On hating humanity

I went to a lecture yesterday on Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Locke. I asked the speaker a question about potential limits of the phenomenological basis of Levinas' ethics in regards to beings who are not yet (the ethics of fighting global warming for those who do not yet exist), and also I asked about what happens when there is a disagreement about being called by the face of the other, specifically about animals. The speaker began his response this way:

"A French philosopher, I don't remember whom, once said that loving nature is really hatred of humanity." And the answer went downhill from there. A few things: (1) I assumed the speaker was referring to Luc Ferry, but when I checked, I realized Luc Ferry is quoting Marcel Gauchet. (2) I am honestly shocked every time I run into an educated person who does not believe in global warming. (3) This seems like a good time to remind people about this post.

I really do wish I had been able to ask him something like, "So, to prove your love of humanity, do you try to destroy nature as much as possible?" Sadly, that seemed grossly inappropriate at the time.

On Human Exceptionalism and Ethical Abstractions

(I am still interested in feedback about this job market question)

Alex Reid has a post up about human exceptionalism and the environment. So, that has prompted me to write some things about human exceptionalism, some of which directly responds to his points, some of which has nothing to do with what he wrote.

One of the reasons that I always find human exceptionalism problematic is that most people seem to skip the hard work of philosophical anthropology. Or to put it another way, most people take the human as given, without doing the conceptual work to draw a dividing line between all the variations of humanity on one side, and all manifestations of life on the other side. There is a sort of almost Supreme Court on obscenity feel to such discussions: we know humans when we see them. Of course, our track record of knowing humans is actually pretty bad. Slavery, sexism, colonialism and coloniality, racism, our treatment of the mentally disabled, peasantry and poor, the mad, physically disabled, and more and more. You get the picture, right? It was not uncommon in the histories of coloniality, for example, to believe that the languages of the colonized were not full languages, but existed somewhere between animal languages and full, human languages. Indeed, those colonized peoples were not seen as full people. As little back as the 1950s, it was fairly common to talk and think about people with autism as being not fully human, of not being capable of language, thought, and humanity. We have to have a certain level of hubris to believe that we have finally understood who are humans and who are not, when quite frankly this question of humanness is both old and recent. It haunts the boundaries of every project of philosophical anthropology, it haunts the boundaries of every claim of human exceptionalism.

To counter one example from Alex Reid, he writes:

Humans are unique (apologies to ET) in their symbolic behaviors, in our particular cognitive capacities and uses of technology, etc., etc

I mean, both yes and no, right? Most attempts to create a clear dividing line between human animals and other animals tend to fall into one of two categories. The first is to claim some trait and say only humans have it, when other animals clearly have it--like claiming only humans have self-consciousness. The second way is to claim some action that exists only for some humans as if it defines humanity--like saying that other animals may have language, but only humans have poetry. We know there are animals that use a great deal of symbolic behaviors (Great Apes, elephants, certain birds, etc), and we know that there are many animals that make tools, even some that make tools to make tools. Of course, we don't know if there are any animal poets, and I don't think there are any animal inventors of complex machines. Of course, most people aren't poets, and I have never invented or made a complex machine. There are certainly expressions of certain traits that seem to be found only in humans, but not for all of humanity. On the other hand, there are all sorts of traits that can be found within animals (tool-use, symbol use and language, mourning, getting high to relieve boredom, friendship, painting, sexual taboos, etc etc). To give an example from Reid's field, George Kennedy, in "A Hoot in the Dark", argues that rhetoric precedes the human (h/t Jim Brown). This is the shores that the projects of philosophical anthropology crash upon: Either characteristics include too many, or not enough. Which makes sense, because as Reid points out:

However not unique in a way that our development cannot be understood as part of the development of the rest of the world. No doubt, for a long time we had a belief (and most humans still believe) that human exceptionalism was not part of the life world but granted by an external divine force.

Evolution is a blind system of forces and relations. It tends to work by repeating adaptive strategies. To believe in evolution as opposed to divine intervention, is to believe that there is a chance that nothing about humans, as such, that does exist in the expressions and manifestations, to some degree, in other species. There is a possibility that we are hopelessly non-unique. Humanity is an abstraction. Abstraction here used in the sense that Pierce, Whitehead, and Deleuze all (differently) use the term. And because humanity is not given, but abstracted, it means that the political and ethical questions of relations are based upon such abstractions. How we attend and care for our abstractions will necessitate different forms of relations. This is probably a good way of thinking through Jane Bennett's claim about necessary anthropomorphism. For a long time (and still is in many places) the way people knew you were purely constructing your abstractions is that they suffered from anthropomorphism--they discovered within non-human categories traits that only belonged to humans. Bennett argues that thinking certain types of relations will require anthropomorphism. And I agree. But I agree, partially, that it will be necessary as a corrective of what primatologist Frans de Waal calls anthropodenial. Anthropodenial is when we refuse to characterize expressions of non-humans by what they are, because they are characteristics we have tautologically assigned to only humans. If we say, for example, that apes do not engage in prostitution because prostitution is an uniquely human activity, that would be anthropodenial. While we have long been wary of abstractions that engaged in anthropomorphism, we are almost never worried about abstractions that engage in anthropodenial. It seems you can never go far enough in your claims about human exceptionalism, you can never been seen as absurd for assuming there are activities and thoughts that belong uniquely to humanity. Anthropomorphism is necessary to counter our millennia long history of anthropodenial.

I want to end, however, with the challenge that Reid ends his post with:

What would a non-humanocentric humanities look like? What would it mean to read literature or examine rhetoric or study philsophy or history or whatever without this exceptionalist view of humans? These are the kinds of changes that Bennett suggests for environmentalism, so perhaps they are not as modest as I suggested at the outset.

Back when we had the group blog of The Inhumanities going on, that was part of the desire. The desire, also, of Cary Wolfe's posthumanism and posthumanities. It is certainly important to note that the humanities, originally and historically, were very much about the domination of a certain expression of the human against other groups that we also consider human. The humanities, of course, have often lead the charge against such colonial impulses, as well. I have high hopes for a posthumanities or an inhumanities. This is also to say, quite simply, that I think the humanities are often great ways of changing our abstractions. Whitehead contented that "You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction" (Science and the Modern World, p.73). Time for a revision. One after the abstraction of human exceptionalism.

