On Ceasing to Be Human (review)

What would it be like to live not as a person but as something like a question? To live as what? Or as who? Clearly, in their various ways, many of the most compelling recent French thinkers are driven by something like this exorbitant thought experiment; it provides much of the radical force of their challenge to forms of life predicated on the violent fantasy of inviolable identity. At the opening of his wisely impassioned study of this challenge, with reference to Blanchot, Gerald L. Bruns summarizes its invitation as follows: ‘Imagine being no one, without properties or attributes, inaccessible to all predication’ (p. 1). In Stanley Cavell’s question, then, which Bruns takes as a guide: ‘Can a human being be free of human nature?’ In one lineage such a constitutive opening has, of course, frequently, if paradoxically, been regarded as the only ‘proper’ definition of the human: Bruns’s investigation shows how the thinkers he considers exacerbate the ethical questions that cluster around this paradox. Moved by ultra-ethical concern — affirming impersonal singularity as a way of suspending the reductive dialectic of identity that reduces an endless plurality of beings to primary self and secondary other — radical impersonality is happily, as Bruns’s patient discussions make plain, goaded here and there by an exorbitant call to responsibility, which keeps probing its limits and limitations. Displaying a broad understanding of recent anglophone moral philosophy and philosophy of consciousness, and in dialogue especially with Cavell, Bruns follows Blanchot, Levinas, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Derrida as they expose the pretension involved in fabricating the human subject as exclusive bearer of meaning, value, and identity, and seek to open other possibilities. These concern particularly relations between humans and animals: here Bruns provides notably rich accounts, in which Ovid and Kafka are also significant interlocutors. In many of the book’s sharpest moments, the tension at the heart of its problematic — the attempt to affirm the freedom of non-identity as in some sense a more profound form of ethical understanding — is delineated with exemplary precision; if some conflicts, and their attendant freight (Derrida/Agamben, say, or Deleuze/Bataille) are perhaps downplayed in its generous embrace, the book’s arguments are careful and urgent throughout. As Bruns shows, Derrida’s formulation of its ‘abyssal limit’ suggests that the human is in a sense always ceasing: as fantasies of self-sufficiency, or self-transcendence, certainly; but also as the insistent question of who, or what, might better respond to the restless multitude of beings, human and other, against which we have been tempted to define it. Never losing sight of the major import of its enterprise, this study is a fine demonstration of the sustained ethical seriousness called for and practised by the thinking it analyses, and a just celebration of attempts to find such a better response.