Returning (to) the Question of the Human: An Introduction

So for us to deal with global warming, this will call for a farreaching transformation of knowledge—this pari passu with a new mutation of the answer (its "descriptive statement") that we give to the question as to who as humans we are.

—Sylvia Wynter, "Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?"

With each intra-action, the manifold of entangled relations is reconfigured. And so consequentiality, responsibility, and accountability take on entirely new valences. [. . .] Responsibility is not ours alone. And yet, our responsibility is greater than it would be if it were ours alone.

—Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway

The trivialization of human suffering in our time and the consequent indifference [. . .] has many causes. Relevant factors are, no doubt, the impact of the society of information and communication–the repetition of visibility without the visibility of repetition [. . .]. However, at a deeper level, the trivialization of suffering resides in the categories we use to classify and organize it [. . .].

—Boaventura de Sousa Santos, If God were a Human Rights Activist

When I speak of the human, it is perhaps also my way of being always traversed by the mystery of sexual difference. By the sort of double listening that I have, I am always trying to perceive, to receive, excitations, vibrations, signs coming from sexed, marked, different places; and then, in a certain place—barely a point, a full stop or a semicolon—the difference gives way to (but it is rather that the two great currents mix, flow into each other, so as only to be) what awaits us all: the human.

—Hélène Cixous, in Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints

To bridge means loosening our borders, not closing off to others. Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and without. To step across the threshold is to be stripped of the illusion of safety because it moves us into unfamiliar territory and does not grant safe passage. To bridge is to attempt community, and for that we must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to risk being wounded.

—Gloria Anzaldúa, "(Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces"

Guiding quotes provide the means by which we, as guest editors of this special issue entitled "The Ends of Being Human? Returning (to) the Question," would like to open this discussion. The thematic horizons toward which this title gestures are both overwhelming and discomforting. There is the rather ambiguous gesture of a "return (to)," which could easily be misinterpreted as implying nostalgia. There is the thematic anchor of "the human," for whose hegemonic humanist and exceptionalist incarnations we feel anything but nostalgia and whose reduction to white, Western Man and obfuscation of other traditions of humanism must be so urgently disrupted that one might wonder—in light of the decolonial, feminist, and posthuman(ist) critiques of Man—how a return to the human can avoid resuscitating these hegemonic humanist ghosts. There is also the modality of the question addressed by the title, which could easily be read as being in pursuit of something seemingly (to be) known, as if the answer was "out there"—or even the goal to reach. The title harbors all of these pitfalls, and more. And asking about (the ends of) being human is perhaps especially challenging in the context of an academic journal devoted to continental feminism, as it might unduly pull any return to the figure of the human into the tradition of continental philosophy and thus only its responses to the question of the human.¹ Therefore, to pretend that this collection of essays simply addresses any other question would be, to say the least, misleading. So, we opt to start this introduction very humbly under the guidance of the above citations and their different voices, taking inspiration here from Sylvia Wynter, whose texts also often begin with an assemblage of guiding quotes, and whose work has inspired so much more of this project. Yet, having selected these guiding texts for our introduction, we also acknowledge that they in no way exhaust what—or who...