Speciesism: Some Introductory Thoughts

Speciesism is a term that I mostly stay away from in my own work (more for rhetorical reasons rather than philosophical reasons), however it seems to be, I hate to say misunderstood but certainly understood in a very limited way. This post is to unpack this concept a bit and see if it useful. This post is in many ways inspired by this video featuring Kathy Rudy and Tim Morton:



The term itself was coined by Richard Ryder in 1970 in a privately published pamphlet of the same name, but for the most part was popularized by Peter Singer in his Animal Liberation. Speciesism clearly is supposed to be analogous to terms like racism and sexism (indeed, Singer is upfront that the title of the book is to put the animal movement as the next rational movement after something like Women's Liberation). But in what way is the word analogous? Is it that we don't treat people of color well, and we don't treat women well, and we don't treat animals well, so they are all in the same boat? It's a bit more complicated than that.
For Singer racism, sexism, and speciesism is the irrational exclusion of beings from the moral community, or beings that we do not have to give equal consideration of interests (I grant those aren't exactly the same thing). Speciesism isn't just the philosophical insight of Animal Liberation, but underpins the entire rhetorical economy of the book. It was (and continuous) to be the case that those who are concerned for the well being of animals are seen as sentimental and irrational fools while the good rationalist isn't concerned for animals. Look toward the descriptions of Descartes and his followers awful vivisection of animals, or remember your Spinoza, "The law against killing animals is based more on empty superstitions and unmanly sentiment than sound reason." (E4p37s1) Almost all of Animal Liberation can be read as flipping this traditional economy, with irrationality being put on the side of not caring about animals and sound reason being firmly on the side of an equal consideration of interests for animals. Now, sentimentality being connected with women in our culture construct, Singer's original preface has been rightly and largely panned for some sexist and ageist representations (by the way, the most recent edition of Animal Liberation has removed all the prefaces, including the original one, except for the current preface). I also happen to think that sentiment and affect are philosophically more important than Singer does, but that's not the point right now.
So first speciesism serves a certain rhetorical capacity. Moreover, it seeks to displace species as an ethically essential category. Singer performs this function by arguing from marginal cases. In general we have a series of capacities that we claim all and only humans have, and that all other beings do not have. The problem, of course, is that is not really true. First of all, all sorts of animals have amazing capacities (and honestly, the evidence on this one has only gotten more true in the 35 years since Animal Liberation was first published), the ability for tool use, prohibitions on incest, language, denial and disavowal, the ability to paint and dance to a beat, etc. This something I sort of get into in this post. Not only are other animals really incredible, but there is also a great deal of diversity among humans (this tends to be the so-called marginal cases), and that means most capacities that we want to say are definite traits of humans tend to find humans who either never have that power, or at some point in their life have not had these capacities. So, part of what speciesism does is began to contest the boundaries of species. So, species may be real, but they are hardly given and coherent categories, they are not exactly actual. In this sense it might be better to think of species as something like sex. I think we would all agree that there are real and even important differences among the sexes. At the same time, the duality of sexes is kinda bunk. So, there are a multiplicity of sexes, but the coherency of sex, particularly a coherent duality, is a constructed reality (basically see anything by Anne Fausto-Sterling).
In this sense, the critique of speciesism isn't at all about erasing or ignoring differences or about propping up the human/other duality as is implied in the video above, but rather explodes difference. It is actually because of the level of difference (for example, the differences internal to the category of human, and the differences internal to the category of animal). It is actually because of the proliferation of difference that the critique of speciesism has any steam at all. Even in a thinker like Singer we have an explicit discussion of difference in the formulation of equal consideration of interests. This is not a formulation for equal treatment, for the same treatment and the same laws and all of that, but rather the unique interests of beings should be taken account of equally. Of course for many people who espouse a critique of speciesism there emerges certain questions of what allows one in a moral community, and sometimes a support of animal rights in a formal and legal sense. But none of those discussions are necessary to the critique of speciesism (and in this I have a bit of sympathy for Cary Wolfe, who gets criticized in the above video for supporting animal rights--when he doesn't-- and he gets attacked by certain analytic people for not supporting animal rights-- see The Death of the Animal). A critique of speciesism often creates a certain new community, a certain new commonality, but it doesn't do so through a reduction of difference, but rather through an explosion of difference that undermines the coherency of the very category of species. One last thing I want to deal with here is the relationship of speciesism and racism, because that is a central question in Kathy Rudy and Tim Morton's comments above.
There are any number of thinkers that argue that racism's formulation is fundamentally a question of determining who gets to be human. Think here of Foucault in "Society Must Be Defended", Balibar's work on racism, and the decolonial critique of humanism to be found in Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Sylvia Wynter, among others. Now, none of these thinkers push their work toward including non-humans into the ethical and political community. Indeed, many of them go on to argue for a new and true and real humanism after just a few pages before calling humanism a hitlerism. But for those of us who critique speciesism, I think you can see a certain conclusion. If racism is deeply and obviously tied to a boundary maintenance of this incoherent category of THE human, why try to fight racism by getting the category of the human right? Empirically, we've not been very good at figuring out what gets to count as human (for a more recent example, are Great Apes and dolphins human?). And if a being gets miscounted, placed as an animal or hybrid or pseudo-human or fully human when they are not, what is the big deal? Unless, of course, some of those are beings we are able to exploit, kill, and violate at will and whim. So, why don't we work toward getting rid of speciesism instead of creating a new humanism?
And that last point is a good one, I think. But I want to move away from things I may have argued in the past. It strikes me that racism can still function even in a world without speciesism. I think such racism would be weakened (and vice versa), but I don't think it is as easy as saying that racism is an extension of the logic of speciesism (or vice versa). These ideologies are certainly entwined, but I think it is important to see them as still discrete.

Thoughts on Bennett, ch. 7

Sorry for missing making comments on a couple of chapters there, but I don't want to backtrack too much. So, some comments on chapter 7 now, and then later this week some comments on chapter 8 and the book as a whole. Also, before I get into this make sure you read APS's post on this chapter (and the discussion, featuring Adrian among others).

