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Philosophy 224
Braidotti’s Posthuman
Pt. 2
Post-Anthropocentrism
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One of the central targets of Braidotti’s
critiques of the humanist tradition is its
anthropocentrism: the belief that human
beings are the most important species on
the planet.
◦ Human superiority could be grounded by:
1. The tenets of specific religious traditions;
2. A theory of value which privileges specifically
human capacities or qualities;
3. The claim that humans are the only, or the
highest, member of the moral community.
A Metaphysical Critique
The initial focus of Braidotti’s critique of anthropocentrism is
its underlying metaphysical assumption: a form of dualism
that separates humans from the rest of the nature.
 In opposition, Braidotti advocates a vitalist materialism.
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◦ The vitalism is evidenced in the claim that life is a property not
of individual entities, but rather a property of the substance as a
whole.
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This monistic understanding of the universe, argues Braidotti,
is the foundation of a critical posthumanism that avoids
anthropocentrism, and allows for the development of a new
understanding of the individual, “there is a direct connection
between monism, the general unity of all matter, and postanthropocentrism as a general frame for reference for
contemporary subjectivity” (57).
ConsumerCentrism
One of the most obvious problems with the
anthropocentric perspective, according to
Braidotti, is how easily it is co-opted and
deployed at the behest of anti-humanist forces.
 Consumerism provides us with one such
example: global capitalism trades on our feeling of
uniqueness to drive consumer demand for
products designed for obsolescence, catching us
in a cycle of consumption which makes us into
objects (purchasing machines).
 Life itself becomes a commodity.
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Zoe
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Braidotti goes on to present an alternative to this
consumerist individualism, advocating an emphasis on zoe, or
the generic animating life force which is a property not of an
individual or species, but rather of the whole of the material
universe.
◦ Zoe is the “dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself” (60),
of which anthropos or bios is just a thin segment.
Braidotti points to a zoe-centric worldview, or a worldview
that values generic life in all of its iterations, as the central
tenant of the post-anthropocentric turn, in that it effectively
decenters bios as the “measure of all things”.
 A posthuman theory of the subjective, therefore, could
emerge as “an empirical project that aims at experimenting
with what contemporary, bio-technologically mediated
bodies are capable of doing” (61).
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An Example: Becoming Animal
Braidotti (developing the work of philosophers
like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze) develops
a number of examples of how anthropocentrism
structures our understanding of ourselves and
our world and how a zoe-centered postanthropocentrism would focus our attention
differently.
 Let’s consider one: the human/animal ‘divide.’
 As typically conceived, this divide is premised on
an the assumption of an inherent inequality: the
anthropocentric assumption that these other
animals exist primarily in relation to humans.
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What is Animal?
One of the most common ways in which we employ this
divide is to reinforce it by virtue of animal proximity and
distance from us.
 Braidotti points out that animals have long been reduced to
metaphorical indicators of human virtues. In this way,
nonhuman animals become problematically reduced to
symbols for human attributes, and thus violently
reinterpreted through human norms.
 Braidotti points out that to change this violent imposition of
human attributes on nonhuman animals, what is needed is a
“system of representation that matches the complexity of
contemporary non-human animals and their proximity to
humans” (70).
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◦ Nonhuman animals can no longer be used as symbols to reaffirm
human centrality, but must instead be approached “in a neoliteral mode” as entities independent of human construct.
How are Animal?
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Alongside our self-valorizing discourse on animals is our use of
them, a use dominated by their instrumental or entertainment
value to humans.
◦ In this use, animals are embedded within advanced capitalist structures
not as individual entities but as statistics or products.
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In our post-anthropocentric globalized economy, “no animal is
more equal than any other, because they are all equally inscribed in
a market economy of planetary exchanges that commodifies them
to a comparable degree and therefore makes them equally
disposable” (71).
◦ The effect of this, interestingly, is that humanity is no longer at the top
of any constructed hierarchy. All individual animals, both human and not,
are interchangeable within the market economy.
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Again, what is needed is a turn to zoe-centric ethics, in which the
sustained preservation of generic life is the primary goal, and
therefore living things are not reduced to their utility or their
market value but rather, are understood as distinct and nonsymbolic entities.
