Before Humanity: Posthumanism and Ancestrality

262 Pages·2021·2.52 MB·English

by  Stefan Herbrechter

Before Humanity
Critical Posthumanisms

General Editors
Ivan Callus, University of Malta
Stefan Herbrechter, Heidelberg University
Editorial Board
Louis Armand, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and
University of New England, US
Ruben Borg, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Megen de Bruin-Molé, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK
Marija Grech, University of Malta, Malta
Laurent Milesi, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Christopher J. Muller, Macquarie University, Australia
Manuela Rossini, University of Basel, Switzerland
Joe Tabbi, University of Bergen, Norway
Pieter Vermeulen, KU Leuven, Belgium
Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside, US
Advisory Board
Neil Badmington, Cardiff University, UK
Pramod Nayar, University of Hyderabad, India
Joanna Zylinska, King’s College London, UK
volume 3
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ cph
Before Humanity

Posthumanism and Ancestrality
By
Stefan Herbrechter
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: © Sara Herbrechter, Inkling Illustrations, “Ancestors”, 2019.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Herbrechter, Stefan, author.
Title: Before humanity : posthumanism and ancestrality / By Stefan
Herbrechter.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2022] | Series: Critical
posthumanisms 1872-0943 ; Volume 3 | Includes bibliographical references
and index. | Summary: “Before Humanity takes up the question of the
post- in the posthuman from the position of ancestrality. Speculating
about who or what comes after the human inevitably throws us back to our
very beginnings. The before in Before Humanity in this context takes on
two meanings: 1) what happened before we apparently became human? -
which translates into a critical reading of paleo-anthropology, as well
as evolutionary narratives of hominization; 2) living through the end of
a certain (humanist, anthropocentric) notion of humanity, what tasks lie
before us? - which provokes a critical reading of the Anthropocene and
current narratives of geologization. In other words, Before Humanity
investigates conceptualizations of humanity and asks whether we have
ever been human and if not, what could, or maybe what should we have
been?” – Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: lccn 2021046656 (print) | lccn 2021046657 (ebook) |
isbn 9789004502444 (hardback) | isbn 9789004502505 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Human evolution–Philosophy. | Philosophical anthropology. |
Paleoanthropology. | Futurologists.
Classification: lcc GN281 .H456 2022 (print) | lcc GN281 (ebook) |
ddc 599.93/8–dc23/eng/20211015
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046656
lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046657
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/b rill- typeface.
issn 1872-0 943
isbn 978-9 0-0 4-5 0244-4 (hardback)
isbn 978-9 0-0 4-5 0250-5 (e- book)
Copyright 2022 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink,
Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re- use and/ or translations must be
addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com.
This book is printed on acid- free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
For Ivan … partner in crime.
In friendship.
∵

Contents

P reamble ix
I ntroduction: Before … 1
1 T he Other Human
On William Golding’s The Inheritors 9
1 P rehistoric Fiction and Ancestrality 11
2 T he Inheritors: Morality, Ideology, Humanism 20
3 P aleontology and the Neanderthal 28
4 L anguage, Cognition and ‘Becoming Human’ 38
5 A nimism and Empathy 51
6 B ecoming Human? 59
interlude 1 Languages and Evolutions 64
interlude 2 Animism without Humans, or Belief without Belief 81
1 ‘ Believing’ in Animism 83
2 A lter- Anthropological Animism (or a-a -a ) 88
3 P osthumanist Animism? 92
4 T echno- Animism and the Re- Enchantment of Science 95
5 A nimism Under Erasure 99
6 T he Animism to Come 105
7 S eriously, But Perhaps Not Too Seriously? 110
interlude 3 Ape/ Man 112
2 A bout to Forget … the Human
On Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene 122
1 H err Geiser Is Losing His Humanity … 125
2 C atastrophe, Ecocide and Extinction in Man in the Holocene 130
3 F orgetting and Geiser’s Mnemotechnics 134
4 V erzettelung 138
5 P re- and Posthistory, Geology and Ancestrality 141
6 B efore Humanity: Dementia and Ecography 151
interlude 4 Geology and Deep Time 156
viii Contents
interlude 5 Lascaux, Geophilia and the ‘Cradle of Humanity’ 162
1 B ataille – The Neolithic ‘Origin’ of Art and Humanity 164
2 B audrillard – Lascaux and Simulation 168
3 I nhumanist Aesthetic? 178
3 U nsociable Robots
Empathy in Robot and Frank 184
1 E mpathy Makes ‘Us’ Human? 185
2 R obot & Frank 186
3 E mpathy and Sociable Robots 191
4 P osthuman(ist) Empathy? 196
C onclusion
Becoming Inhuman 208
1 S o You Think You’re Becoming Human? 209
2 P ost/ Anthropology – Before and After Humans 210
3 I nhumanism, or, Becoming Inhuman 215
B ibliography 219
I ndex 240
Preamble1
The starting point for what follows is quite straightforward. If we live in ‘post-
human’ times, as is often claimed – and posthumanism as a theoretical dis-
course is nothing but an investigation into what this might mean – all our
energies must go into finding out where we are heading, or what lies before us,
in the sense of what awaits us around the next corner of history or evolution.
Who are these posthumans that we are supposedly becoming? Do we need
to be afraid of our future? Or does the best still lie ahead? With its focus on
technological change and human self- surpassing, posthumanism seems ‘nat-
urally’ future- oriented. Often, it is virtually indistinguishable from science fic-
tion with its scenarios of mind- uploading, enhancement, its fantasies of ai as
successor species or the ultimate control of ‘spaceship Earth’ through dreams
of geoengineering. Technoeuphoria as much as technodystopia seem essential
aspects of these transhumanist desires that seem to be willing our transition
into posthumans into existence. There is also a much quieter posthumanism,
however, and a much more critical and slower one, much more far-r eaching
maybe in its challenging of what it means to be human and how we came to
believe what we seemingly are and why we might have been wrong – why, to
paraphrase Bruno Latour, we might never have been human in the sense that
the main humanist narratives have been eager to explain to us. If this (human-
ist or anthropocentric) humanity is threatened with its end by a number of
apocalypses (climate change, asteroids, ai etc.) and cannot envisage anything
coming after it, a critical posthumanism must start by wondering what is going
on here. So it is with the following statement in Bernard Stiegler’s Technics
and Time, which investigates and indeed rewrites the origin of humanization
through the idea of an ‘originary technicity’ of the human species and its evo-
lution, that I want to begin: “For the end of the human cannot be investigated
without investigating its origin …”.2
1 Some brief extracts of the “Preamble”, “Introduction” and “Conclusion” to this volume have
previously been published as “Before Humanity, Or, Posthumanism Between Ancestrality
and Becoming Human”, In Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty- First Century
Narrative: Perspectives on the Non- Human in Literature and Culture, eds. Sonia Belo- Allué and
Mónica Calvo- Pascual (New York: Routledge, 2021), 20– 32.
2 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. George Collins
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 135. In many ways my argument in Before
Humanity endorses Stiegler’s rewriting of natural biological evolution into a technical co-
evolution of the human. There is, however, an important difference in my angle here: where
Stiegler proposes an ‘originary technicity’ that produces “The Différance of the Human” (ie.