ONTOPOLITICS OF THE AHUMAN: FROM (THE EXPANDED FIELD) OF THE HUMAN TO AFTER THE HUMAN

Text topic: Human

Text author: Андрија Филиповић

Writing about the archeology of human sciences, Foucault has shown that the modern concept of the human is a discursive effect, and that it can easily disappear once the configuration of power/knowledge has changed. Contemporary age is also called the Anthropocene - the age in which the Earth is irrevocably marked by human activities, and for exactly that reason it is necessary to theoretically and critically re-think the discursive effect called “the human“. In this paper, I will show that it is necessary to theorize that which is “after the human“ – the ahuman – in order to develop an image of the world without the human, which can serve as an ontological and political framework for thinking and doing in the age of contemporaneity. The theory of the ahuman would serve in that regard as a corrective to the multiplicity of conceptions which developed as critiques of the subject – antihumanism, posthumanism, transhumanism and other – which were still based on a certain, although expanded image, of the human.