(Post)humanity

Chapter Two ("(Post)humanity") argues that increasing unevenness in capitalist relations have normalized an ethical turn in the humanities and led to the "posthumanities". The "post" of the posthumanities signals awareness of not only the exclusionary basis of the concept of Man, as did (post)structuralist post-humanist philosophy, but also represents a new sentimental embrace of non-human otherness and a Heideggerian ethics of care as "being-with" the animal(s) to respond to the growing social alienation of global capitalism and so one finds Derrida nakedly communing with his pet cat in The Animal That I Therefore Am and Haraway writing about making love with her dog through "oral intercourse" (Companion Species, 2-3) as if such sentimental attachments could remake "reality" (6). As in all "posts" (postfordist, postindustrial, poststructuralism, postmodern,... ), a cultural zone "beyond" the conflict between capital and labor is announced that naturalizes class inequality as the basis of human societies (Zavarzadeh 1).
The "post" of (post)structuralist post-humanism and the "post" of the new-er posthumanism are, despite their historical differences, ideologically the same—they attempt to "solve" in the theoretical imaginary contradictions that have arisen from the conflict between capital and labor. The founding texts of (post)structuralism were of course post-humanist but the opposition to humanism today has changed since Derrida and Foucault's critiques of humanism in the '60s and '70s and it is less concerned with deconstructing logocentrism and the languages of Man as it is with the cultural inscription of bodies around the human/animal distinction. I argue that these discursive changes are not driven by knowledge as in the dominant cultural theory but reflect changes in the mode of production.
Keywords: posthumanism; animal studies; Jacques Derrida; Donna Haraway; Wendy and Lucy; Slavoj Žižek; Alain Badiou.