Posthuman Temporality: Mitchell’s Ghostwritten

Dasein, as being, is always coming towards itself.

—Heidegger, Being and Time

This paper reads David Mitchell’s figuration of the posthuman subject, specifically its curious temporality, in relation to Heidegger’s notion of Dasein as itself an instantiation of futurity. In Being and Time Heidegger offers a way of coming to understand the human as temporally fixed as both futural and as a site of an aporetic historicality: in other words Being comes to know itself as a repetition of a prior—if not an a priori—repetition: “Dasein is as it already was, and it is ‘what’ it already was”; “Dasein ‘is’ its past in the way of its own Being” (Being and Time 41). My aim here is to explore a series of questions: If Heidegger’s representation of the doubly-inflected temporality of the subject holds, does Mitchell’s figuration of posthuman subjectivity as a continuum of repeating partial objects not stand as a confirmation of an all-too-human (rather than posthuman) position? Mitchell’s posthuman subject—one I will figure, after Blanchot, as a “subjectivity without any subject” (30)—is a subjectivity always oriented to the futural or imminent possibility of radical disaster and thus stands, it seems, as an almost perfect figure of the Heideggerian human, rather than as some variety of discontinuous posthuman. (In this way, of course, a Heideggerian reading of Blanchot’s figure of the disastrous subject would seem to confer on it, Blanchot’s subject, a counterintuitively stable relation to futurity and thus something approaching a firm humanity). Or does Mitchell’s figuration of the subject suggest, in a radicalized manner, that Heidegger’s work, in its focus on the aporia of human temporality, contains a subterranean, perhaps disavowed, even spectral, acknowledgment that the very idea of human Being must acknowledge the ends of the human, as such?

In this sense, a reading of Mitchell with Heidegger (rather than a reading of Mitchell through Heidegger) suggests that Heidegger’s model of subjectivity, as for instance articulated in “The Age of the World Picture,” in which the human “specifically takes up this position as one constituted by himself, intentionally maintains it as that taken up by himself, and secures it as the basis for a possible development of humanity” (219-20), must be called into question precisely as it fails to acknowledge a temporality—the subject as subject to rather than constituting itself in relation to both a lethally repeating past and a coming into a possible future mode of being—that effaces any question of a traditionally conceived humanist subjectivity. My interest here is to suggest that Mitchell’s figuration of human historicality, its position as carrier of what we may call the virus of traumatized subjectivity, must be read philosophically: we must, in other words, attend to the possibility that Mitchell’s novels offer another way of conceiving of the historical subject, what I initially term the post-human partial object and then, turning to Paul Virilio, the “traject.” The subject in Mitchell can only be fully comprehended as an instantiation of various traces of incompatible, because traumatized, temporalities. My conclusion here will be, of necessity, deeply speculative, as befits the speculative nature of both Mitchell’s and Heidegger’s work: can we begin to see Mitchell’s subject not merely as the all-too-human or merely an aporetically constituted posthuman, but as an emergence of something entirely other? Can we, perhaps, begin to give critical attention to the full temporal nuance of the “post” in posthuman, a term that inflects forward and backwards? Does this term post, not instantiate Being as both imminent and, to borrow from Heidegger, “what it already was”?

As my concern here is to explore the historicality of Mitchell’s subject—his or her relation to past and futural temporalities—a historicality that essentially figures the subject as partially present, coming into its pure possibility at some other time, as being fundamentally incomplete in its present time, I will begin with Heidegger and his conception of Being and historicality. In the introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger defines historicality and...