Inhumanism, posthumanism, antihumanism: bug of the human.
Posthuman as a navigational tool.
Convergence issue: (1) (anti)posthumanism + (2) postanthropocentrism.
NL: humanism as a bastion of humanism.
Antihumanism: Nietzsche's critique (death of God, etc.) + disenchantment with democracy/social justice. Antihumanism: aspiring to justice/peace/love. Affect at work. It is not cool to be humanist (too sentimental). Disenchatment with the humanisms in the 60s, Vietnam, socialist humanism (belief in progress. Lacan: "as long as you believe in progress, you're a believer").
Simon de Bouvoir (social humanism).
Affective turn - affectivity of humanism.
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Philosophy: man is the centre. Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin (4 horsemen of modernist apocalypse). Post-anthropocentric challenge: thinking in term of species brings us to places where we cannot be: thinking beyond anthropos.
New ecology of belonging: belonging to a species which we perceive at the very moment where that sense of belonging is challenged if not completely lost.
Lack of dictionary: no critical discourse on Darwin and evolutionary theory (animality). Crisis of humanities. You humanist cannot possibly address scientific issues of today because you still believe in centrality of the human and you're so nationalistic.
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Difference b/w posthumanism and postanthropocentrism. Navigational tool + a lot of exhibitions, discourse, etc.
Oxford: The Institute for the Future of Humanity (transhumanism, human enhancement). Project: super-intelligence. Higher levels of human computational abilities (we need to keep up with our computer developments). We are slow….
But the problem is, we're all too human.
Disembodiment factor: brain is a black box that you plug into the computer.
The brain is not embodied, body is not embrained.
Cambridge: The C. centre of study of the Global Risk (risk - human species will not be able to catch up with the computational issues). Mutation of humans is very much on the board and being full-on researched.
Titanic situation: we're all in this together, this is anthropocene, the tragedy and we all are dying.
Humanimals of the new kind.
Barbara Creed: the monstrous feminine; races, animals, multiple sexualities all united against white male (Alien films).
Do we phase out menstruation, if we're modifying humans?
G.Bush administration banned biogenetic research because of christian reasons, so the research moved to UK. Anxiety and fascination with the capacity for mutation. Christianity is the only religion that has an intrinsic link to reason. Moral panic about what is happening to us, it is a part of social theory - neo-katian ethics. Moral universalism, european specitivity, Europe as the place where these things are taken seriously.
D. Haraway, 1985 - the generic figure of human is in trouble, M.Thatcher, masculinises politics etc.
Mid 90s - man, the taxonomic type becomes the man, the brand. Genomic moment is important.
B. Massumi, ex-man - genetic metrics embedded in the materiality of the human.
Negri - "anthological exodus" - from the definition of human.
It is pathetic to say that a philosopher can understand modern science - it is too complex.
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The explosion of the human. Postcolonial, race, feminist theories entry point: when the human becomes an all-inclusive category? e.g. were black, jews, non-europeans, gay, women, human?
Human is a normative category that indexes access to power.
Human is post-class, post-gender, post-power….
Human of humanity (Deleuze) - is a white, male, heterosexual, etc. Kantian citizen (the one who doesn't need to work for a living).
Braidotti's critical posthuman approach: remember that we were not all human to begin with - as it's not looking like an issue anymore.
What is the humanity and what our terms of our engagement with it?
Humanism: over-inflated man is the measure of all things, shaped by what it excludes more that by what it includes.
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3. Mille plateaux: each plateau contradicts the previous one, so in the end you have a choreography of ontological differenceses that you can work with. Advanced capitalism: why advanced - it is brutal primitive accumulation (only because of technology it is called advanced). Haraway: machines are so alive while we are so intert. We run on machines - universities, politics, finance, etc. global economy is post-anthropocentric in its basic structure. We have techno scientific culture build on the convergence of biotechnology+information technology.
Melinda Cooper, Advanced Capitalism: a system that capitalises on life (information codes of all that lives). Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy (one company is the legal owner of every type of grain available on the market, selling the grain to farmers every year).
Information codes of all that lives - no differences, no gender, race, etc. Synthetic hamburger: why are we so depressed about it? Isn't it great. What are we missing?
Melinda Cooper: life as surplus -> devastating labour relations, bodied that don't matter (refugees), invisible types of labour, advanced capitalism as a cognitive system is a disaster for those of us who is in business of producing knowledge because we're in the thick of it.
1966, Foucault - "I will turn my professorship to critique of power of professors" (beginning of politics of radical immanence). People in the production of knowledge will be caught in systems for whom the production is a high social economic investment.
Whatever you call "human", it is a good investment, humans make a lot of money from it.
Human rights for everything, animals, plants, etc. (Martha Neubaum).
Scientific workers as enterpreneurs of their human capital. We need Spinoza, the antidote to Hegelian dialectics, monastic philosophies that allows to think about the unity of being.
France, 60/70s - students of Althusser - Pierre Macherel (1979, Hegel or Spinoza?), Deleuze, three books on Spinoza, early Ballibard, Negri (Savage Anomaly, on the role of imagination in Spinoza preface by Deleuze).
We're post-marxism, post-dialiectic people, - one system, one meta, self-organising, the embodiment of the brain. Disengagement the production of intelligence from the embodiment is a crime and it is a scientific error. Spinoza/Derrida: a different philosophy of time, auto-poetic nature of what we used to call nature. Jenny Lloyd, Part of Nature and Spinoza Ethics (two books on Spinoza), Gatens/Lloyd, Collective Imaginings (bringing spinozist politics into discussion). Yes, one meta, but differentiated. New trans-species alliances - or do we need a new humanity that brings the same old image of thought (tired old dude), postulated on fear, emerging from the tragedy of anthropocene.
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Q&A
Transhumanism: reductive methodology (uploading your personal neurone system to the computer); it forgets about the bodies, about the devastation of modernity. Digital proletariat that is disassembling the digital waste. Braidottti: we like to see the materially grounded discussion around the computational networks, tracing the minerals from our digital devices back to the geopolitics and the mines that we fight our wars around. Rubbish in the orbit, in the atmosphere. New humanity will have a strong class index. No diversity in the West - we're modifying ourselves according to an ideal perception of human. Females have an incredible power of creating new bodies. V.Woolf: she's more feminine that female.
Embodiment as being necessarily a naturalised, ontological site that would make all kind of transformations difficult and would make processes of change difficult. (Hegel's critique of Spinoza, which is repeated of Bardieu critique of Deleuze). European philosophy is very political. If Spinoza in 17th century had already an understanding of the unity of matter with "the flows of becoming" (Braidotti), how come this philosophy disappeared and we ended up with 2.5 centuries of Descartes? Because dualism is a much more simpler system of governance. Mind-body, us-them, male-female, nature-culture - you can run the world on this, and we did. And this dualism with the humanist sauce is also a pretext of all the wars we've been fighting through 19h century.
Spinoza was a labourer, he worked with his hands, and it shows in his philosophy. His idea of nature contains artefacts. For him, there's no ontological difference between the lenses that he was making and a human. His criteria is the capacity, the level of intensity of that thing (Letter on Suffering - animals suffer).
Politics of opposition is not the only way of politics: Carl Schmidt, the legal theorist of the Third Reich. Why is it not enough to have the politics as the radical immanence, subversion of power in the places where we exercise it. The only people who read Spinoza with any degree of understanding were the environmentalists and the peace movement (Guy Lovelace). All the human beings have potent, capacity - Foucault's two faces of power (potestas/potentia), and on the basis of that re-constituting patterns of becoming that would allow us to actually become a political subject. We don't need meta revolutionary theories.