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.
To begin from the last point, this has been the background, meta-methodological idea guiding this Substack: to build successive layers of reflection that produce an intellectual, reflective mise-en-abyme: an infinite well of reflection that one glimpses in elevators with glass walls facing each other or in contemporary art installations demonstrating the same principle.
To return to the initial points, I would like to underline the linguistic parallelisms: thing, thinking, and Ding, denken, which shows the Germanic undercurrents of English. This contrasts with the Latin origins of French language and thought, which cluster together and form a cultural other, a Lacanian object petit a, of the Anglo-sphere.
The post-human turn is evident in my Substack too, but I treat it as a point of exploratory departure.
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.
Indeed, this is the underlying rationale.
To begin from the last point, this has been the background, meta-methodological idea guiding this Substack: to build successive layers of reflection that produce an intellectual, reflective mise-en-abyme: an infinite well of reflection that one glimpses in elevators with glass walls facing each other or in contemporary art installations demonstrating the same principle.
To return to the initial points, I would like to underline the linguistic parallelisms: thing, thinking, and Ding, denken, which shows the Germanic undercurrents of English. This contrasts with the Latin origins of French language and thought, which cluster together and form a cultural other, a Lacanian object petit a, of the Anglo-sphere.
The post-human turn is evident in my Substack too, but I treat it as a point of exploratory departure.