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The fifteen tree species in my/our arboretum:

Beech
Sweet Chestnut
English Oak
Chilean Pine (Monkey Puzzle)
Hawthorn
Leylandia
Pine (2 varieties)
Evergreen (3 varieties)
Mountain Ash
Common Cherry
Californian Lilac
Holly

As might be imagined from the naming of the concept of post-humanism it is a critical concept, but one which remains trapped within the implications of the name post-humanism. It is not an affirmative, positive concept but is instead a negative position which is inscribed in the limits of the discourse. Within the concept of the post-human the negation of the humanist adversary takes place in the partial critique, the Aufhebung rather than by a deliberate forgetting of the humanist adversary. Just as atheism can be understood as a religion developed into a negative form, with the consequence that a post-secular thinker might even argue it is the modern variant form of religion and is the way in which some people manage to remain religious in the modern era, so the post-human critique makes itself the object of its object and remains within the field of the other (humanism) it critiques. The post-humanism concept remains within the partial critique of the concept it aims to transgress.

Here then we shall be considering the consequences of transgression, with the refusal of the category of transgression and implicitly for the work of thinkers like Bataille, because you either exit stage left without wasting time in a partial critique, because you want to be in a different domain than the adversary’s domain, for post-humanism this would be humanism or else you partially critique consequently always remain within the domain of humanism, really a negativity which contains nothing of the positive, nothing affirmative. This is the absence that one finds is Feuerbach and Adorno.

This is the logic that Marx explained when he said that socialism does not need atheism because atheism is positionally that of religion; it remains a critique. Equally for post-humanism what is important in the question it proposes is not its negativity but the position of the problem which remains humanism. In the movement from atheism to socialism there is not a critique but a displacement, so that new machines begin to operate which do not reference the prior problem but instead something entirely new. In this familiar terrotory then we find post-humanism which cannot leave behind its original relationship to humanism.

(Thanks to Lyoard)

True my metapolitics has always caused difficulties in this long term exchange, I agree that it marks perhaps the primary difference in our cultural, social and philosophical unsdertandings, at least if we ignore the related but more ontological issues of difference/equivalence. It’s not just the underlying belief that to understand, act and live within capitalism we must maintain our connection with Marxism, but also the lesson from Deleuze and 68 is that everything is political or in the softer version ‘maybe’. But still your right the core difference remains the marxism.

What the ‘different uses’ suggests to me is the opposite, that in the de-authored world of texts that I live in where Heidegger as a person is a facist madman but where the texts may be raided and used in the toolbox sense that Deleuze proposes and which I’m advocating with the idea of ‘use’, the texts may be useful. That ‘different uses’ is always political is I think independent of either the strong sense or the weak sense, though clearly I advocate the strong sense of the understanding where the political is not to be considered as being solely the domain of the human and where the restricted subset of the political which is generally advocated as a reflection of the world we live in is rejected.

The point of disagreement over the last paragraph is not in relation to the construction of a global socialist order, whatever we think this might be. But rather the difference is that you’ve had 30 years to have that discussion, to move things forward to allow and use the experimentation and compromise that Lyotard describes and argues for. To present and even construct philosophy as a place where this discussion can take place to arrive a suitable postmodern compromise… But it hasn’t happened. Instead there has been a continuing retreat so that what was once reactionary has become acceptable, has become the new norm, new fascisms sit on the horizon unquestioned, just waiting for their moment… So no - I think its time that we did something different; extend the space which is political into something broader and more all-encompassing, including not just the entirity of the everyday but beyond this into the longer term dreams of autonomy.

On Jupiter the skies are always blue,
from palest blue to deepest darkest hue

I’m still not sure that the piece on post-humanism will end up being written, its not that the multiplicity of ideas don’t work, because with the research review I’m carrying out as I prepare my notes demonstrates and confirms that, but that the time necessary to turn them into something concrete doesn’t seem to be there. The actual world sits on the margins of the text, the keyboard even and demands more attention…