Chapter seven, on political ecology, didn't clarify the issues I hoped would be. Indeed, the chapter reflected both the positive and frustrating aspects of the book. First, I won't get into it here, but her readings pushing both Dewey and Ranciere into a stronger anti-anthropocentric vibe are wonderful. For those sections alone I would suggest this chapter (especially if you have any interest in those two thinkers). But her own commitment to being anti-anthropocentric struggles in this chapter. Or, as I put it before, her commitment to a certain type of anti-anthropocentrism (in ontology and policy) seems to not also mean an escaping a certain humanism (an anthropocentrism in ethics and politics, if you will). That's the only way I can possibly understand her claiming at one point in this chapter that we need to move beyond an human exceptionalism, and her claims that certain human interests will always come first and that humans must play an executive role in the world. So, while obviously supportive of the first move (the need to get rid of human exceptionalism) I think we need to spend some time with these last two claims.
In a footnote Bennett claims "this fermentation seems to require some managing to ensure, for example, that all the ingredients are in the pot. It seems to require humans to exercise this 'executive' function" (p. 150 n. 19). This seems to lay in conjunction with her claim that:

For while every public may very well be an ecosystem, not every ecosystem is democratic. And I cannot envision any polity so egalitarian that important human needs, such as health or survival, would not take priority.
Why not? Since I have challenged the uniqueness of humanity in several ways, why not conclude that we and they are equally entitled? Because I have not eliminated all differences between us but examined instead the affinities across these differences, affinities that enable the very assemblages explored in the present book. To put it bluntly, my conatus will not let me "horizontalize" the world completely. I also identify with members of my species, insofar as they are bodies most similar to mine. (p. 104)

Okay, let's parse this position. Bennett wishes to tap the breaks on her movement towards egalitarianism. Whatever else she may have led us to believe, humans are still firmly in the driver's seat. Now, this doesn't just mean that we have greater responsibilities, but like all executives we get more perks, too. So, whatever she has said about enabling instrumentalizations from before, this is a fairly classical move: Deontology for humans, utilitarianism for everything else. Now, this may be unfair, but it is hard to read this in another way. Maybe I am being too quick to think that phrase "important human needs" is fairly useless qualifier, not nearly strong enough ethical, politically, or ontologically to actually protect nonhumans. Her justification for this human exceptionalism is perhaps the worse part: Her conatus makes her. Seriously? Maybe Bennett needs a new conatus. There is nothing her to explain why species difference is an ontologically, ethically, and/or politically important difference or coherent category. My cat is obviously not the same as myself, but my female partner is also obviously not the same as myself. There are plenty of times when we do not flatten out differences but still demand egalitarianism and democracy. Racists who had bothered to read Spinoza might talk about how they can't support egalitarianism because ultimately their conatus makes them support people of the same race because they are more similar. Or class, sex, nation, what have you. It speaks of the profound anthropocentricism of the world that we think people can simply slot in the word species and not suffer from similar issues as if they had said race, sex, class, etc.
Again, this may seem as if I am being too hard on Bennett. so let me clarify. I may find this move disappointing, but I also don't have solutions here. I have occasionally been attacked as simply replacing an anthropocentrism with some sort of animal-centrism. Not entirely fair, but partially true. In that I think that figuring out how to integrate animals into our political and ethical systems is hard enough for now. I could say: Democracy for all! Which is fine if I simply want to work in slogans, but far more complex to actually have some sort of flat ethics. I have repeatedly come out that I worry that a flat ontology can justify its own humanism. I think this is one example of that.

Punch an animal in the face if you love humanity! (Or, I promise, I don't hate humans).

One of the more peculiar charges made against those advocating for the liberation of animals, particularly those who advocate for animal rights, is that we somehow hate humanity. That our desire for animal welfare, animal emancipation, etc., is based on an animus to humans. This is something I come across all the time, but let me just highlight three of the more philosophical versions of this argument.


José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting, p. 103

It is inconceivable that no study from the ethical point of view has even been made of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, analyzing its standards and actions. I bet one would find that English zoophilia has one of its roots in a certain secret English antipathy toward everything human that is not English or Ancient Greek!

Elisabeth Roudinesco, in her dialogue with Derrida in For What Tomorrow..., p. 67.

What strikes me about such an excessive claim [that Great Apes deserve rights] is that it would establish a sort of division between what would be human and what would be nonhuman. To bring great apes into the order of human rights, it would be necessary to exclude the mentally ill.

And just a page later.

Just as, from a psychoanalytic point of view, the terror of ingesting animality can be the symptom of a hatred of the living taken to the point of murder. Hitler was a vegetarian.

And last up, Roberto Esposito, in his Bios, p. 130.

More than ‘bestializing’ man, as is commonly thought, it [Nazism] ‘anthropologized’ the animal, enlarging the definition of anthropos to the point where it also comprised animals of inferior species. He who was the object of persecution and extreme violence wasn’t simply an animal (which indeed was respected and protected as such by one of the most advanced pieces of legislation of the entire world), but was an animal-man: man in the animal and the animal in the man.

Before I get any further, I was wanted to share with your Derrida's wonderful reply to Roudinesco, p. 68.

The caricature of an indictment goes more or less like this: "Oh, you're forgetting that the Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were in a way zoophiles! So loving animal animals means hating or humiliating humans! Compassion for animals doesn't exclude Nazi cruelty; it's even its first symptom!" The argument strikes me as crudely fallacious. Who can take this parody of a syllogism seriously even for a second? And where would it lead us? To redouble our cruelty to animals in order to prove our irreproachable humanism?

As absurd as that last line is, in a way it is Ortega y Gasset's position. He argues that hunters show both the authentic form of respect of humans and other animals!

I've never understood these arguments against animal liberationists. I once compared it to the arguments that people make that extending the same rights to homosexuals in our society is passing special rights for homosexuals. It doesn't make any sense, but is often repeated. It is, therefore, somehow effective on an intuitive level for many of the people making the arguments. Because I don't share these intuitions, these sorts of arguments confuse. Like Derrida, I wonder how such an argument could be taken seriously, even for a second! But not only are they taken seriously, they are repeated, again and again, by serious people. What is it about these absurd arguments that are so effective, so appealing to people?

I really don't have a good answer. On some level, it seems as evidence for both Foer and Derrida that we are at war with other animals. If we are at war, than supporting animals is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

That has a certain elegant appeal for me, but I don't honestly think that is all (or maybe even most) of what is going on. The real desire is for human exceptionalism. And there is some sort of linkage that I miss between human exceptionalism and human well-being. To attack the doctrine of exceptionalism is seen, therefore, as an attack on the human as such. (Ditto on the weird arguments against same-sex marriage). But it is that weird hidden linkage that makes no sense to me. Why do we need an exceptionalism?

