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This article was downloaded by: [190.65.221.131]On: 28 August 2013, At: 18:48Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical

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Limits of the HumanDebjani Ganguly

a& Fiona Jenkins

b

aHumanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Sir

Roland Wilson Building 120 McCoy Circuit, Acton, Canberra, ACT0200, AustraliabSchool of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, Coombs

Building Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200,

Australia

Published online: 04 Jan 2012.

To cite this article:Debjani Ganguly & Fiona Jenkins (2011) Limits of the Human, Angelaki: Journal

of the Theoretical Humanities, 16:4, 1-4

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2011.641339

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what Achille Mbembe has termed a necropolitics

politics as the work of death presents us with

the inhuman face of catastrophe on multiple

fronts, and in terms that call for invention and

change beyond all that we hitherto knew as

human. Running through these essays is both afrisson of horror at the human, in its hyperbolic

capacity for destruction, and a profound desire to

keep faith with the possibilities for transforma-

tion that inspired modernitys sense of promise.

Our contributors explore these dynamics of

threat and transformation along three vectors.

Several essays take up the idea of the

Anthropocene and what it entails for thinking

human and non-human history, our relation to

other species and the very idea of species-being.Paul Alberts also addresses the issue of respon-

sibility to life in the Anthropocene by offering a

critical re-reading of Hans Jonas and Michel

Foucault as they focus on the way in which the

forces of modern industrial society have brought

the biological facts and potentials of human

existence into ethical and political calculation.

Yet as neither thinker sufficiently articulated the

place of non-human species and ecological

contexts in their perspectives, questions ofresponsibility to life need new approaches. This

challenge is taken up by Krzysztof Ziarek, but

fundamentally refigured as an ontological respon-

sibility that must engage existence in excess even

of the terms on which we think of life. Ziarek

offers a Heideggerian reading of the emergence of

the Anthropocene as an irreversible tech-anthro-

pic imprint on the planet. If conceptualisations of

biopower and biopolitics trace the ways in which

power posits human life as technic and thus

available to manipulation, the response cannot

simply be to downgrade human sovereignty from

its dominance over other forms of life. Rather,

the thought of Da-sein crucially moves the

emphasis away from life to attend to the

importance of the non-human and the non-

living (world, being, event). David Woods

essay explores the nature of the link between

our suicidal or toxic behaviour as a species and

our capacity for transcendence, and asks

whether we can (or should) will our own

destruction as a species. Gerda Roelvink and

Magdalena Zolkos consider how the affective

experience of the environmental destruction

already underway might effect political transfor-

mation through an altered sense of time, arguing

against the assumption that environmental

destruction lies ahead of us, in a future we

might avert, rather than being already affectivelydemanding, here and now. In giving an account

of human dwelling Rosalyn Diprose develops

an innovative approach to the experience of

natural and political catastrophes and the import

of rebuilding in their wake, showing how the

inhabitation of built and living environments

must leave space for the event of dwelling, that

is, the unique and the arbitrary, not simply seek

to minimise risk. In all these discussions, a

critical engagement with the terms of modernitysself-understanding gives a complex reading of

states of emergency and suggests that situations

of crisis can be open to potentiality; that they do

not have to descend into a rationalisation for

violence.

In a second set of essays, the task of rethinking

biopolitics as a theorisation of the engagement of

politics with life is extended, with and beyond

Foucaults or Agambens analyses, to revisit

questions of the relations of the human, theanimal and the divine. Joanne Faulkner explores

a limit of the human that draws on the figure of

the animal and the innocent child to disavow our

own vulnerability and argues for the reconfigura-

tion of equality and subjectivity as sites of ethical

and political change. Agambens rendering of the

anthropological machine proves a critical tool of

analysis here, as it also is for Mathew Abbott, who

invokes the backdrop of Nietzsches philosophy

to examine the ways in which animality has come

both to intrude upon and haunt the human. More

sceptical of Agambens thought, Tony Burke

offers a robust defence of the idea of the human

as a normative resource and argues that the

analytical rubric of biopolitics has left us with few

openings to conceptualise the human as a source

of value and transcendence. Burkes is not a call

for a return to classical liberal thought but rather

an appeal to work through what he sees as a

dystopian entrapment of the human in biopoli-

tical thought. Through a careful reading of

alternative theoretical vocabularies that bring to

the fore ideas of human vulnerability, ethical

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relationality and even a primordial exposure to a

