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October 1, 2006
I do not know the work of Dominique Janicaud at all. I have a vague understanding that Janicaud 's basic strategy with regard to Heidegger's work, with particular reference to the question of metaphysics and its overcoming, was that he opposed Heidegger's alternative between the completion of metaphysics in technology (Gestell), on the one hand, and the experience of meditative thinking (Gelassenheit), on the other.
Janicaud's position is often described as an overcoming of all claims at overcoming. So what does that mean? Is this a sort of reiteration of Heidegger's idea that we should cease all overcoming, specifically the overcoming of metaphysics? Does it mean that Janicaud understands 'meditative thinking' in terms of an abandoning of rationality? Does it mean that Dominique's critique of Heidegger's division between meditative thinking and technologized reason echoes Habermas's critique of Adorno's univocal notion of instrumental rationality opposed to aesthetic experience?
I have just come across this review of Dominique Janicaud's 'On the Human Condition' by Vicki Kirby, which helps. Kirby says:
Janicaud is wary of technology's ability to manipulate life. He sees in the Promethean dream of a scientific instrumentalism a desire to control and dominate Nature and to transcend human imperfection and finitude. Indeed, this unwelcome possibility is even heralded in a specific example: "the overcoming of the human by a Successor without face or body, but infinitely more intelligent and robust than us" (p. 27). Janicaud certainly concedes that life and intelligence could assume a silicon form, "a vast bank of self-programmed data, without any anchorage in flesh and blood" (p. 29). However, his point seems to be that even this "totally inhuman" operation that can overcome "the limits and moorings that made man's 'humus'" (p. 29) must remain tethered to its human creator. If there is, indeed, an inseparable and ironic relationship between the human condition and the power of technology to completely transform that condition, then the ethical responsibility for technology's threat and its promise remains with Man.
I don't know where the essays in 'On the Human Condition' fits into Janicaud's work. The above passage does resonate with the view that technology has the ability to manipulate life and lead humanity towards being inhuman. But it implies that the political and ethical consequence of technological change doesn't automatically herald the displacement or transcendence of the human condition. Instead, the assessment of innovations such as human cloning, genetic engineering, the promise of machine intelligence can only be made by returning to some notion of the human. How then is Janicaud wedded to humanism, given technology's ability to manipulate life?
Kirby quotes Janicaud:
However inhuman the universe produced by technology is, it still refers to the human, which is its source, uniquely capable of using it and giving it meaning. That which endangers humanity, then, really derives from itself: a freedom that turns against itself.
Kirby says Janicaud's point is that we should not conceive humanism in opposition to the inhuman -- the sub-human -- nor in opposition to the technological transformations and promises of the superhuman. The base animality of the subhuman as the inhuman? Does that mean humanism is identifed with consciousness instead of corporeality or embodied being?
Talking in terms of the base animality of the subhuman implies that our bodies are containers for consciousness and ignores the way that embodiment is lived out in its specificity and the way that it is socially and techologically situated in a culture where specific types of bodies (body images) are privileged. There is not a universal body as implied by the 'base animality of the subhuman' nor even two gendered bodies; rather we have multiple and shifting bodily modalities. We can talk in terms of body modalites---bodies in-use---because embodiment is more than the body being a surface for social inscription.
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