A history of the concept of person

With the recent SCOTUS decision allowing corporations unlimited political speech, we've heard all sorts of things about this idea that corporations are persons. Some of those ideas have also touched on the relationship between animals and persons (see the comments made to Levi's post). None of this should surprise us, because questions surrounding animals and personhood have been around for a few years now. Great apes as persons, dolphins as persons, animals as persons; a menagerie of personhood. But if the idea of an animal as person is now several years old, the idea of a corparation as a person is even older, and extends out of an even older understanding of personhood.
To be a person has, at least in the occidental tradition, been tied to the concept of ownership since Rome. Though it also includes notions of personhood outside of the occidental tradition, we won't be getting into that quite yet. Indeed, to be a person is originally bound to the capacity and desire for ownership, for possessing the property of property. A radical course might be, then, not to abolish animalhood into personhood, but rather to abolish personhood into animalhood. This is why, for Deleuze and Guattari, an anti-capitalist politics requires a becoming-animal. This is just prelude, to summarize the arguments below.
***
Our word person comes from the Etruscan phersu, which originally meant mask. The Etruscan theater rites held that the performers wore masks, the phersu. These rites would influence the Roman theater, and gave birth to their word persona. The persona could refer to the mask, to the individual wearing the mask, or to the character one played. Persona both meant mask, and also meant role. Around the second Punic War grammarians borrowed the theatrical term of persona, and used is to signify different forms of address (first person, second person, etc.). That was the third century BCE, by the first century BCE the word persona had come to take on several different but related meanings. One had many roles in Roman society; roles as father, roles as citizen, etc.; and persona became the technical term for different types of roles one was to perform in society. Perhaps most definitely for our purposes is that persona comes to be a definitive legal category. One's persona was connected toward the legal right to have a name, that indeed the "Roman citizen had a right to the nomen, the praenomen and the cognomen that his gens assigned to him." [1] To be a persona meant to have access to one's name, to one's status. And this status is not an abstract category but the very right to have property, to do business, to be a member of the senate. Mauss again:

To the very end the Roman Senate thought of itself as being made up of a determinate number of patres representing the 'persons' (personnes), the 'images' of their ancestors.
It is to the persona that is attributed the property of the simulacra and the imagines. [2]

Indeed, if we fastforward to 535 CE the exacting Institutes of Justinian codify all of this. As Thomas Collett Sanders explains in his definitive commentary:

Every being capable of having and being subject to rights was called in Roman law persona (see Introd. sec. 37). Thus not only was the individual citizen, when look at as having this capacity, a persona, but also corporations and public bodies. Slaves, on the other had, were not persona. They had no rights (see Introd. sec. 38). [...] Status (legal standing) is the correlative of persona: persona is that which has a status. In Roman law there were recognized three great heads of this legal capacity: libertas, the capacity to have and be subject to the rights of a freeman; civitas, the capacity to have and be subject to the rights of a Roman citizen; and familia, the capacity to have be subject to the rights of a person sui juris. [3]

So, at least by the sixth century CE, personhood is the term of art for those with legal standing, and corporations were included. But there is another important development with the concept of person in Rome. We need to rewind back to first century BCE.
While persona was entering legal terminology, it was also entering as a term of art in moral philosophy. In particular, it forms part of the basis of Stoic anthropology. As Cicero declared "dignitas hominis," he also outlined the four persona that make us human in De Officiis. The first persona is that of ratio, of reason. This is the most important one for Cicero, as it is both what divides the human from the animal and "in superiority surpass the brute creatures" [4] while at the same time gives us the guide of how to treat the other personas, as if they were "wild beasts." [5] The other three personas are individuality, the historical factors that form you, and your own will. This anthropology is more than just an argument on what separates humans from animals, it is also a moral argument. Here the idea of a moral consciousness enters into our understanding of persona; a moral consciousness that is bound together with reason. Persona will undergo one other important transformation in the classical period, this time under the treatment of the patristics.
As Mauss argues: "Our own notion of the human person is still basically the Christian one."[6] Let's exam what could be meant by this statement. Tertullian, whom invented the notion of the trinity, argued that God is "tres Personae, una Substantia," three roles, one substance. And while we are dealing with three, what we are really dealing with is a duality between spirit and flesh, and this duality must be overcome. This is why Mauss further contends: "It is from the notion of the 'one' that the notion of the 'person' (personne) was created -- I believe that it will long remain so -- for the divine persons, but at the same time for the human person, substance and mode, body and soul, consciousness and act." [7] The way this dualism is eventually overcome is by tying the notion of persona to the notion of economy. [8]
These classical understandings of persona, bound up with ownership, reason, legal status, dualism and economy, are important. But we need to fast forward again, this time all the way to the early 19th century.
Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an aristocrat and philosopher perhaps best known for coining the term ideology, published an influential book entitled Traité de la volonté. When Thomas Jefferson translated this book into English, he changed the title to Treatise on Political Economy. Within this treatise, Destutt de Tracy argues for the absolute inability of personal property, because one's very personhood is defined by the capacity to own things. As he writes, "Now this idea of property can only be founded on the idea of personality. For if an individual had not consciousness of his own existence, distinct and separate from every other, he could possess nothing, he could have nothing peculiar to himself." [9]
Destutt de Tracy's arguments are taken up by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, which I shall quote at length:

Destutt de Tracy among, and after, many others said the same thing much better approximately thirty years ago, and also later, in the book quoted below. For example:

“Formal proceedings were instituted against property, and arguments were brought forward for and against it, as though it depended on us to decide whether property should or should not exist in the world; but this is based on a complete misunderstanding of our nature” (Traité de la volonté, Paris, 1826, p. 18).

And then M. Destutt de Tracy undertakes to prove that propriété, individualité and personnalité are identical, that the “ego” [moi] also includes “mine” [mien], and he finds as a natural basis for private property that

“nature has endowed man with an inevitable and inalienable property, property in the form of his own individuality” (p. 17). — The individual “clearly sees that this ego is the exclusive owner of the body which it animates, the organs which it sets in motion, all their capacities, all their forces, all the effects they produce, all their passions and actions; for all this ends and begins with this ego, exists only through it, is set in motion through its action; and no other person can make use of these same instruments or be affected in the same way by them” (p. 16). “Property exists, if not precisely, everywhere that a sentient individual exists, at least wherever there is a conative individual” (p. 19).

