Published simultaneously at Immanence
A social media conversation prompted me to dig up something I had written in my notebook years ago after reading Serhii Plokhy’s masterful book on “premodern identities” in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Which in turn prompted me to realize that coronavirus provides an answer to the question I had just finished writing an article about — what it means to be “posthuman” (and why I find that term inadequate).
The question is “who are we?” The answers that have been provided over the centuries fall into three general categories:
- “We are X” (name your ethnic/national/cultural identity),
- “We are human” (the modern/modernist answer), or
- “We are something else (but not X and not exactly just human)” (e.g., animals, Devo, spirits in a material world, cyborgs, posthuman, becoming this or that, blah blah blah).
Here’s my contribution to answering that question.
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