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Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical

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Response to Christopher Peterson,

The Posthumanism to Come
Cary Wolfe

Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor Chair, Department of

English, MS-30 , Rice University , Houston, TX 77251-1892, USA
Published online: 09 Aug 2011.

To cite this article: Cary Wolfe (2011) Response to Christopher Peterson, The Posthumanism to
Come, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 16:2, 189-193
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2011.591597

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ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 16 number 2 june 2011

hen the editors of Angelaki invited me to

respond to Christopher Petersons essay
The Posthumanism to Come, I told them Id
be happy to, but my response would be fairly
brief. The reason is simple. I am broadly
sympathetic (and often quite specifically sympathetic) to Chriss views on posthumanism, its
relation to the question of animals and animality,
and the theoretical and philosophical commitments that inform all of the above. As for the
broadly sympathetic, anyone who has read my
book What is Posthumanism? or even just the
introduction to it will know that my approach to
posthumanism is deeply informed by Jacques
Derridas work, and as such it rejects, like Chriss
essay, a logic of dialectical reversal regarding
humanisms disavowal of the animal. (Looking
back beyond What is Posthumanism?, this was,
after all, the point of the critique of Slavoj Zizeks
dialectical rendering of Lacan vis-a`-vis the
question of the animal that, some fifteen years
ago, Jonathan Elmer and I undertook in the essay
Subject to Sacrifice and undertook, moreover, via the quite different line of understanding
made available by Derridas analysis of
carnophallogocentrism.)1 Similarly, What is
Posthumanism? does not imagine a complete
rupture with humanism but is instead interested
in teasing out how the philosophical and
theoretical commitments of humanism undercut
what it says are its aims and desires (often
admirable, of course). In the last section of
his essay, Chris cites some of the relevant
passages in that connection, so I wont repeat
them here.
As for more specific sympathies, I agree
with him that to claim that humans can avow
the animal without reservation is thus to
endow human consciousness with a self-mastery

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cary wolfe
RESPONSE TO
CHRISTOPHER
PETERSON, THE
POSTHUMANISM
TO COME
and agency that disavows the power of our
non-power. I explain why this is so in my
detailed exposition of what I call the logic of
double finitude in What is Posthumanism?,
and it is the linchpin of how I articulate the
relationship between the animal(ity) question and
the question of posthumanism, making it clear
in the process why the former is a subset of the
latter. I develop this idea in some detail using the
work not just of Derrida but also of Niklas
Luhmann, but the Derridean version goes like
this: the first form of finitude that we share with
non-human animals is the fact of our embodied
being, and thus our vulnerability and mortality,
the form highlighted by Derridas reading of
Benthams insistence that the fundamental

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/11/020189^5 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2011.591597

189

response to peterson

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question with regard to non-human animals is

Can they suffer? But there is a second and
equally radical form of finitude, of not being
able, that Derridas work brilliantly exposes,
and that (to quote from my introduction)
derives from the fundamental exteriority and
materiality of meaning and communication
itself, of any form of semiotic marking and
iterability to which both humans and nonhuman animals are subject in a trace structure
that, as he puts it, exceeds and encompasses
the human/animal difference and indeed
the life/death relation itself. For this
reason, we cannot master and erase, in any
analytic of finitude or existential of beingtoward-death (as in Heidegger), our radical
passivity. (xxviii)

I develop this line of inquiry in the book on any

number of sites: contrasting Derridas work with
philosopher Cora Diamonds (and in connection
with Coetzees The Lives of Animals, which
Chris references); in relation to the idea of the
humanities and disciplinarity; in relation to
disability studies and the question of agency;
in relation to questions of visuality and visual
media and their spectralizing character (to use
Derridas term), and much else besides. In other
words, the logic that anchors Chriss approach to
the topic in his essay that posthumanism
cannot stabilize itself without claiming a doubtful
capacity to efface the mark of separation by
which it disassociates itself from humanism is
the same logic that orients the entire enterprise
of What is Posthumanism?, not just on the level
of general theoretical orientation but also in
the very letter of its readings of a range of texts
in philosophy and theory, film, literature, sound
and music, and contemporary art. This is
precisely why, early on in the introduction to
What is Posthumanism?, I frame my approach
in terms of what David Wills calls the viral or
parasitic logic of deconstructions constitutive dehiscence, its originary rupture or selfdivision that has enormous potential for
resisting the self-assurance of any hegemonic
discourse or practice because it has its invasive
impact precisely there where border lines are
drawn between and among nations, religions,