Having thus made private property and personality identical, Destutt de Tracy with a play on the words propriété and propre, like “Stirner” with his play on the words Mein and Meinung, Eigentum and Eigenheit, arrives at the following conclusion:

“It is, therefore, quite futile to argue about whether it would not be better for each of us to have nothing of our own (de discuter s'il ne vaudrait pas mieux que rien ne fût propre à chacun de nous) ... in any case it is equivalent to asking whether it would not be desirable for us to be quite different from what we are, and even to examining whether it would not be better for us not to exist at all” (p. 22).

“these are extremely popular”, now already traditional objections to communism, and for that very reason “it is not surprising that Stirner” repeats them. [10]

As Marx and Engels here indicate, there is a stapling together of property, individualism, and personhood. This stapling together is rooted from some of the earliest occidental legal codes and moral philosophy. This forces us to face the idea that maybe we need to exit from basing our rights and ethical responsibilities on the notion of person. It just might be true that as long as the person is the center of our politics and ethics we will always privilege the wealthiest of us and always leave at risk the most disposed. It is for this reason that in some ways corporations are the most natural of persons (who, after all, owns more stuff), and of course it continues to be a problem to ever extend personhood toward other animals.
***
If I had more time I'd probably now enter into a discussion of Heidegger's notion of animals as poor-in-this-world, Schmitt's notion of nomos, and Deleuze and Guattari's notion of nomos and becoming-animal. But I don't.


A comment on Citations:
I recognize these are not formal citations, it's late and this is a blog. These should, however, allow you get to any of the citations I've given. If you have trouble tracking something down, let me know.

[1] Marcel Mauss, "A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self" in The Category of the Person, edited M. Carrithers et al., p. 16.
[2] Mauss, p. 17.
[3] Justinian, The Institutes of Justinian, translated with commentary by Thomas Collett Sanders, p. 76. I also suggest reading the strongly Agambenian reading of this code by Steven DeCaroli in "Boundary Stones: Giorgio Agamben and the Field of Sovereignity" in Giorgio Agamben, ed. M. Calarco and S. DeCaroli.
[4] Cicero, On Duties, Cambridge Press, p. 42.
[5] Cicero, p. 125.
[6] Mauss, p. 19.
[7] Mauss, p. 20.
[8] Despite his lack of focus on the concept of persona, Agamben's focus on economy in Il Regno e la Gloria is well worth the read.
[9] Destutt de Tracy, A Treatise of Political Economy, p. 17
[10] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, International Publishers, pp. 100-101.

What makes us unique as humans?

I got this from Ezra Klein's blog:

You should watch it, it is funny and smart.

A couple of comments: He goes through several different things that we think make us human, but we realize other animals (usually primates) have them as well. Then he will always make something that other animals have and only humans have: being a chess grandmaster, killing other people with predator drones, S&M sex, etc. In each case he isn't really making an argument for what is unique about humans as a species, but rather what is unique about certain humans. In other words, he is not drawing lines of kinds, but of degrees.

Except for the last part, which while inspiring, is certainly scientifically implausible, and certainly impossible to prove. Still, worth watching, and very enjoyable.

Negri, more on vitalism and humanism

Peter Gratton follows up my last post with this:

I think it’s a false choice, no? One can’t be both? I also think that though Negri is saying he’s not a vitalist that doesn’t end the point. I think Critical Animal is right, but let’s not pretend that Negri is the most consistent thinker on this and doesn’t often have confusing discussions on this point.

I think he's absolutely right that vitalist vs. humanist is a false choice. Sorry if I came across that way. And I am in now way trying to get onto anyone who has read Negri as a vitalist (including myself. I am sure if you searched through my various internet writing places you can come across some places where I described Negri as a materialist vitalist). Though I think, and I can in no way back this feeling up so thank god this is blogging, that the fault is not with Negri on this on. I would guess he has been pretty consistent on this issue, and our confusion rests with having read this position as being slightly closer to Deleuze's than it is in reality. But this has a pretty important implications for Negri's political ontology. The fact that I seem to create an obviously false contrast between vitalism and humanism is because I think the contrast is true for Negri. Vitalism destroys the power of humanism, for him. Not only does vitalism destroy the power of humanism, it opens the door for biopower (again, in his use of the term). A desire for a biopolitical humanism in a biopolitical enlightenment is absolutely essential for Negri's work, and there is no room for vitalism.

Now, I really can't prove it without combing through my Negri books (and right now my tendency would be to work a little backwards, starting with The Porcelain Workshop and In Praise of the Common and only later getting to A Savage Anomaly), which right now I am not inclined to do, but if there is real interest or a lot of discussion, who knows what will happen. So, if anyone wants to weigh in, feel free.

Negri, Humanism, Monstrosity

Jason Read has a review of Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics. (h/t Philosophy in a Time of Error). In it, Read argues:

Finally, Casarino's example of language as this relation between the virtual and actual, an example that is repeated numerous times throughout the discussions with Negri, underscores that as a philosophical problem the common focuses as much on the fundamental aspects of human subjectivity, on a philosophical anthropology, as it does on an ontology.

The turn towards philosophical anthropology, towards an examination of humanity through its fundamental activities and relations, differentiates Negri's work from the work of thinkers of a previous generation such as Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser. For Deleuze, and other "anti-humanist" thinkers, any discussion of human nature, of some commonality, was an effect of power or an ideological ruse. Negri's and Casarino's work has more in common (no pun intended) with the work of Giorgio Agamben, Etienne Balibar, and Paolo Virno, who have returned to the maligned field of philosophical anthropology, to a consideration of what makes us human, not as a generic essence, but as the interplay between abstract potential and singular differences. This is not to say that these conceptions are the same. In the interviews, and in the essay on the political monster, Negri distinguishes his understanding of humanity from Agamben's understanding of bare, or naked, life. For Agamben, bare life, the reduction of humanity to pure survival, is at the basis of the modern state. Such an understanding of humanity disavows the common, specifically the way in which the common as presupposition constitutes a kind of historicity. As Negri writes,

There is no naked life in ontology, much as there is no social structure without rules, or word without meaning. The universal is concrete. What precedes us in time, in history, always already presents itself as an ontological condition, and, as far as man is concerned, as (consistent, qualified, irreversible) anthropological figure (208).

This is, as I have argued before, absolutely correct. Negri is no vitalist, no matter how many times you read that people say he is a materialist vitalist in the same lineage as Deleuze. For Negri, it is not life that gives us the power to be, but rather the very being of humanity that gives us the unique power to be. This is, and always been, the flavor of humanism that always exists in Negri. Though a biopolitical (in the sense Negri uses that term) humanism, to be sure.

