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If we are inclined to suppose that a certain mode of questioning, of reflection and of self-consciousness should in itself characterise the meaning of the term Humanism, then the advent of the post-human would seemingly presuppose the resolution—independent of man (and independent of any Sartrean dialectic of reason)—of what Humanism is. On the other hand, it could also appear possible to say that an understanding of the human (of "the more or less presupposed unity of a [human] subject"), by way of a Humanism , has always implied, however paradoxical this might sound, a stance necessarily coterminous with what today is called post-humanism—the apparent objectification of subjective experience, the world as prosthesis, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, degré zéro des choses, degré zéro de la personne … and so on—but without necessarily sharing aspirations to any kind of transcendence or negation of the human. It is a simple enough contention that in the discourse of post-humanism neither the human nor Humanism is effectively transcended or negated. Rather, something entirely else is at work, and this 'something," this thing , is nothing less than the recursive form of Humanism's self-reflexive appeal to a condition of immanence. The pivotal moments of this thought are arguably Freud's discovery of the unconscious, the exploration in modernist writing of the conjunction between a theory of the unconscious and discoursivity, and Lacan's refiguring of the Freudian idea in his long-running seminar—in particular the 1954 series on cybernetics and the 1976 series on topological chains and the work of James Joyce.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-76327-9_2

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