On the One Hand, and the Other

The critique of instrumental reason is here complicated to grasp how the value of the humanities might be reworked at a moment when its founding concept, the human, is under pressure from many quarters. Drawing on a paleontological and technogenetical analysis that links the being and the concept of the human through the organ of the hand, this essay turns to consider how the “preeminence of the right hand” lends a certain critical force to the work of the left hand, a hand thought to gesture toward an other arising on the outer edge of the human. If the presumed homology of the two hands grounds the relation between the humanities and society, then “the other hand” urges us to think and engage the work sustaining this relation diff erently. Here the “Left” points to more than a space in a general assembly.