving (world, being, event). David Woods essay explores the nature of the link between our suicidal or toxic behaviour as a species and our capacity for transcendence, and asks whether we can (or should) will our own destruction as a species. Gerda Roelvink and Magdalena Zolkos consider how the affective experience of the environmental destruction already underway might effect political transformation through an altered sense of time, arguing against the assumption that environmental destruction lies ahead of us, in a future we might avert, rather than being already affectively demanding, here and now. In giving an account of human dwelling Rosalyn Diprose develops an innovative approach to the experience of natural and political catastrophes and the import of rebuilding in their wake, showing how the inhabitation of built and living environments must leave space for the event of dwelling, that is, the unique and the arbitrary, not simply seek to minimise risk. In all these discussions, a critical engagement with the terms of modernitys self-understanding gives a complex reading of states of emergency and suggests that situations of crisis can be open to potentiality; that they do not have to descend into a rationalisation for violence. In a second set of essays, the task of rethinking biopolitics as a theorisation of the engagement of politics with life is extended, with and beyond Foucaults or Agambens analyses, to revisit questions of the relations of the human, the animal and the divine. Joanne Faulkner explores a limit of the human that draws on the figure of the animal and the innocent child to disavow our own vulnerability and argues for the reconfiguration of equality and subjectivity as sites of ethical and political change. Agambens rendering of the anthropological machine proves a critical tool of analysis here, as it also is for Mathew Abbott, who invokes the backdrop of Nietzsches philosophy to examine the ways in which animality has come both to intrude upon and haunt the human. More sceptical of Agambens thought, Tony Burke offers a robust defence of the idea of the human as a normative resource and argues that the analytical rubric of biopolitics has left us with few openings to conceptualise the human as a source of value and transcendence. Burkes is not a call for a return to classical liberal thought but rather an appeal to work through what he sees as a dystopian entrapment of the human in biopolitical thought. Through a careful reading of alternative theoretical vocabularies that bring to the fore ideas of human vulnerability, ethical

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ganguly & jenkins

relationality and even a primordial exposure to a pre-political moral universe what Esposito calls an openness to what is held in common with others Burke urges us to seriously consider the limits of received wisdom on the political ontology of life. Cognate issues are at stake in a third thematic strand that explores the sense of global connectedness together with the apprehension of suffering at a distance, and the distinctive questions that new media technologies raise about our experiences of embodiment and responsibility to others. The historical spectrum of discussion on mediated suffering stretches from the early capitalist period in the eighteenth century to our contemporary moment of saturated digital connectivity. Central to this discursive field are at least four critical coordinates: the transitive affectivity of mediation (how far does it go and who does it exactly touch and why); the cultural politics of spectatorship; the calibration of responsibility to the subject of suffering; and the presence/absence of the suffering body itself. The implications of each are mapped in this collection across a range of genres: cinema, photography, social media and the novel. While Robert Sinnerbrink analyses the films of Michael Haneke for their reflexive critique of the mediatised nature of contemporary social experience, Melinda Hinkson turns to the global circulation of new media images of the 2009 post-election violence on the streets of Tehran. She makes a strong case for the importance of the cultural frame in imagistic witnessing and theorises new media spectatorship as a communicative act that has the potential to dissolve the distinction between a passive onlooker and an active agent. Debjani Gangulys essay analyses the emergence of the post-1989 world novel as a genre produced by the conjunction of global violence in the wake of the Cold War, digital hyperconnectivity and a mediatised infrastructure of sympathy. The figuration of the human in these novels, she argues, conjoins an affective imaginary of imminent terror with a metaphorics of right. This latter does not, like the Bildungsroman of early capitalist modernity, mark the novelistic subject as a site of transcendence from the immanence of the social. Rather, it renders the agency of the subject as co-extensive with the necropolitical forces at work, if not in the sense of being directly responsible for the global spread of violence then in its compulsive attachment to a regime of exorbitant visualisation of such violence. In Fiona Jenkins essay a critique of cosmopolitan modes of vision emerges from asking how a sense of the equal value of life is established in and through the global circulation of photographic images. Jenkins argues that humanism is inadequate to the problem of what it is to mark a life as mattering; and she turns to Jean-Luc Nancys distinction between globalisation and mondialisation, alongside Judith Butlers treatment of the idea of grievable life in the context of the global mediation of violence, to elaborate an account of how the circulation of images renders a sense of existence that is weighty in excess of human meaning. Many of the essays collected here were first delivered as papers at a conference on the Limits of the Human, held at the Australian National University, 24 September 2009. Within an overarching philosophical concern to critically chart contemporary vicissitudes of the category of the human, and of limits of the human as places of violence and hope, fear and creativity, we have sought to develop articulations of these issues that draw together scholars from across the humanities to offer rich and nuanced stories, conceiving the human at points of extreme tension and signifying stress: as inheritor of the highly ambivalent legacies of modernity; as destroyer and potential guardian of nature; as subject simultaneously of histories of progress and of the threat that now hangs over all the living or, indeed, world itself.

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editorial introduction

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Debjani Ganguly Humanities Research Centre Australian National University Sir Roland Wilson Building 120 McCoy Circuit Acton Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia E-mail: debjani.ganguly@anu.edu.au Fiona Jenkins School of Philosophy Research School of Social Sciences Coombs Building Australian National University Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia E-mail: fiona.jenkins@anu.edu.au