pre-political moral universe what Esposito calls

an openness to what is held in common with

others Burke urges us to seriously consider the

limits of received wisdom on the political

ontology of life.Cognate issues are at stake in a third thematic

strand that explores the sense of global connect-

edness together with the apprehension of suffer-

ing at a distance, and the distinctive questions

that new media technologies raise about our

experiences of embodiment and responsibility to

others. The historical spectrum of discussion on

mediated suffering stretches from the early

capitalist period in the eighteenth century to

our contemporary moment of saturated digitalconnectivity. Central to this discursive field are at

least four critical coordinates: the transitive

affectivity of mediation (how far does it go and

who does it exactly touch and why); the cultural

politics of spectatorship; the calibration of

responsibility to the subject of suffering; and

the presence/absence of the suffering body itself.

The implications of each are mapped in this

collection across a range of genres: cinema,

photography, social media and the novel. WhileRobert Sinnerbrink analyses the films of Michael

Haneke for their reflexive critique of the

mediatised nature of contemporary social experi-

ence, Melinda Hinkson turns to the global

circulation of new media images of the 2009

post-election violence on the streets of Tehran.

She makes a strong case for the importance of the

cultural frame in imagistic witnessing and

theorises new media spectatorship as a commu-

nicative act that has the potential to dissolve the

distinction between a passive onlooker and an

active agent. Debjani Gangulys essay analyses

the emergence of the post-1989 world novel as a

genre produced by the conjunction of global

violence in the wake of the Cold War, digital

hyperconnectivity and a mediatised infrastructure

of sympathy. The figuration of the human in

these novels, she argues, conjoins an affective

imaginary of imminent terror with a metaphorics

of right. This latter does not, like the

Bildungsroman of early capitalist modernity,

mark the novelistic subject as a site of transcen-

dence from the immanence of the social. Rather, it

renders the agency of the subject as co-extensive

with the necropolitical forces at work, if not in the

sense of being directly responsible for the global

spread of violence then in its compulsive

attachment to a regime of exorbitant visualisation

of such violence. In Fiona Jenkins essay a critique

of cosmopolitan modes of vision emerges from

asking how a sense of the equal value of life is

established in and through the global circulation

of photographic images. Jenkins argues that

humanism is inadequate to the problem of what

it is to mark a life as mattering; and she turns to

Jean-Luc Nancys distinction between globalisa-

tion and mondialisation, alongside Judith

Butlers treatment of the idea of grievable

life in the context of the global mediation ofviolence, to elaborate an account of how

the circulation of images renders a sense of

existence that is weighty in excess of human

meaning.

Many of the essays collected here were first

delivered as papers at a conference on the Limits

of the Human, held at the Australian National

University, 24 September 2009. Within an

overarching philosophical concern to critically

chart contemporary vicissitudes of the category ofthe human, and of limits of the human as places

of violence and hope, fear and creativity, we have

sought to develop articulations of these issues

that draw together scholars from across the

humanities to offer rich and nuanced stories,

conceiving the human at points of extreme

tension and signifying stress: as inheritor of the

highly ambivalent legacies of modernity; as

destroyer and potential guardian of nature; as

subject simultaneously of his-tories of progress and of the

threat that now hangs over all

the living or, indeed, world

itself.

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Debjani Ganguly

Humanities Research Centre

Australian National University

Sir Roland Wilson Building

120 McCoy CircuitActon

Canberra, ACT 0200

Australia

E-mail: debjani.ganguly@anu.edu.au

Fiona Jenkins

School of Philosophy

Research School of Social Sciences

Coombs Building

Australian National University

Canberra, ACT 0200Australia

E-mail: fiona.jenkins@anu.edu.au

editorial introduction