Disconnection at the limit : posthumanism, deconstruction and non-philosophy

Abstract

Speculative posthumanism (SP) conceives posthumans as agents made inhuman by a technological disconnection or ‘withdrawal’ from human social systems (The disconnection thesis – DT). DT understands becoming nonhuman in terms of agential independence. An artefact like a robot is a ‘wide human’ so long as it depends on its human-related functions to exist. But what is an agent? SP forecloses a purely conceptual response to this question because it rejects transcendental accounts of subjectivity founded in human experience or social practice (Unbounded Posthumanism – UP). UP renders this question illegitimate because it denies there is any theory of agency that could apply to all agents. Not only does DT not tell us what posthumans are like, it has no criteria for determining when disconnection occurs. It follows that understanding the posthuman (if possible) must proceed without criteria. The content of unbounded posthumanism is produced by disconnection rather than by the schematic theoretical content of DT. I will argue that this implies an intimate relationship between the understanding and practice in posthumanism that allows us to draw fertile analogies between UP and two other ‘philosophies of the limit’ Derrida’s Deconstruction and Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy.