Toward an Ethico-politics of the Posthuman: Foucault and Merleau-ponty

We live in an age where rapid developments in technologies and environmental catastrophes increasingly question the limits and meaning of the human and human “agency,” the inevitability of human “progress,” and the capacity of humanity to control its world. In response, there have emerged a number of different ontological ideas of the “posthuman.” These continue a critical history emerging from nineteenth century philosophies, such as those of Hegel and Nietzsche, where conceptual reconsiderations of human “animality,” critiques of the classical notion of human agency based in reason, free will, and/or conscious intentionality, and theoretical challenges to the classical subject-object culture-nature distinctions, combine to challenge conventional grounds for distinguishing the human from the non-human. Contemporary versions of these ontologies of the posthuman, such as in “actor’s network theory” (ANT), aim at giving the non-human some kind of “agency,” some say in opening new and more collective ways of thinking and living. The welcome consequence of this levelling out of human and non-human “life” is that it undermines the privilege afforded the human that has justified its dominance over everything else. A less welcome consequence is that we are left without the conventional basis of normativity underlying ethics and politics. It is this issue that this paper addresses.