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Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical

Humanities
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Limits of the Human

a

Debjani Ganguly & Fiona Jenkins

Humanities Research Centre , Australian National University , Sir

Roland Wilson Building 120 McCoy Circuit, Acton , Canberra, ACT
0200 , Australia
b

School of Philosophy , Research School of Social Sciences ,

Coombs Building Australian National University, Canberra, ACT
0200 , Australia
Published online: 04 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: Debjani Ganguly & Fiona Jenkins (2011) Limits of the Human, Angelaki: Journal
of the Theoretical Humanities, 16:4, 1-4
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2011.641339

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ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 16 number 4 December 2011

odernity defines its civilisation and epoch,

its political desires and ethical norms
through the value and meaning of being human.
It is in terms of the rights, needs and nature of a
common humanity that universal laws are
conceived as valid and true. Today, however,
the very concept of the human appears to be in
crisis as we acknowledge our collective agency in
precipitating a slide towards a catastrophic future
for our planet, or register the aporias of the
international human rights regime in the face of
the multitudinous sites of geopolitical conflict
and violence that have succeeded the Cold War.
As the fundamentals of ethics are challenged by
the anticipation of a post-human future, whether
of an intelligence explosion, an event horizon
termed singularity by the futurist Ray
Kurzweil, or of a biologically re-engineered
human subject enabled by advances in the
human genome project and the technologies of
mammal cloning, we face a pressing need to
recalibrate for our times the conceptual weight
that the category of the human has acquired over
two centuries of critical reflection and
representation.
This special issue of Angelaki orients itself to
a climate of contemporary critical thought that
originates in the contemplation of such limit
cases. At once sober, tremulous, wondrous, and
inventive, such thought takes the measure of
humanitys presence on this planet. It weighs the
human capacity for transcendence with its
predilection for annihilation. It ponders the fate
of our non-human others, not just animals
and living organisms but inert matter; and
contemplates the fields of techno-mediation of
suffering lifeworlds that constitute new public
realms of visibility. Startlingly, it scales up
human historicity to mark our intervention in

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EDITORIAL
INTRODUCTION
debjani ganguly
fiona jenkins
LIMITS OF THE
HUMAN
geological space-time, thus heralding a new Earth
era, the Anthropocene, a term that gives ominous
credence to the indelible imprint of the human on
our biophysical systems. If in ecological perspective, the human has become an element so
disjoint with nature that it threatens to bring
many forms and species of life to the threshold of
extinction, then it may seem that all that has
inspired modernitys self-conception as progressive, humane and historically necessary proves
instead to have been an unmonitored and
dangerous experiment with lifes very conditions
of possibility. The same thought may apply to our
encounter with the limits of the human in global
media images of extreme violence. The differential impact of crisis and suffering, giving rise to

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/11/040001^ 4 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2011.641339

Downloaded by [188.25.230.217] at 23:02 12 February 2015

editorial introduction
what Achille Mbembe has termed a necropolitics
politics as the work of death presents us with
the inhuman face of catastrophe on multiple
fronts, and in terms that call for invention and
change beyond all that we hitherto knew as
human. Running through these essays is both a
frisson of horror at the human, in its hyperbolic
capacity for destruction, and a profound desire to
keep faith with the possibilities for transformation that inspired modernitys sense of promise.
Our contributors explore these dynamics of
threat and transformation along three vectors.
Several essays take up the idea of the
Anthropocene and what it entails for thinking
human and non-human history, our relation to
other species and the very idea of species-being.
Paul Alberts also addresses the issue of responsibility to life in the Anthropocene by offering a
critical re-reading of Hans Jonas and Michel
Foucault as they focus on the way in which the
forces of modern industrial society have brought
the biological facts and potentials of human
existence into ethical and political calculation.
Yet as neither thinker sufficiently articulated the
place of non-human species and ecological
contexts in their perspectives, questions of
responsibility to life need new approaches. This
challenge is taken up by Krzysztof Ziarek, but
fundamentally refigured as an ontological responsibility that must engage existence in excess even
of the terms on which we think of life. Ziarek
offers a Heideggerian reading of the emergence of
the Anthropocene as an irreversible tech-anthropic imprint on the planet. If conceptualisations of
biopower and biopolitics trace the ways in which
power posits human life as technic and thus
available to manipulation, the response cannot
simply be to downgrade human sovereignty from
its dominance over other forms of life. Rather,
the thought of Da-sein crucially moves the
emphasis away from life to attend to the
importance of the non-human and the nonliving (world, being, event). David Woods
essay explores the nature of the link between
our suicidal or toxic behaviour as a species and
our capacity for transcendence, and asks
whether we can (or should) will our own
destruction as a species. Gerda Roelvink and
Magdalena Zolkos consider how the affective

