Inhumanity, Materiality, and the Machine: Benjamin, de Man, and Derrida on Translation

In The Inhuman, Lyotard complains that humanism keeps telling us not to question the human subject's privilege as the central focus of our thinking, and that it's damagingly irrelevant to seek an alternative focus for intellectual enquiry. But humanism is shutting the door after the horse has bolted: the horse (let's quickly replace that animal by the human being) has long since been running towards what some now call post-humanism. Impetus for this was given by the critiques of humanism: Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism," his response to Sartre, is wellknown, and in Levinas's Humanism of the Other, the "other" is emphatically not the Cartesian subject—the latter so often cast as place-holder and fall-guy for the sins of complaisant humanism or metaphysics tout court. Levinas agrees with Foucault's premonition of the closure of one epoch in humankind's history: it's now possible to discern new horizons for the human being: a "non-human order," for instance, "suited to the name that is anonymity itself: matter" (Levinas 48). Brute matter, mere stuff: this is the material from which humanity is made, and if an alternative humanism begins here, then the first order of business entails acknowledging that humanism has always feared to trade the intellectual, creative, and spiritual dignities of human beings against the insight that we are made of clay. Whether that acknowledgement means counterposing the human of humanism and the non-human depends, I take it, on how strongly humanism feels it has saturated the field, such that opposition to its visions and versions of "Man" can only imply radical negations of the human.

Levinas's text dovetails with his attempt to shift philosophy's attention from the self to the other in the name of the ethical imperative to respect the other. Yet insofar as Levinasian ethics requires that the self place no conditions on what the other is, then how far can such unconditionality go? Even to characterize the other as a fellow human being risks compromising the rigorously categorical notion of alterity Levinas asks the self to respect or be responsible for. But, Derrida asks in "Eating Well," if the self unconditionally affirms the otherness of the other, if responding to the other's call implies placing no conditions on the Who or What made that call, then we can hardly suppose that the call was placed by anything as philosophically conventional as the human subject. Philosophy almost runs out of road when it has to contemplate "the origin of the call that comes from nowhere, an origin in any case that is not yet a divine or human 'subject'" (Points 276). Moreover, "to say of this responsibility … that it is not 'human,' no more than it is 'divine,' does not come down to saying that it is simply inhuman. That said, in this regard it is perhaps more 'worthy' of humanity to maintain a certain inhumanity, which is to say the rigor of a certain inhumanity" (276). Levinasian ethics refuses premature designations of whatever summons us to responsibility. We must therefore restrain ourselves from determining this scene of call-and-response as a matter solely for humans. Such would be the (human) rigor of inhumanity.

These are some of contemporary philosophy's positions vis-à-vis the human, the non-human, and the inhuman. But besides this, the inhuman often names what humans fear: monsters, zombies, and automatons. Things like Kleist's marionettes, the subject of an essay by Paul de Man in The Rhetoric of Romanticism where their status—dead, playing at life—is disturbing. The uncanny puppet-body breeds thoughts of the cripple, of mutilation and dismemberment. De Man's assessment of Kleist orients me, in fact, to the subject of the present essay. To get closer to that subject, consider his essay "Kant and Schiller" in Aesthetic Ideology, where these marionettes re-emerge. We have to risk an apparent non sequitur, however: at one moment, de Man observes that there is a tension between the rules of a game and the arbitrariness of chance...