Critical theory Today: Perspectives and Practices

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One of the most pointed paradoxes of our era is precisely the clash between the urgency of finding new and alternative modes of political and ethical agency on the one hand, and the inertia or self-interests of neo- conservatism on the other. In this context, I want to side firmly with the technological forces, but against the liberal individualistic appropriation of their potential. I would like to emphasize instead the liberatory and transgressive potential of these technologies, against the predatory forces that attempt to index them yet again onto a centralized, white, male, heterosexual, Eurocentric, capital-owning, standardized vision of the subject. I want to think through and alongside these axes of power and to challenge them, not in order to play them back onto the classical humanistic subject-position. I would much rather explore their diversity in order to seek for adequate forms of non-unitary, nomadic and yet accountable modes of envisaging both subjectivity and democratic human ethical interaction. This does not reject universalism, but rather expands it, to make it more inclusive. My quarrel with humanism, in such a context, has to do with the limitations of its own historical relevance in the present context. In other words, I do not have an implicit mistrust if its tenets – be it in the secular version of the Renaissance ideal, in the more Protestant version of humanist tolerance or in the universalistic mode of human rights. I have rather become convinced that classical humanism needs to be reviewed and opened up to the challenges and complexities of our times. I want to put my own conviction to the test in this chapter, by addressing some concrete issues in the light of a politics of life defined as bios-zoe power, which opens the possibility of the proliferation of highly generative post-humanities. My position in favour of complexity promotes a continuing emphasis on the radical ethics of transformation and it shifts the emphasis from a unitary into nomadic subjectivity, thus running against the grain of contemporary neo-liberal conservatism. This amounts essentially to a rejection of individualism, which however asserts an equally strong distance from relativism or nihilistic defeatism. A sustainable ethics for a non-unitary subject proposes an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others, by removing the obstacle of selfcentered individualism. This is not the same as absolute loss of values - as we shall see in the next section. It rather implies a new way of combining self-interests with the well-being of an enlarged sense of community, which includes one’s territorial or environmental inter-connections. This is an ethical bond of an altogether different sort from the self-interests of an individual subject, as defined along the canonical lines of classical humanism. It is a nomadic eco-philosophy of multiple belongings. This also affects the question of universal values. Contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre and structure of the living, creating a negative unity among humans. The Human genome project for instance unifies all the human species in the urgency to organize an opposition against commercially-owned and profit-minded technologies. Franklin, Lury and Stacey refer to this situation as "panhumanity" (2000:26), that is to say a global sense of inter-connection between the human and the non-human environment, as well as among the different sub-species within each category, which creates a web of intricate inter-dependences. Most of this mutual dependence is of the negative kind: " as a global population at shared risk of global environmental destruction and united by collective global images" (2000: 26). There are also positive elements, however, to this form of post-modern human inter-


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