Defining the Human: The Always Already — or Never to be — Object of the Social Sciences?

Abstract

Chapter 1 canvassed several struggles related to the material and ideological constitution of humanity but throughout I have been assuming that the social sciences are, so to speak, the ‘party of humanity’ in the academy. While historically this has been the case, is it so anymore — and if so, is it likely to be in the future? Chapter 2 addresses this question by considering the stakes, especially as the clarity of the social sciences as a distinct body of knowledge is increasingly in question. Nearly half a century ago, Michel Foucault identified the contingencies that originally enabled and nowadays disable ‘the human’ as a stable object of study and governance. Seen through the long lens of intellectual history, humanity has been the site of a bipolar disorder that has divided cognitive and emotional attachments between God and animal at least since the medieval foundation of the university. Indeed, the differences between the university’s founding Christian orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, have redounded through the centuries, resulting in what I call alternative ‘mendicant modernities’: on the one hand our reabsorption into nature and on the other our transcendence of nature. The remainder of this book is devoted mainly to the latter prospect, an initial survey of which I provide in an inventory of ‘transhumanisms’, blueprints for ‘Humanity 2.0’.