Comparative Critical Studies 9.3 (2012): 365–378Edinburgh University PressDOI: 10.3366/ccs.2012.0069C© British Comparative Literature Associationwww.euppublishing.com/ccs

The Humanism in PosthumanismKATE SOPER

PRELIMINARY REMARKS

The growth in environmental concern during recent decades hasprompted much discrimination around the concept of ‘nature’, andthis has been reflected in the now complex and ramifying field of eco-philosophy. But in a broad brush way we can distinguish between twomain tendencies: on the one hand, in the calls to re-value nature asa site of intrinsic value, to recognize our kinship and continuity withother living creatures, and to abandon anthropocentric conceptions ofhumanity’s privileged place within the eco-system, we have been witnessto what can be termed a ‘nature-endorsing’ tendency. Nature endorserslament the loss or erosion of nature, emphasize human dependencyon the planetary eco-system, and demand that we both acknowledgeenvironmental limits and revise our consumption with a view to keepingwithin the confines they impose. As a counter to this, on the otherhand, although sharing some of its naturalistic arguments on human-animal affinities, we have the contructionist tendency that emphasizesthe formation or mediation of human culture in whatever comes to countas ‘nature’. This approach is sceptical of any redemptionist appeal tonature’s powers, while also often celebrating the breakdown of clear-cut distinctions between artifice and nature (organic and inorganic) asan emancipatory advance.

Both sides to this debate have important things to say and need tobe heard. But both, too, it can be argued, fail to distinguish adequatelybetween differing invocations of the idea of nature or to explore thecoherence of their normative implications. The ‘hands off’ natureapproach to conservation encouraged by the endorsing perspective hasoften proved too ready to give preference to wilderness preservationfor the eco-tourists over the welfare of indigenous peoples; or tooquick to make humanity in general responsible for the environmental

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destruction associated with the pursuit of Western-style affluence. At itsmost extreme, it can licence the totalitarian control of human populationadvocated by some adherents of deep ecology. The constructivistposition, on the other hand, is at risk of denying or abstracting fromenvironmental pressures altogether. The treatment of ‘nature’ as acontinuously revisable signifier does little to address material damage tothe environment; nor does the unqualified stress on socialization give duerecognition to the ‘nature’ that grounds bioscience and environmentalchange and always constrains the forms of their intervention.

We need, therefore, to be endorsing of nature in the sense ofallowing that it provides the independent and permanent ground of allhuman bio-activity and environmental change (and to recognize thatthis ‘nature’ is always at work in the formation of historically changingand culturally conditioned life forms and environmental effects). But wealso need to resist the naturalism of those who would assimilate humanpatterns of need and consumption to those of other animals, ratherthan highlighting critical differences – and the role of those differencesboth in creating, and (potentially) in resolving ecological crisis.1 It ishuman ways of living, after all, that – much in contrast to the cyclicaland reproductive mode of existence of other animals – are wrecking theplanet, and humans alone who can do something about it. In otherwords, relative to other creatures, human beings are under-determinedby nature, and the possibilities of action available to them that muchgreater in consequence.2 As biological organisms, we are certainly limitedin our capacities and we have a number of requirements or instinctualresponses that we share with other animals and that we cannot resist (tobreathe, take in food and drink, excrete, etc.). But beyond those, the areaof reduced or under-determination is very vast. Hence the variety andcomplexity of lifestyle options open to human beings relative to otheranimals.3

It is not, therefore, by reference to the intrinsic qualities of non-animate nature nor by recalling us to our fundamental kinship withother living creatures, that we can best address – and improve upon – ourcurrent ecological situation, but by confronting the distinctivelyhuman appetite for innovative forms of cultural transcendence andindividualizing self-expression. Viewed in this light, the key ecologicalproblem is whether we can find ways of living rich, complex, creative,non-repetitive lives without social injustice and without environmentaldamage. The focus, in short, should fall less on the adoption of the‘right’ attitudes to, or ways of valuing nature, and more on the conditions

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of human fulfilment and how these can be secured in an ecologicallysustainable mode. To accept this focus would be to challenge those (andthey are well represented among eco-critics) who think environmentalpolitics has more to do with appreciating ‘nature’ than with revisingideas about ‘progress’, ‘prosperity’ and human flourishing. It would beto question the adequacy of an approach that points to some Spinozanor Deleuzian unity and play of forces as linking us all into an endlesslyrhizomic universe. This is not so much because the argument isontologically mistaken but because it invites a positivism and fatalismof approach. To point out that we are all inter-connected in ‘nature’and share much more with other animals than we previously thoughtis all very well. But what is important eco-politically is recognition bothof the role of humanity in bringing about ecological collapse, and of thedistinctive capacities humans alone have to monitor, and in principle, toadjust their behaviour and environmental impact.