This collection, however, contains a particularly interesting essay that both goes the farthest at contesting the boundaries of the human while at the same time ultimately reterroritoralizing on the figure of the human. This is the essay "The Political Monster." I remember a little over a year ago, back when I first trying to blog, Shaviro had a series of posts up on the question of monstrosity that Hardt and Negri praise as the monstrous flesh of the multitude. Shaviro had argued at the time that such a moves ignores that for Marx, the monstrous was capitalism. At the time I argued that the monstrous was something I wanted to be on the side of. Anyway, in this essay Negri not only extends the analysis about why he is on the side of monsters, but also specifically deals with this change from capitalism as monster to multitude as monster.

We Have Never Been Human

In recent discussions over humanism(s) and philosophical anthropology, I figure I should address my own feelings on these subjects in a more direct way (aka less critical). There have been several attempts to advance a non-anthropocentric anthropology of recent. Bernard Stiegler's first volume of Technics and Time (hey, OOP people, what are your thoughts on Stiegler?) is a move in this direction. Judith Butler has said in interviews that her most recent work is also a move in this direction. Kvond has a fairly long post on Virno's recent attempt at such a trajectory, in Virno's essay “Natural-Historical Diagrams: The New Global Movement and the Biological Invarient” (both are worth reading, EDIT though I have reservations to Virno's conclusions, which I hope to get to later). I continue to remain skeptical of the success of all these projects, even if I have benefited philosophically from all of them. My own view has been that such a philosophical anthropology remains unnecessary and potentially harmful. I tried to advance something of this argument before in my post on Species Trouble.
I certainly do not deny differences between human animals and other animals. What I deny is The Difference. The Difference is the borderline drawn that will finally demarcate The Human, that will finally let us know what it means to be human as opposed to, well, everything else in existence or ever in existence. We will finally The Difference that will hold in common every being we determine to be human while managing to hold every other being as different from this human common.
So we have differences, probably a countless and irreducible number of them. Just as there is a difference between me and you, there exists differences between us and my cat in the other room. And sometimes my cat and I can be different from anyone reading this blog. Multiple differences refuses any determinate nature. To say someone is a human or a cat is ultimately a convenience, not a philosophical fact (either ontologically or ethically). I remain fundamentally confused why I need anything more.

Strong Humanism, Weak Humanism, Beyond Humanism

This post follows up on my earlier post about Leigh Johnson's concept of weak humanism. Again, I encourage you to take the time to listen to her dialogue, here. Also, as a note, she has further clarified her position in a blog post. Considering the majority of my response to the podcast had been written before that was posted, I will include my responses to clarification in a second post, and my first post will not be edited to respond to her new points, but hopefully I will have a part two up tomorrow.
***

Johnson begins her argument by stating she wants to defend human rights, philosophically. She feels in order to do that she needs a proper thought of humanism (and here is my first question: Does she really need a humanism here? What about a philosophical anthropology? Would she, like Judith Butler is attempting, be able to make the argument for human rights from a non-anthropocentric anthropology that avoids any sort of humanism?). Contrasting earlier modalities of humanism (which she terms 'strong humanism,' in that the traits of humanism that mattered were positive attributes such as autonomy, rationality, etc.), she proposes a new type of humanism (which she terms 'weak humanism,' not because the humanism is weak, but because the humanism is based upon qualities like weakness, vulnerability, precariousness, etc.). Strong humanism sets the bar of admittance to the human subject too high, which not only leaves out groups that might not be able to make strong claims on rationality and autonomy, but more importantly does nothing for groups that are systematically expropriated from categories of strong humanism. In this, her work follows not only poststructuralist criticisms of humanism, but perhaps more strongly follows decolonial criticisms of humanism: the work of people like Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Slyvia Wynter, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, etc. The decolonial tradition has criticized humanism for its colonialist, imperialist, eugenicist, and frankly genocidal contours. These thinkers have shown how humanism not only justified colonial expansion, but also systematically denied admittance to the human subject to racialized and sexed bodies. Or, if racialized and sexed bodies were granted admittance, it was only as mimic men. After this critique, all of these thinkers make a second move; a call for a new humanism, one which will be true and real. While Johnson doesn't spend a lot of time explaining the critique against strong humanism, one assumes that all of this is in the background of her work. And if that assumption is made, it is not at all surprising that she too is constructing a new, true and real, counter-hegemonic humanism.
One of the major differences between her work and many of the decolonial thinkers is that whereas most decolonial thinkers simply assert the need for a new and true humanism, Johnson spends her time advancing the necessary step of a philosophical anthropology to support the new and true humanism. (There are, of course, several notable exceptions of decolonial thinkers who do engage in this necessary step. I would feel particularly amiss if I didn't mention the work of Slyvia Wynter again, who makes the strongest arguments in this direction, even if I ultimately disagree with her). Johnson's humanism of weakness and vulnerability is one that seeks to define the human in terms of a shared sense of being wounded, hurt, tortured, killed. One that seeks to privilege sentience over sapience as the primary quality necessary for an ethical and political response. Weakness and finitude are brought into the discussion not just to create a lower admittance into the human, but also because it is at the level of finitude we need an ethics and a politics. It is only because of our shared finitude that we are infinitely responsible for le tout autre. In this I would like to say I am agreement with Christopher Long's comment that it is at the basis of our vulnerability we are actually talking about a strength. The fiction of the autonomous and atomistic individual is an anemic fiction, actually weak because it cannot feed upon the powers of the common, a common that is possible only because of a shared finitude. Our responsibility to the wholly other is not, in this view, a burden. It is rather a practice of joy, an affirmation of life.
It is here that my confusion (or perhaps a critique hidden as confusion, though I honestly want to advance in the spirit of confusion, not critique) begins. I am working on how the concepts of abandonment, exposure, and vulnerability can be a way of entering into the dialogue of community that we find in Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, Derrida, Agamben, and Esposito. But for me, such a community can never be a community of humans, but must be a community of animals (including humans!). When we look at capacities like vulnerability, percarity, suffering, joy, are we looking at capacities that are unique to the human? Are these the categories that make us human? That separate and demarcate the human from other animals? Or, are these the categories that come not from our humanness but from our animalness? Are not vulnerability and finitude the affirmation that we are one animal among others? An animal among other animals that suffer, that celebrate, that mourn and are mourned. As Butler argues in her Frames of War, "The point, however, would not be to catalog the forms of life damaged by war, but to reconceive life itself as a set of largely unwilled interdependencies, even systemic relations, which imply that the 'ontology' of the human is not separable from the 'ontology' of the animal. It is not just a question of two categories that overlap, but of a co-constitution that implies the need for a reconceptualization of the ontology of life itself" (pp. 75-76). Are we not talking about, ultimately, not a humanism of weakness but an animalism of weakness? Can we not think, along with Derrida, who contends in The Animal That Therefore I Am:

Being able to suffer is no longer a power; it is a possibility without power, a possibility of the impossible. Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower, the possibility of this impossibility, the anguish of this vulnerability, and the vulnerability of this anguish. (p. 28).

