how to work it into my own work - and it seems definitely to hinge on
a different kind of reflection, one that bears on a more properly
'anthropological' problem, in the sense of it being a philosophical
reflection on the 'human' as such. The question is what defines the
specificity of 'human,' on what grounds can the human be legislated as
an entity different from animals, most obviously, but also from
machines, from gods. This again is part of a longer series - I've
reflected on this in some of my papers, but it also seems like this is
the question that motivates a long of early anthropology - that is, in
defining an object for the discipline, there emerges a kind of
reflection of what is proper to the human as a way of thinking what is
proper to the discipline. In this sense, Agamben writes of the
anthropological machine, that which serves the sole purpose of
producing the human.
Of course this is a really complex topic, so I think I wouldn't do it
all at once here. But I will at least want to pass through a couple
of key points that are anchoring this reflection. So Marx, Derrida
(Lacan), Arendt, but also Boas, Herder, Levi-Strauss. The point of
this wouldn't to be to work toward but to work through a critical
animality studies, to think what animality will ultimately offer us,
which, I think/hope will be a way of thinking of an anthropology that
will really problematize this question of the human again. So in
broad strokes, the way I imagine this working is something like this:
a) there is a sense in which human difference from other living beings
hinges on a couple of possibilities:
1: something that serves as a supplement, something additional to the
mere physicality of the animal body
1a: this is either a species-level biological trait or something that
must be developed either by the self or in the society of others.
That is, we either have a vision of the human species at the level of
the individual body, or the human as a social animal, whereby the
human body is already propped through multiple connections with
others. The problem here is that we have conflicting ideas of where
the human begins - is it individual or is it social, and what will be
the status of something extra/over the animal that needs to be
developed amongst others - and so, human difference must be cultivated
in a relationship with the other (human). This is Aristotle on the
polis, which I may come back to through Arendt.
But the problem anyway is that you'd need to be able to determine what
the basic unit of the human is, and if we mean to say that the human
is in fact a social animal, what the condition of his being-human is,
if there is in fact a condition of its activation (being amongst
people), how is the human not in fact given as a condition of the
human body. The other possibility is that the human difference lays
in a potentiality, the potential of becoming-human, where the
ontological status of the human is a potential to become human?
2: a prior condition of lack, where the human exists in fulfilling a
need that other animals can do 'naturally.' Most often, this is
framed in terms of a lack of instinct, where the human is that animal
that is woefully ill-equipped to survive, where there is a gap between
nature and human requirements. I think we see this in Nietzsche, in
Marx, in Derrida, in Herder (especially on language)
But here, culture is that which develops to fill the gap. Perhaps
culture is 'instinctual' in the sense that people must have culture
(and this is where Levi-Strauss, in his search for
funadmental/elemntary forms becomes really interesting). So here's an
interesting point, that Derrida gets into a lot, which is that Lacan
is very interested in what he takes as a human capacity to respond
rather than just react - I would want to argue that response is based
on its fallibility, or rather, the possibility of its not happening or
happening in a different way. This way, response is about a capacity
for difference, which is more interesting to consider then in these
terms: human is that which has the possibility of different
possibilities.
Anyway, I always start writing and then can't keep my attention, and I
let my thoughts pool up and never say what I need to say.
So here:
What is the human? That which makes, which is made, insofar as it is
an incomplete animal (or animals are incomplete humans?).
This makes anthropogenesis as a figure of what people make very interesting.
Alternatively, anthropogenesis might be analyzed as a kind of slogan,
a semiotic process by which 'the human' becomes the privileged
perspective through which everything will be understood. I am
thinking of how the colonial project is similar, in that it seeks to
have everything pass through it, where the empire becomes the conduit
through which all knowledge must pass. Like an electromagnet, it
orients all toward itself.
What am I working through? I don't want to reproduce the kind of
analysis that says that human is that which destroys, but I also don't
want to think about human as that which creates, either. I would want
to think of the human as part of a process without a necessary
subject, or that can't be apprehended as a process at all, insofar as
'process' assumes a kind of normative structure in time already..
Who knows?
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