ABSTRACT

The phrase ‘before humanity’ is ambiguous, it refers to pastness, but also to presence and futurity. In doing so, it seems to encapsulate the current (posthumanist) climate in which the question of what it means to be human is being asked again with great urgency, in the context of new threats and fundamental technological and ecological change. Posthumanism, on the one hand, refers to the rush for ever smarter technologies that increasingly think with and for humans and, on the other hand, to the ever more urgent discussion about climate change, extinction angst, exoplanets, biopolitics and speciesism. It thus labels the ‘mess’ that arises once traditional humanist answers to the question of “what does it mean to be human?” are giving way to the uncertainty about what humans should do next. In this context, the critical posthumanism that I have been promoting in my work is aimed at evaluating, contextualising and historicising but also appreciating the resistance to the posthuman, posthumanisation, posthumanism or posthumanity. In this vein, ‘before humanity’ challenges posthumanist futurists and techno-utopians by foregrounding prefigurations, genealogies and disavowals of the posthuman through a rereading of paleoanthropology and the notion of ancestrality.