systems of thinking, disciplines, within and

between the ontological pretension of an is and
the thetic possibility of an in (xix). For those
who are allergic to the deconstructive rendering
of this logic, I elaborate in some detail a version
of it that is available to us in second-order
systems theory. In other words, this logic doesnt
just frame my book, it frames it twice over, and
not just in Derridean terms.
Given this fact, I find Chriss recasting of
What is Posthumanism? at the end of his essay
curious, to say the very least. In what amounts to
a sort of bait and switch tactic, Chris briefly
characterizes the project of the book in a more or
less accurate way, and then turns around and
spends the rest of the essay attributing to the
book positions that it quite explicitly argues
against. For example, he characterizes my
attempt to articulate important differences
between the work of, say, Martha Nussbaum
and that of Derrida as a form of one-upmanship
that imagines posthumanism precisely within
a narrative of increasing perfection. Well, I do
think there are important differences here
between Nussbaum and Derrida (or Habermas
and Luhmann). (And anyway, if he thinks my
handling of Nussbaum is rough, he should check
out Derridas engagement of John Searle in
Limited Inc. If that exchange wasnt about the
internal disciplinarity of philosophy, I dont
know what is.) And I also think that it will be
possible to do work in thirty or forty years that is
impossible to do right now, just as Derridas
discussion of the gramme in Of Grammatology
in 1967 would have been impossible in 1867.
We are in a position now to reconjugate the
genealogical relation of past and future work in a
way that is different from thirty or forty years
ago, and will be different in another thirty or
forty years.
I see no reason to jump to the conclusion that
this rather mundane observation harbors within
it a perfectionist scheme, and, in fact, the
only way you can frame my understanding of
posthumanism in terms of increasing perfectionism is to pretend you never read What is
Posthumanism?, because Im quite explicit
early, late, and in between about the theoretical
reasons for perfectionisms impossibility. As for

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wolfe
the early, take page 12 of the first chapter, where
I foreground the centrality for the book of
Derridas argument that iterability introduces
into self-presence from the beginning all the
impurity putatively excluded from it, a
corrupting and contaminating force that
marks the essential and ideal limit of all pure
idealization. As for the late, on literally the next
to last page of the book I return to this point,
and specifically to its spectralizing force for any
notion of perfectionism, any structure of community that posits an us vs. a them: that it is
the lack of identity and ideality of any we, of
any community whatsoever that (as Richard
Beardsworth puts it) will have returned from
the beginning to haunt any determination of the
community (298). Perfectionism and oneupmanship are not just irrelevant to my argument, in other words; they are actively impossiblized by it.
In fact, the only appearance that perfectionism
makes in What is Posthumanism? is in Stanley
Cavells rendering (which I endorse) of what
he calls Emersonian perfectionism. But
Emersonian perfectionism not only has nothing
to do with the kind of perfectionism Chris
attributes to me; it is actively opposed to it.
Emersonian perfectionism is a kind of ongoing
act of radical negative capability in which the
necessity of constantly leaving behind the self
you just were (the self of what Emerson calls
conformity) your otherness to yourself
provides the basis for your opening to the alterity
of the democratic other. It is an ongoing process
of democracy conceived as an otherness always
yet to be achieved, or if already achieved, only
achieved by the other and not by me; it is thus
directed toward futurity itself, conceived as a
horizon, where, paradoxically, the only self to
recover is a self that one has not yet been
(248). Such a version of perfectionism shares
precisely the theoretical structure of Derridas
democracy to come (and the structure of
temporality that goes with it) that Chris uses
as a stick to beat me with, without
apparently realizing that Derridas position on
this is my position (and it is one that is reprised,
moreover, at the end of chapter 11). Caveat
emptor.

191

Similarly, he suggests that my argument

promotes a certain Aufhebung of the human,
a raising up of the human to a higher level
of meaning, even if it gains its significance by
affirming our affinity with the so-called lower
animals. I would call this a caricature of my
argument and leave it at that were it not for the
fact that a caricature exaggerates the distinctive
features of a subject for comic or grotesque effect
(so the dictionary definition goes). This characterization, however, actually bears no relationship whatsoever to my position in the book, and
it completely ignores the argument about double
finitude to which I have already referred, which,
from the books opening pages, articulates
the fundamental lineaments of the relationship
of posthumanism to the animal question in terms
that are exactly the opposite of what Chris says
is my position. Pages 8792 of the third chapter
go into this point in some detail and do so by
means of working through the similarities and
differences between Cora Diamonds work and
Derridas but the gist is not just that there are
two kinds of finitude here, but more importantly that
the first type (physical vulnerability, embodiment, and eventually mortality) is paradoxically made unavailable, inappropriable, to us
by the very thing that makes it available
namely, a second type of passivity or not
being able, which is the finitude we experience in our subjection to a radically ahuman
technicity or mechanicity of language, a
technicity that has profound consequences,
of course, for what we too hastily think of as
our concepts, which are therefore in
an important sense not ours at all. (88;
emphasis in original)

Aufhebung of the human? No. A raising up

of the human to a higher level of meaning?
Hardly.
There are other, equally egregious instances
a remarkable number of them, in fact, in the
scant space of four single-spaced manuscript
pages. For example, Chris suggests that in my
view of posthumanism and the posthumanities
one can trace a certain trajectory, mapped
out in advance, that begins with the posthuman

