Creation and Posthumanism

While, in the 2010s, “posthumanism” more readily evoked a technology-enhanced humanity with a fantasy of immortality driven by the Silicon Valley’s ideology, the term has taken on a different nuance in the 2020s regarding the concept of the Anthropocene, which has spread into the public sphere. Posthumanism still stipulates the overcoming of humanism, but aims more at reconsidering fixist ontologies, dualisms, and the place of exception or at the pinnacle of evolution that humans granted themselves. The challenge is to think of the living world without the prototypical reference of the human taken as a model through which we compare the “cognitive or sensorial capacities” of other living beings, thereby justifying a hierarchy of beings, without considering the particularity of each living’s own life. Various works attempt to approach the different perspectives of living beings, to imagine their point of view, in short, their Umwelt (Uexküll, Milieu animal et milieu humain (C. Martin-Fréville, Trans.). Éd. Payot et Rivages, 2010). But is it possible to detach ourselves from the human to think of the living in an absolute and radical difference, without the relationship to the same, for us humans endowed with speech? This is the question to address in a piece entitled “Qui parle donc?” (Who’s talking then?), which explores the listening capacities of plants. Using plants as a starting point, the author raises the question of other perceptive worlds, the singularity of the living, and the limits of our anthropocentric epistemologies. Posthumanism also questions, at a secondary level, the very “essence” of man, since studies in ethology and plants suggest that neither communication, sociality, technology, laughter, and representation of the past or future nor emotions are what characterize humans. Microbiology studies, on the other hand, question the notion of identity and sovereignty of the subject. This chapter questions what is it that allow us to distinguish between ourselves without looking forward into this distinction as an evolutive or remarkable advantage, and with the awareness that we all belong to a unique moment. Author then asks if this question is still relevant and if it is preferable to embrace a view that might be opened toward the multiple, the unstable, the entanglement in the dance of representation that humankind eventually constitutes. Transhumanism is linked to the notion of the Anthropocene, which certainly marks a turning point in the presumed neutrality of the use of instrumental rationality and the ideological base that has sustained it. On the one hand, some are aware of the need to revise our modes of relation with the environment in which we are immersed through various proposals, albeit literary, artistic, or judicial; on the other hand, the technopositivist belief persists, tempering these announced philosophical and lifestyle changes.