Such arguments, however, presuppose distinctively human demandsfor self-realization and self-expression, and the capacities of reason,language use, imagination and so forth, needed to act on thosedemands. They are rooted, in other words, in a commitment to human‘exceptionalism’ of a kind that has been challenged by some of the morerecent ecological claims that have been termed ‘posthumanist’. So I shallturn now to consideration of the rationale and coherence of that challengein a bit more detail, beginning with some general remarks about theemergence of this spectrum of thought.

POSTHUMANISM: A COHERENT FRAME FOR THINKING ABOUT

HUMANS AND OTHERS?

Questions about where to draw the lines of division between humans andanimals (and between the organic and inorganic, since that is also at issue)have a long history. But they are being posed today in a novel form in thesense that the current concern is less with finding and fixing the criteriafor drawing clear demarcations between human, animal and machine,and more with winning acceptance to the idea that these borders aremore blurred than we previously thought. Very often, moreover, claimsto this effect come with a suggestion that it is ecologically progressiveand/or humanly emancipatory to break down these conceptual barriersand commit ourselves to less rigid, fuzzier modes of thinking.4

Advances in genetics have prompted some of this kind of thinking,given the new questions they pose about where to draw the divide

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between the artificially contrived and the naturally given. So, too,have developments in IT, and there are so-called ‘connectionists’and advocates of ‘Emergent Artificial Intelligence’ who emphasizethe unpredictable, non-rule governed and non-determined qualities ofthe most sophisticated computers, and view these as ‘psychologicalmachines’.5 (Conversely, the human mind is often seen in cognitivescience as best understood on the computational model).

The politics of animal liberation has also, of course, as alreadyindicated, prompted reconsideration of humanist approaches to thehuman-animal divide. This ‘ecological naturalism’ represents a spectrumof positions within which there are important philosophical divisions,but what is common to all those sharing its anti-dualist perspectiveis a resistance to treating the differences between humans and otheranimals as anything but matters of degree within an essential ontologicalcontinuity, and the assumption that the more we come to recognize thisand hence the fluidity of the divide between the human and the animals,the more eco-friendly our policies are likely to be, or, at any rate, theless tolerant we shall become of the maltreatment of animals.6 In thecyborg thinking of Donna Haraway and her followers,7 we have beeninvited to blur or collapse both the organic-inorganic and the human-animal opposition in favour of an ontology that cheerfully accepts the‘leakiness’ of these boundaries, and revels in the emancipatory potentialof cyber-technology to destabilize and revise existing constituencies andidentities.8 Thus we find, in their influential work on the conditionof global ‘empire’, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri arguing that theprimary condition of political progress is ‘[. . .] recognition that humannature is in no way separate from nature as whole, that there are nofixed and necessary boundaries between the human and the animal, thehuman and the machine, the male and the female, and so forth; it isthe recognition that nature itself is an artificial terrain open to ever newmutations, mixtures and hybridizations’.9

Support of a more general philosophical kind for this type ofontological destabilization and revision has also come from the anti-foundationalist shift in philosophy, most influentially in the argumentsof Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. One might particularly note hereDerrida’s last writings on animals, and his presentation of our intuitivedemarcations between human and non-human ‘others’ as a form ofunwarranted conceptual policing.10 Derrida, Singer and the cyborgistsmight seem strange bedfellows in certain respects, but there are somestriking parallels between recent Continental animal philosophizing and

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arguments produced – albeit in a very different style – much earlierwithin Anglo-American environmental ethics (on this subject see the2004 volume Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity, co-edited by PeterAtterton and Matthew Calarco).11

There are also of course some notable contrasts between these variousthinkers, and in that sense it may be misleading to assimilate themunder some general ‘posthumanist’ umbrella. But certain themes doemerge as held in common: the decentering of the ‘humanist’ subject; theproblematization of the human-animal distinction as capable of providingethical guidance on the treatment of non-human animals; and a resistanceto allowing that attributes, notably language use, traditionally viewed asconfined to humans, are to be theorized as exclusive to us. A resistance,if you like, to the idea of any definitive ‘exceptionalist’ stance.

