Anthropological Mutations

Abstract

This article takes up and develops Michel Foucault’s intuition (The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. Pantheon Books, New York (original French edition 1966), 1970) that modern anthropology, born in the seventeen and eighteenth centuries, would have envisaged the human being as an “empirical-transcendental subject”, thinking of humans as being torn between responsibility and determinism, between capacity and incapacity, between autonomy and heteronomy… The ‘disjunctive’ conception of these anthropological coordinates, which was dominant in the nineteenth century, where there was a harsh opposition between those who were capable and those who were not, depriving the latter (the poor, women, the insane, servants, workers…) of rights granted to the former, has gradually been replaced by a ‘conjunctive’ conception, as a response to numerous social struggles, seeing humans as being situated on an ‘anthropological continuum’, considering each person as being both capable and incapable, certainly fragile and vulnerable, but always resilient as well. This is an anthropological continuum that now extends beyond humans alone, to animals and anti-speciesism on the one hand, and to robots and transhumanism on the other.

Translation by Gail Ann Fagen.