experience of the environmental destruction

already underway might effect political transformation through an altered sense of time, arguing
against the assumption that environmental
destruction lies ahead of us, in a future we
might avert, rather than being already affectively
demanding, here and now. In giving an account
of human dwelling Rosalyn Diprose develops
an innovative approach to the experience of
natural and political catastrophes and the import
of rebuilding in their wake, showing how the
inhabitation of built and living environments
must leave space for the event of dwelling, that
is, the unique and the arbitrary, not simply seek
to minimise risk. In all these discussions, a
critical engagement with the terms of modernitys
self-understanding gives a complex reading of
states of emergency and suggests that situations
of crisis can be open to potentiality; that they do
not have to descend into a rationalisation for
violence.
In a second set of essays, the task of rethinking
biopolitics as a theorisation of the engagement of
politics with life is extended, with and beyond
Foucaults or Agambens analyses, to revisit
questions of the relations of the human, the
animal and the divine. Joanne Faulkner explores
a limit of the human that draws on the figure of
the animal and the innocent child to disavow our
own vulnerability and argues for the reconfiguration of equality and subjectivity as sites of ethical
and political change. Agambens rendering of the
anthropological machine proves a critical tool of
analysis here, as it also is for Mathew Abbott, who
invokes the backdrop of Nietzsches philosophy
to examine the ways in which animality has come
both to intrude upon and haunt the human. More
sceptical of Agambens thought, Tony Burke
offers a robust defence of the idea of the human
as a normative resource and argues that the
analytical rubric of biopolitics has left us with few
openings to conceptualise the human as a source
of value and transcendence. Burkes is not a call
for a return to classical liberal thought but rather
an appeal to work through what he sees as a
dystopian entrapment of the human in biopolitical thought. Through a careful reading of
alternative theoretical vocabularies that bring to
the fore ideas of human vulnerability, ethical

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ganguly & jenkins

relationality and even a primordial exposure to a
pre-political moral universe what Esposito calls
an openness to what is held in common with
others Burke urges us to seriously consider the
limits of received wisdom on the political
ontology of life.
Cognate issues are at stake in a third thematic
strand that explores the sense of global connectedness together with the apprehension of suffering at a distance, and the distinctive questions
that new media technologies raise about our
experiences of embodiment and responsibility to
others. The historical spectrum of discussion on
mediated suffering stretches from the early
capitalist period in the eighteenth century to
our contemporary moment of saturated digital
connectivity. Central to this discursive field are at
least four critical coordinates: the transitive
affectivity of mediation (how far does it go and
who does it exactly touch and why); the cultural
politics of spectatorship; the calibration of
responsibility to the subject of suffering; and
the presence/absence of the suffering body itself.
The implications of each are mapped in this
collection across a range of genres: cinema,
photography, social media and the novel. While
Robert Sinnerbrink analyses the films of Michael
Haneke for their reflexive critique of the
mediatised nature of contemporary social experience, Melinda Hinkson turns to the global
circulation of new media images of the 2009
post-election violence on the streets of Tehran.
She makes a strong case for the importance of the
cultural frame in imagistic witnessing and
theorises new media spectatorship as a communicative act that has the potential to dissolve the
distinction between a passive onlooker and an
active agent. Debjani Gangulys essay analyses
the emergence of the post-1989 world novel as a
genre produced by the conjunction of global
violence in the wake of the Cold War, digital
hyperconnectivity and a mediatised infrastructure
of sympathy. The figuration of the human in
these novels, she argues, conjoins an affective
imaginary of imminent terror with a metaphorics
of right. This latter does not, like the
Bildungsroman of early capitalist modernity,
mark the novelistic subject as a site of transcendence from the immanence of the social. Rather, it

renders the agency of the subject as co-extensive

with the necropolitical forces at work, if not in the
sense of being directly responsible for the global
spread of violence then in its compulsive
attachment to a regime of exorbitant visualisation
of such violence. In Fiona Jenkins essay a critique
of cosmopolitan modes of vision emerges from
asking how a sense of the equal value of life is
established in and through the global circulation
of photographic images. Jenkins argues that
humanism is inadequate to the problem of what
it is to mark a life as mattering; and she turns to
Jean-Luc Nancys distinction between globalisation and mondialisation, alongside Judith
Butlers treatment of the idea of grievable
life in the context of the global mediation of
violence, to elaborate an account of how
the circulation of images renders a sense of
existence that is weighty in excess of human
meaning.
Many of the essays collected here were first
delivered as papers at a conference on the Limits
of the Human, held at the Australian National
University, 24 September 2009. Within an
overarching philosophical concern to critically
chart contemporary vicissitudes of the category of
the human, and of limits of the human as places
of violence and hope, fear and creativity, we have
sought to develop articulations of these issues
that draw together scholars from across the
humanities to offer rich and nuanced stories,
conceiving the human at points of extreme
tension and signifying stress: as inheritor of the
highly ambivalent legacies of modernity; as
destroyer and potential guardian of nature; as
subject simultaneously of histories of progress and of the
threat that now hangs over all
the living or, indeed, world
itself.

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editorial introduction

Debjani Ganguly
Humanities Research Centre
Australian National University
Sir Roland Wilson Building
120 McCoy Circuit
Acton
Canberra, ACT 0200
Australia
E-mail: debjani.ganguly@anu.edu.au
Fiona Jenkins
School of Philosophy
Research School of Social Sciences
Coombs Building
Australian National University
Canberra, ACT 0200
Australia
E-mail: fiona.jenkins@anu.edu.au