If we are going to advance that our morality is tied up with mortality, how can we remain anthropocentric? Does not an argument for a shared vulnerability demand we jettison the anthropocentrism that got us in our present situation in the first place?
That is, I think, where my confusion has to open itself up to critique. This is where we have to go beyond humanism. I don't think it is enough to say, 'I am only concerned with human issues, and am therefore not trying to think animal issues.' I understand that one has a finite resources to work on certain political and ethical issues, but we are not talking about that right now. We are instead talking about the philosophical underpinnings for action, and those cannot exclude the wholly other because your current responsibility is not a response to that other. To paraphrase Derrida, one has to think without alibis. Not only can you not exclude the wholly other (and at this second that stands in for other animals), but it is necessary to understand the interlocking of oppressions. I don't know if I have time to go into this now, but let me advance one argument here. If you are able to expropriate beings into 'merely' animals, and if that 'animal' suffering is not considered equal to 'human' suffering, how do you stop anything? How do you stop the torture of 'terrorists' who are, as you know, animals? How do you stop the genocide of those that are, as you know, subhumans? How do human rights work if the victims' very humanity is exactly what is contested? (I am wish I had more posted on this issue. I have a rough draft of a conference paper on this exact question. I am not in total agreement with it anymore, but it might be considered interesting for showing some of the ways I am trying to explore these questions. Read it here). It seems that the only way for a weak humanism to work is for it to stop being a humanism at all.

Moved in, Weak humanism, and some thoughts on the Sokal Hoax

Well, I am finally moved in, and the place has shaped up nicely. Sarah has started orientation for medical school (I went with her and her parents to a parents night for the medical school, and it was seriously surreal. Basically, they have a PTA-esque organization for parents of, you know, grown students in medical school. Many of whom, it seems, still live with mom and dad. I don't have anything to add to that). I am amazingly behind on everything, but I have a friend flying in from california tonight, so it will be a couple of days still before I get around to anything I told anyone I would do (Personal note, from now I know that even with internet access, I won't feel like writing about anything than what I am thinking at the moment while moving, or doing some other stressful activity).

Meanwhile, Leigh Johnson (Dr. J. is her blogger name) has a dialogue with Christopher Philip Long on her notion of weak humanism. The discussion is both deeply problematic and also deeply interesting (at least for those interested in discussions of humanism, animals, rights, etc.). I plan to make a longer post (but again, who knows) on all of this later. Meanwhile, one of the strangest things is you have two people who are both advancing humanist projects who constantly keep returning to the question of the animal and the question of the environment. Now, it maybe that despite their humanisms, one of the subjects of the dialogue is deeply concerned with that question personally. But it is phrased in such a way that it seems to come up out of a perceived necessity. Long says his own work has come under critiques of anthropocentrism, and Johnson says that whenever she says humanism she is immediately asked "about trees and non-human animals." This is interesting to me. Because while the interviews with big names still seem to be immune to such questions (unless prompted by the big name, and even then often ignored), on the ground at conferences and things of that sort there is a growing tide of people demanding that animals and the environment be a part of ethical and political thinking. This matches up with my own experiences (fellow grad students always seem far more interested in what I am doing with animals than professors, who may like my work by find the animal part rather weird). Anyway, I'd suggest listening to the interview, and hopefully I might be able to write a longer response to the interview later.

Lastly, Graham Harman has a post on the Sokal Hoax, which gives me an excuse to talk about the Hoax here, briefly. What many people fail to realize is the article wasn't part of a blind review, the editors knew who Sokal was when they published the article, and knew he was considered an important scientist. They asked him to lower to the number of footnotes, to change much of the way the article was worked and sounded. Sokal refused explaining this scholarly apparatus was expected of him by his scientific peers, and the article remained at the social text offices until they decided to do a special issue on The Science Wars. His article was published not because it was good, or interesting, but because he was a scientist. What has always struck me about the hoax is that it reveals so little about postmodernism/anti-realism/social text/scholarly articles, but it reveals a lot about authority. Sokal's authority is what got him published. And in a journal that was dedicated to questioning that scientific authority in the first place, the editors still fell for the authority. We were given a chance to discuss the ways that authority play a role in academic publication, but that discussion never really emerged.

Judith Butler's anti-anthropocentrism

For those of who have read Judith Butler's more recent work (by which I mean Precarious Life, Giving An Account Of Oneself, Undoing Gender, and one assumes her new book Frames of War even though I have yet to find a copy of that book is over half a dozen bookstores), you are aware that she has become interested in produces our concept of the human. How is it that humanness is produced and deproduced? Now, despite that being in many ways the central question of her last three books, it has yet to be heavily theorized in these works. You can feel the contours in which her project is going, but also feels as if the work where it has all been worked out has yet to be written (unless, of course, Frames of War is that book). This theoretical shift has been really interesting to me (though, obviously, it isn't so much a shift. The author of Bodies That Matter clearly has long tried to think through the questions of, well, what bodies get to matter) for all the obvious reasons. The question for me has been two-fold: (1) Is this really just a way to pave a new humanism, like how such questions are usually proposed in many decolonial circles? and (2) Even if there remained a fairly dogmatic poststructuralist rejection of humanism, would this rejection like so many poststructuralists still not mean the ethical, political, and ontological inclusion of other animals?

