Sunday 18 February 2007

Idhumanity

Of 'the system' Lyotard says ‘the interest of humans is subordinate to that of the survival of complexity’ [7]. It seems to me that this is the awkwardness at the heart of The Inhuman, because, surely, complexity is also constitutive of the human; both in the sense that there are levels of complexity below which we do not recognise humanity, and also in the sense that humanity as a becoming is a process of heuristic complexification. But I guess this is to make the obvious point about Lyotard's 'inhumanity', that although it presents itself in opposition to a valorised 'humanity' in fact humanity is predicated upon a mode of inhumanity, and vice versa--inhumanity, that is, not unhumanity. Idhumanity, perhaps.

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