Posthuman Praxis of ‘Human’ (Editor’s Note)
Faizan Moquim | Jamia Milia Islamia | ORCiD ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7698-1656
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.71106/NFUX9641
Publication: Volume 3 Issue 3
Excerpt | As our civilization faces probably its worst crisis in the form of the pandemic COVID-19, through which thousands have lost their lives while millions are infected globally and billions are at severe risk, we head towards an unchartered territory with unforeseeable socio-economic and geo-political scenarios. With the entire world grinding to a halt through lockdowns and quarantine, our team of editors has been working overtime to publish this Issue: to feel the normalcy of life by warding off the sense of doom that awaits outside our closed doors.
This dystopic experience of the world disjointed in time also serves as a point of departure to reflect upon the category of ‘human’ itself—for ethics invariably depend upon the ways in which one makes sense of or defines human which is a contentious site—vis-à-vis the emergent concepts of posthuman as well as their praxis within our civilizational context. In the modern humanist thought of the West, category of ‘human’ is conceived as a rational being who is “[…] epistemologically self-transparent, all-knowing, all-seeing agent of history” (Soper 5). Cartesian cogito sets itself up as one who has the audacity to be at the center of existence to perform the ethical task of conquering nature which, like all other non-human reality, remains at his beckoning. This idea of modern praxis underlines a shift away from the Aristotelian ethics, which advocated benefits for both the self and the world he inhabited, towards performing this task of conquest either as a duty (Kant) or as a utilitarian engagement with the world around us (Bentham). In each sense, cogito’s ability to act inevitably calls for an implicit conception of ethics: a set of shared notions of values within a community to which cogito subscribes. Anthropocentric ethics’ fondness for notching up watertight boundaries, within which this humanist ethical praxis flourishes, manages to exclude all other non-human forms of life—organic, inorganic, mechanical, artificial—from its ambit. This ethical tangent of praxis at the center of humanist thought, shaped by cogito’s will and grounded in his actions, involves both existential as well as moral questions that are now being challenged by the emerging posthuman deliberations attempting to overthrow these long-held ideas of human exceptionalism and open its folds to incorporate others. Posthumanist thought therefore problematizes any sense of demarcation that requires passports legitimizing the anthropocentric ethics—such as rationality, linguistic code, appropriate biological form or psychological frame—for affiliations to the ‘human’ community.
Keywords | Pandemic COVID-19, Emerging Posthuman Deliberations, Human, Nonhuman, Cartesian Cogito, Ethics, Anthropocentrism, Science Fiction
Faizan Moquim (faizanmoquim@gmail.com)
MLA Citation for this Article:
Moquim, Faizan. “Posthuman Praxis of ‘Human’ (Editor’s Note).” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 2 Apr. 2020, pp. vii-ix, https://doi.org/10.71106/NFUX9641.