Transgenics of the Citizen (I)

Citizenship exposes non-humans and sub-humans—both animate and inanimate—to abandonment on the far side of its amity line. This essay explores how the figure of the human being designates a technical limit to the isometric principle of limitless access to civil and political rights. As zoon politikon, the human being inhabits a tautegorical enclosure, immuring itself from the claims of all other entities: there is no citizenship for robots or automaton chess players nor even for the wolf of Gubbio with his signatory paw, even while corporations are given rights of personhood. And yet: a pending South Korean Robot Ethics Charter signals that a new planetary order might be afoot.