In Giving An Account of Oneself, with the emphasis on becoming human, I clearly thought the answers to the earlier questions were yes and yes. However, there were two things in her other books that gave me pause. The first was her avowed anti-anthropocentrism near the beginning of Undoing Gender. This contained with it a strong rejection of humanism, but also employed Fanon's and Wynter's critiques of humanism without mentioning both of those authors' strong desire for a new humanism. And also, it is not clear what role she sees in extending the ethical pass the human boundary (though there is a wonderful couple of lines about the implications of a human declaring 'I am an animal'). The other interesting comment came in her Precarious Life. In it she is explaining that the body of suspected terrorists have become animalized. And then she writes something like: This has nothing to with actual animals, merely the figure of the animal. I thought that was a subtle distinction that most authors miss (that Agamben has again and again missed, for example). My greatest hope so far involves an interview published in Theory and Event entitled "Antigone's Claim." In it, she argues that:

So, one has to be critical about how and when the notion of humanity is invoked, but I am not convinced that it is always a lie or, indeed, a way of cheating. It is important to ask what it occludes, and how whatever it illuminates presupposes a consequential occlusion – one that turns the idea of “humanity” against the universality by which it is supported and seems, invariably, to reinstitute a certain anthropocentrism. As a result, I think it might be more helpful to consider instead a term such as ‘precarious life’ which, though it has strong resonances with the idea of humanity, functions very differently. There are at least two differences: the first is that precarious life is a life that is shared in a specific sense: “shared life” is not simply a “life” that functions as a common element in which individuals participate on the order of a mathesis. Rather, it is common in the sense that we are reciprocally exposed and invariably dependent, not only on others, but on a sustained and sustainable environment.
Humanity seems to be a kind of defining ontological attribute, who I am, or who we are, that properly belongs to us as persons, and in that sense, it keeps the human within the humanistic frame. But what if our ontology has to be thought otherwise? If humans actually share a condition of precariousness, not only just with one another, but also with animals, and with the environment, then this constitutive feature of who we “are” undoes the very conceit of anthropocentrism. In this sense, I want to propose ‘precarious life’ as a non-anthropocentric framework for considering what makes life valuable.

And later in the interview, in response to the question, "Would it be possible to define your concept of “precarious life” as a new form of “humanism”?" Butler responds:

Currently, I do not want a new humanism. If we ask what the human could be beyond humanism, then it seems we resituate the human within the non-human, not as a contingent fact of existence, but as a necessary ontology, an ontology that articulates certain constitutive bonds and binds. So I am struggling toward a non-anthropocentric conception of the human, if that is possible – even a non-anthropocentric philosophical anthropology. The other way of saying this is that wherever the human is, it is always outside of itself in the non-human, or it is always distributed among beings, among human and non-human beings, chiasmically related through the idea of precarious life. So we can neither lodge the human in the self, nor ground the self in the human, but find instead the relations of exposure and responsibility that constitute the “being” of the human in a sociality outside itself, even outside its human-ness.

All I got to say is: More of this, please!

Can chimps dance to music?

So, I was watching Monday night's Daily Show, and Oliver Sacks made the odd claim that only humans keep rhythm to music. That chimps can't dance. http://www.hulu.com/watch/80421/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-oliver-sacks#s-p1-st-i1

That just sounds incorrect to me, but I don't actually know. Is Oliver Sacks correct, or did his mistook his humanism for a science?

Decolonial humanism

The theoretical and philosophical contributions of decolonial thinkers is absolutely essential. Those of us, like me, whose training is in poststructuralist philosophy, we ignore the contributions of decolonial philosophy to the determent of our understanding.

One of the things that has always interested me in the work of decolonial philosophy is the strong and profound critique of humanism. Patiently and brilliantly, we given over to exam how the human, invented as a european male, has been used to dominate and exploit the rest of the world. So far, so fascinating. But in almost every case the decolonial move is to then demand a new humanism (and what type of humanism tends to get various adjective applied, like substantive humanism, real humanism, universal humanism, humanism of the other, etc). You can see this in theorists as similar and diverse as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, Edward Said, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres; just to name a few. They seem to agree (implicitly with most, explicitly with Maldonado-Torress) with Levinas that "[h]umanism has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human."

I don't have much else to point out. I find this problematic. Does anyone know any decolonial thinkers that don't make this move of reclaiming humanism? Does anyone believe there is something essential in their varied humanisms I am missing?

Negri and vitalism

So, most people read Negri as being a vitalist even though he explicitly and frequently rejects vitalism. Now, I assume this because of the vitalism that is in Deleuze. But this is one of those issues where people end up reading everyone into the poststructuralist goo. Someone says something similar to someone else, and suddenly they are saying the same thing.

Regardless, that Negri is not a vitalist, that he rejects the bergsonism in Deleuze, is a key and critical difference. Not just between Negri and Deleuze, but oddly also between Negri and Agamben. Negri does believe in an ontology of becoming, which clearly places him alongside Deleuze. And their shared interest in Spinoza and a Marxism that focuses on the production of subjectivity means this shouldn't surprise you. What changes however is that for Deleuze this ontology of becoming is rooted in a vitalism, with the force of life that comes from outside and exceeds everything. This life is certainly not contained within just the human, necessary. Though certainly life, as Deleuze (with and without Guattari) understands it includes things like metal, and various other things that would not traditionally be considered life. For Negri, the ontology of production has nothing to do with the nature of life, but rather with the particular nature of humanity. To be human, for Negri, is rooted with our unique capacity for production, for living labor power. This is not vitalism, as people keep calling it, but humanism. And a not surprising humanism from a man whose early philosophical projects were undertaken in examining many of the great enlightenment era humanists (Descartes, Machiavelli, and a certain conception of Spinoza). And that this is a thinker who desires a new enlightenment, a biopolitical enlightenment. Now, I have no doubt that Negri would disagree with my characterization of this as humanism. Most likely because the production of subjectivity that is uniquely human for Negri can overcome itself (with all the Nietzschean and Foucauldian overtones this is suppose to evoke).

This humanism is also stands as stark contrast to Agamben. Negri believes it is when vitalistic concerns are introduced, when we come to care about zoe instead of just bios, that we see introduced the concerns of the thantopolitical. This comes to heart of Negri's criticisms of Agamben's figure of the homo sacer becoming a political figure. He is terrified that we will rally around naked life as something to be protected, which for him continues to justify being able to see humans as being separable from their bios.

I guess I don't need to say I find this humanism even more problematic than I find Deleuze's generalized vitalism. In particular, I doubt I need to tell you that what Negri misses in this obsession with bios is the problem that I refer to, following the movie Blade Runner, as more human than the human. It may be true that we can produce something different from the human, but if we are bound up with humanism then all seek to make is to perfect the human. And that drive, of course, is what drives regimes to make people into naked life. Not by having the concept of naked life, but by having a concept that can we need to perfect the human.

Which is sad, because I really Negri.