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Simone Stirner: In a lecture in 2007, you expressed the wish for a five-year moratorium on speaking about the self, about the subject, its experience, its affects, rejecting the emphasis on the personal.1 The five years have passed, but I still apologize in advance for beginning my questions with a very subjective, even affective response to your writing. When I first read Chaos, Territory, Art, and, shortly after, Becoming Undone, I found the thinking you suggest quite challenging, at times unsettling, but also, in a strange way, comforting.2 Challenging, in its methodological turn to Darwin’s conception of life and the interventions it makes to decenter the human, rethinking the human in a gesture of moving beyond this category, toward other forms of life.

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Many contemporary thinkers strive to imagine what a world without human beings might be like. These thinkers include philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux conceptualizing an “ancestral” Earth pre-dating human life or Eugene Thacker testing how philosophy may––or may not––respond to horror of a “world-without-us”; they are journalists like Alan Weisman, author of The World without Us, a book that imagines what would happen to buildings and infrastructures if human beings mysteriously vanished; or paleobiologists like Jan Zalasiewicz, well known for his work on the Anthropocene, who in The Earth after Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? wonders whether, in a very distant future, an extraterrestrial intelligence could detect on Earth geological traces of a now gone human presence.

Why such an enthusiasm for reflections concerning the disappearance of humanity?

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Much about Philippe Descola is exactly what you end up deciding you might have expected from someone holding a chair at the Collège de France. So measured is his tone when discussing what is clearly an extremely wide learning that it becomes obvious that this is someone with the tact and discretion of a politician, and thus the capacity to survive the complex trajectory leading to a professor-ship at that almost inaccessibly elite institution. Nothing in his appearance disconfirms it: his considerable height, still full white hair and beard, and long, masculine face give him a patrician air that you, the disoriented foreigner, imagine to be like that of many of his Republican forebears interred up the hill in the Panthéon. Objective criteria agree—France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique conferred upon him its highest honor, a medallion d’or usually reserved for genius in the natural sciences, he presided until recently over the anthropological laboratory founded by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and a major, celebrated exhibition at Musée de quai Branley was a result of his work—while a first meeting at his office might as well be with a mid-level political official, the staff assuring you that the Monsieur, while running late, will still see you, and he himself later welcoming you to his office with entreaties to “Sit down, please sit down, make yourself comfortable!” that are accompanied by a stream of unprompted laughter so loud and prolonged that it unnerves you until you realize that it was intended to be reassuring. (This is famous laughter.)

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Slavery and colonialism not only catalyzed the conscription of black people into hegemonically imperialist and racialized conceptions of “modernity” and “universal humanity” but also inaugurated Western modernity’s condition of possibility, initiating a chain of events that have given rise to a transnational capitalist order. In light of this history, it stands to reason that we should critically remember New World slavery as epochal rupture.1 Slavery’s archival footprint is a ledger system that placed black humans, horses, cattle, and household items all on the same bill of purchase. This ledger’s biopolitical arithmetic—its calculation of humanity—dislocated, depersonalized, and collapsed difference, except in the area of market value. The ledger’s life promised the social death of those enslaved.

“Slave humanity” is an aporia with which we have yet to reckon and which, perhaps, marks the limit of the reckonable. Rather than view the paradoxical predicament of enslaved humanity through the lens of lack or absence, I contend that humanity itself is fractured and relational instead of a single trajectory or a unitary sign. In place of assuming the virtuousness of human recognition or humanization, I interrogate the methods upon which an imperialist and racialized conception of “universal humanity” attempted to “humanize” blackness.

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In the Oxford English Dictionary, the word shadow-box appears as a verb both transitive and intransitive: “to box (against) an imaginary opponent, as a form of training.” In his 1991 book translated as Ecological Enlightenment, the German sociologist and philosopher of risk Ulrich Beck uses the metaphor in the course of distinguishing “the new ecological conflict,” in which nothing is at stake except “negatives: losses, devastation, threats,” from “the old industrial conflict of labor against capital” that was (once upon a time) conceivable as a struggle for “positives: profits, prosperity, consumer goods.” Written in the aftermath of Chernobyl, Beck’s words bear repeating in light of recent catastrophes such as the BP–Deepwater Horizon oil hemorrhage in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 or the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear melt-downs in 2011, widely publicized accidents whose unfinished harm overlaps with, and cannot be separated from, the ongoing violence of systemic forms of energy-intensive resource extraction, including tar sands exploitation and gas-and oil-hydrofracking...

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To speak of the secular is to speak of the world. Or, more precisely, it is to speak of the age of the world, which for Christianity marked a time between the Christ’s advent and return, and which for the secular modern came to mark a time in which “religion” would be superseded. However one goes about parsing the continuities and/or discontinuities of Christianity and the secular, one ends up with the fact—the evident doing and making—of the world. This is to say that the world demonstrates an immense staying power, namely, the power to decide what stays (and what does not).

The world survives. It certainly survives its Christian formation, but if it does so through an apparent identification with the secular, it may nonetheless survive the critique of the secular. More essential than the question of whether the post-secular (as that which follows from the critique of the secular) diverges from the secular is the question of whether the post-secular (or the critique of the secular) diverges from the world. The survival of the world, after all, is a matter of reproduction, of a development and futurity that—even (or especially) when emergent in the guise of crisis or threat—manages to extend itself in ever more supple and micro-calibrated degrees.

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A review of Lowe, Lisa, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

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A review of de Certeau, Michel, The Mystic Fable, Volume Two, edited by Luce Giard, translated by Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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A review of Culler, Jonathan, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

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A review of Cheah, Pheng, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

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A review of Lee, Rachel C., The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (New York: New York University Press, 2014), and Weheliye, Alexander G., Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

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