#the posthuman

“The inhuman nature of the artistic object consists of a combination of non-functionalism and ludic seductiveness. This is precisely what the surrealists meant by the ‘bachelor machines’ – an idea that Deleuze and Guattari adopted and transformed in the theory of ‘bodies without organs’ or a-functional and un-organic frames of becoming. Art, not unlike critical philosophy, is for Deleuze an intensive practice that aims at creating new ways of thinking, perceiving and sensing Life’s infinite possibilities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). By transposing us beyond the confines of bound identities, art becomes necessarily inhuman in the sense of nonhuman in that it connects to the animal, the vegetable, earthy and planetary forces that surround us. Art is also, moreover, cosmic in its resonance and hence posthuman by structure, as it carries us to the limits of what our embodied selves can do or endure. In so far as art stretches the boundaries of representation to the utmost, it reaches the limits of life itself and thus confronts the horizon of death. To this effect, art is linked to death as the experience of limits (Blanchot, 2000).”

In other words, in a posthuman perspective, the emphasis on the impersonality of life is echoed by an analogous reflection on death. Because humans are mortal, death, or the transience of life, is written at our core: it is the event that structures our time-lines and frames our timezones, not as a limit, but as a porous threshold. In so far as it is ever-present in our psychic and somatic landscapes, as the event that has always already happened, death as a constitutive event is behind us; it has already taken place as a virtual potential that constructs everything we are. The full blast of the awareness of the transitory nature of all that lives is the defining moment in our existence. It structures our becoming-subjects, our capacity and powers of relation and the process of acquiring ethical awareness. Being mortal, we all are ‘have beens’: the spectacle of our death is written obliquely into the script of our temporality, not as a barrier, but as a condition of possibility. This means that what we all fear the most, our being dead, the source of anguish, terror and fear, does not lie ahead but is already behind us; it has been. This death that pertains to a past that is forever present is not individual but impersonal; it is the precondition of our existence, of the future. This proximity to death is a close and intimate friendship that calls for endurance, in the double sense of temporal duration or continuity and spatial suffering or sustainability. Making friends with the impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way of installing oneself in life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor. We build our house on the crack, so to speak. We live to recover from the shocking awareness that this game is over even before it started.