The Other, the Inhuman
Another register in which Braidotti sees the
advantage of a posthumanist turn moves beyond
the animal, to a more general conception of the
other.
 Classically, the other of the human is the inhuman
‘other.’
 Whether understood as a human who has
rejected our common heritage, or the bruteness
of a nature with no regard for human needs or
interests, the otherness of the inhuman has been
understood as a limit of our moral concern, a
point beyond which moral reflection is no longer
applicable.
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The Techno-Commodity (again)
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This classical dichotomy, like so many of the categories of
classical humanism, is increasingly meaningless in the face of
the rapidly changing technological landscape.
◦ For example, the relationship between humans and machines is
increasingly moving from one of “self” and “other” into one of
mutual interdependence, as machines become increasingly
implicated into the definition of the subject.
Given this, the project of the third chapter is a defense of the
position that “the current historical context has transformed
the modernist inhuman into a posthuman and postanthropocentric set of practices” (109).
 As in the context of the critique of anthropocentrism,
Braidotti points to her “matter-realist” vitalism as a more
adequate basis for a discourse on death and mortality in our
technologically bio-mediated present and future.
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Moral Limits
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The classical way of understanding the limits of moral
discourse are increasingly running up against the complexly
mediated contemporary concerns.
One example Braidotti cites is the debate about climate
change.
Our way of addressing climate change commonly poses the
issue as a conflict between human and natural interests, a
dichotomization which belies the obviously interconnected
character of the terms of the conflict.
The result is a deep anxiety about the rapid disappearance or
destruction of “nature,” as well as a misguided understanding
of nature as something separate from humanity.
The classical moral concepts are unable to address the fact
of our unity with nature (zoe) and that any adequate moral
analysis is going to have to be a piece with and speak to this
unity.
For Life, it’s Death
The key feature of this unity is that all life stands
together. The death of the planet is also our death
(though obviously the inverse is not the case).
 What is needed for a posthuman ethic, is a more
sophisticated understanding of death.

◦ Only with such a development can progress be made
toward more sustainable and zoe-friendly public policy.
◦ In practice, a focus on zoe reinscribes the individual subject
within the whole of the substantial universe. In this way,
humanity can work toward a solution to the “posthuman
predicament”, which is Braidotti’s term for the “significant
changes in the status of the structure of the inhuman and
inhumane practices” (116).
An Example: Health Care
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An example of the consequence of not taking the zoe-centric perspective
is seen in the recent health care debate.
A popular classical perspective has been to encourage individuals to take
responsibility for their own physical fitness and well-being. While these
practices productively encourage a greater awareness of each of our
posthuman bio-organic existence, they also “pervert…the notion of
responsibility towards individualism” (116).
Institutions like national healthcare can be dismantled on the misleading
grounds that they function as “handouts” for individuals who refuse to take
responsibility for themselves.
This choice excludes those for whom the products necessary for a healthy
lifestyle are financially inaccessible; thus those who are already marginalized
within society become further marginalized, and can now be blamed for
their own marginalization.
In this way, the political policy is designed specifically to promote the
sustained life of those who are deemed to be the “healthy” normative core
of society and implicitly necessitates the death of those deemed unhealthy.
A (too quick) Conclusion
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There’s much more to this analysis than one example can account for, but given our
constraints, we can note a few salient feature of Braidotti’s posthuman theory of death
and morality.
The key is to recognize that, “[o]ne’s view on death depends on one’s assumptions about
life” (131).
For Braidotti, this refers to her matter-realist view of life as a generic force of “cosmic
energy”. The death of the individual, then, cannot be seen as the teleological end of life,
because life is not an inherent property of the individual, but rather the opposite: the
mortal individual is best understood as a kind of temporary echo chamber for zoe, the
temporality of which inherently means that death has always already occurred.
Death is not an indifferent and inanimate state of matter, but rather a position on on the
spectrum of vitality. For this reason, “Death is the becoming-imperceptible of the
posthuman subject and as such it is part of the cycles of becoming, yet another form of
interconnectedness, a vital relationship that links one with other, multiple forces” (137).
That is to say, both life and death are impersonal, generic expressions of zoe, and
understanding them as such has the potential to, ultimately, transgress ego and dissolve
the boundaries between subjective individuals, such that the primary focus of each
individual becomes the sustained existence of zoe.
Health care?