Abstract
This essay draws attention to the implication of rupture in the idea of a Eurocentric posthumanism and indicates how such a rupture is premised in a classificatory system based on a normative humanism. A posthumanism of this kind, in its emergence, also extends its inverse double, the nonhuman monster, grafted onto the subaltern. As of our time, this periphery is represented most aptly by the Islamic terrorist. In place of this problematic rapturous ‘post,’ Ahluwalia invokes Paul Gilroy’s idea of pan-humanism, which revises post-Enlightenment humanism through multicultural engagement with its alternatives, a cultural micropolitics which consciously enlarges and extends individual and collective subjectivity. Such a pan-humanism can be thought of as a posthumanism, not a post which exceeds humanism but includes and surpasses it through an open-ended extension based in subjective cultural praxis.
The horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure awareness that something living within him is so akin to the animal that it might be recognized. All disgust is originally disgust at touching… He may not deny his bestial relationship with the creature, the invocation of which revolts him: he must make himself its master.
—Walter Benjamin, in One-Way-Street, 1923–26.
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Notes
- 1.
Wlad Godzich has noted that in the United States:
“the idea has taken hold that we are living in a ‘time of terror’. The phrase often modified to ‘war on terror’, has gained sufficient currency to serve as the rubric under which present times are periodized. For Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, the cold war has given way to “the global war on terror” (2006: 135).”
- 2.
For an excellent insight into the origins of anti-humanism, see Hindess (1996: 79–98).
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Ahluwalia, P. (2016). Two Senses of the Post in Posthumanism. In: Banerji, D., Paranjape, M. (eds) Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures . Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3637-5_8
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