- Jun 2019
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Appeals to the ‘human’are always discriminatory: they create structural distinctions and inequal-ities among different categories of humans, let alone between humansand non-humans (Braidotti, 2013, 2016).
The most compelling account of the discriminatory power of "human" I've seen is Alexander Weheliye's "'Feenin'': Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music."
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Social the-orists from different political backgrounds, such as Habermas (2003),Fukuyama (2002), Sloterdijk (2009) and Derrida (in Borradori, 2003),express intense anxiety bordering on moral panic about the future of thehuman and the humanist legacy in our advanced technological times.
This anxiety (for me) is best expressed in Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror.
"The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is now here, jetted, abjected, into "my" world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue's full unlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away." (5)
http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/touchyfeelingsmaliciousobjects/Kristevapowersofhorrorabjection.pdf
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