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response to peterson
as a trope, continues through its canonization as
the guiding concept of an interdisciplinary field
of study, and achieves its formal concretization
as a division of research and teaching within a
university to come in which its aims will have
been instituted once and for all. For one thing,
this completely ignores my argument throughout
the book that there can be no once and for all.
Why? Because, as I put it in chapter 4, the post
of posthumanism thus marks the space in which
the one using those distinctions and forms is not
the one who can reflect on their latencies and
blind spots while at the same time deploying
them, which means, in turn, that the subject
(in both senses) is opened, and unavoidably so,
to the alterity of the other (122) (and thus, so
the Derridean argument goes, to the alterity of
time itself that is to say, to the to come,
which Chris himself affirms). Worst of all, his
characterization of my position not just in the
passage just cited, but through to the very end of
the essay elides the fundamental distinction
between posthumanism and the posthuman
that I insist upon from the very opening pages.
These arent cognate terms in my argument; they
are opposed terms. That distinction is so central
to the books argument that its even highlighted
in Donna Haraways blurb on the back cover.
As far as I can tell, the catalytic agent for this
exercise in selective (mis)reading and equally
selective overreaction is a graph that I include on
page 125 of the fourth chapter, where I attempt
to schematize some of the differences between
different thinkers associated with posthumanism along two axes: one in terms of their
objects of attention, and one in terms of how they
study it. Chris writes: Most striking about the
categorical couplings that Wolfe constructs are
how they presume a certain internal purity, such
that, for example, each term in the pair . . . is
presumed to be entirely identical to itself.
To which I would simply respond: Of course,
its a graph. Many readers find such schematics
and intellectual shorthand useful think of
Lacans graphs of subjectivity and sexuation,
Fredric Jamesons permutations of Riffaterres
semiotic square in his work on ideology and
postmodernism, Bruno Latours schematics for
the modernist contract and its handling of purity

and hybridity in We Have Never Been Modern,

or Donna Haraways many tables in Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women the list (need it be said) is
illustrious and could be extended almost indefinitely. If Chris doesnt find such things useful,
thats fine with me. Whats not fine with me is
that he chooses to then recast the entire argument
of What is Posthumanism? in the graphs image
and then ignore the other 120,000 words I wrote.
What is even more irksome about this piece of
ventriloquism is that it leads Chris to put words
in my mouth to characterize those whose work
I find problematic in particular theoretical
aspects. He says that these interrogations
always take the form of a judgment in which
others are found bearing the traces of an atavistic
humanism that one would have hoped to fully
eradicate in oneself a presumption, as Ive
already made clear, that is actively and, as it
were, permanently undercut by the theoretical
commitments that frame the book, not just in the
post of posthumanism as I characterize it
above from chapter 4 but also in systems theorys
articulation of the necessary blind spot of
observation that is a key component of that
books theoretical framework. Worse still, he
suggests (albeit indirectly) that I would accuse
those whose work I find problematic in theoretical particulars as engaged in folly, bad
judgment, or stupidity. As anyone will know
who has read the many, many pages that I have
devoted over the years to thinkers such as
Richard Rorty, Peter Singer, Tom Regan and,
in this instance at hand, Cora Diamond, Stanley
Cavell, and Slavoj Zizek this is not just an
ungenerous characterization of my handling of
their work, its an irresponsible one. In fact,
my entire body of work and not just What is
Posthumanism? has sought to bring figures on
different sides of various intellectual divides
(analytic vs. Continental philosophy, for example) into fruitful conversation with each other,
precisely for the reasons I have already touched
on above regarding the necessary blind spot that
the unavoidable self-reference of any observation
unavoidably produces.
In conclusion, I would be tempted to chalk all
of this up (as Chris says of Matthew Calarco)
to a certain analytical hair-splitting that is

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wolfe
symptomatic of contemporary political anxieties
with regard to drawing lines in Chriss case,
drawing lines about not drawing lines (or using
graphs) were it not for the fact that I cant bring
myself, for reasons I have briefly sketched here,
to call Chriss (mis)representation of my position
in What is Posthumanism? analytical at all.
As I said at the outset, I share most of his
theoretical commitments around the question of
posthumanism, many of them anchored by
Derridas work. Why he chose to pretend that
I wrote a book that says otherwise and then
labeled the product of that pretense a betise is beyond me.
Either way, its all bark and
no bite.

note
1 The essay appears as the third chapter of Wolfe,
Animal Rites.

bibliography
Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber
et al. Ed.Gerald Graff. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
UP,1988. Print.
Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the
Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.
Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.

Cary Wolfe
Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor
Chair, Department of English, MS-30
Rice University
Houston, TX 77251-1892
USA
E-mail: cewolfe@rice.edu