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Laura O'Driscoll's avatar

Gosh, this took me back to a few years ago when I was in a Foucault/Derrida/Beckett/post-humanism deep dive. It strikes me we’re facing a new crisis (evolution?) on that front now. Bataille, talking about the cave paintings at Lascaux, argued that early man’s recognition and refusal of the hilarity of the human image and destiny lead to the current crisis in modernity. He read the impressive representations of human-animal hybrids on the walls of Lascaux as acts of pre-atonement for treating the animal as ‘thing’; whilst refusing in kind to identify with the category of ‘thing’ would become fundamental to modern Humanism’s cult of reason. Blanchot argued that this expressed Man’s double transgression: firstly of the rules of nature, producing the human world of work, and secondly of the rules governing the world of work, in an attempt to return to nature. The human act lies in the second transgression. I.e. humanity has a double origin or a point of origin that cannot be fixed, a non-origin: to say, human origin is a constant act of reinvention, an attempted progression through regression that erupts into transgression. I think we are there now, with the “meta” layers of humanity, technology, politics, performance as you describe here. I wonder how our concept of humanity will look on the other side of it.

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