Now I should make clear that I am not taking issue with everycomponent of this ‘posthumanist’ spectrum of thought, and indeedaccept the importance of certain forms of its critique of the ‘humanist’subject. In defending ‘human exceptionalism’ I am not defendinga Cartesian conception of the human subject as exhaustively self-knowing and autotelic (self-directing). I accept the wisdom of agreat deal of what follows from the Nietzschean-Marxian-Freudianand, more recently, Foucauldian-Derridean-Deleuzian post-structuralistcritique of the ‘humanist’ subject conceived as an epistemologically self-transparent all-knowing, all-seeing agent of history. Human persons,like other creatures, are subject to trans-individual systemic processesand pressures, not least language and other semiotic systems, that arepresupposed to their forms of consciousness and communication ratherthan purely expressive tools of them; and these structures are in manyways beyond their ken or controlling intervention. Posthumanists areright in that sense to point to the ways in which modes − and the verymeans of − communication are involved in what it means to be human atany given point in time. As Derrida puts it in speaking of the transitionfrom paper use to electronic media, the ‘history of paper’ is

tangled up with the invention of the human body and hominization. It also revealsanother necessity: we will not be able to think through or deal with or treat thisretreat without general and formalized (and also deconstructive) reflection on whatwill have been meant [. . .] by being-beneath, the submission or subjectedness ofsubjectivity in general.12

We have to recognize, in short, that such media technologies haveshaping effect on what it is to be human, even though, I would want

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to insist, they do not have the final say. I would also, secondly, dissociatemy ‘humanism’ from a speciesist arrogance licensing cruelty to, or ethicaldisregard for other sentient species, companionate, domestic or wild. Inthis respect, I tend for the most part to prefer the language of speciesdifferences rather than to talk in terms of superiorities, higher and lowerforms of animal being, and so on (even though it is impossible to keepthe idea of hierarchy out of the picture altogether). I am also personallymyself, I would have to confess, a confused sentimentalist about non-human animals, an occasional meat-eater who cannot bring herself to killa fly or a wasp, and a fantasist about the lives of my pet cats, with whomI still converse almost daily about a range of practical, philosophicaland aesthetic issues even though they are all now dead by some years.Let me add, too, that I find descriptions of animal cruelty in literatureamong some of the most painful and haunting to read (the horse floggingscene in Tolstoy’s Revolution; the rabbit amputated during the harvest inLawrence’s The Rainbow; the dog drowning episode in John McGahern’sMemoir (the dog escapes from the sack the first time, only to be tied upmore firmly and flung in the sea again). And there are many more.

So I can empathize with those who seek support for lessanthropocentric ways of thinking about human-animal relations. In thatconnection, I would endorse a good part of the argument of those − theyinclude, for example, Haraway, Cary Wolfe, Cora Diamond, Derrida,and others − who want to problematize the discourse of ‘rights’ in itsapplication to animals on the grounds that it rests on an inadequateconception of justice: one that fails to see that what generates our moralresponse to animals and their treatment is not some distanced andimpartial calculation of what ‘rightful’ consideration is due to them, butrather our sense of the mortality and vulnerability we share with them,and the compassion that goes with that. ‘The mistake’, as Diamond hasput it, ‘is to think that the callousness [to animals] cannot be condemnedwithout reasons which are reasons for anyone, no matter how devoid ofall human imagination or sympathy’.13 Elizabeth Costello, the vegetariannovelist in J. M. Coetzee’s novel, The Lives of Animals, makes a similarpoint when she argues that true empathy with animals would not beexercised by seeing how far they approximate to mentally deficienthuman beings.14 In other words, she implies, there is something ethicallyill-judged in applying the yardstick of reason at all.

But it is precisely with a view to sustaining the philosophical coherenceof this kind of position, with its appeal to the distinctive role of humanimagination and sympathy in generating moral response, that we need,

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I submit, to defend human exceptionalism, and resist blurringthe human-animal divide. Diamond herself, although influential onposthumanism, fully accepts this when she argues that the concept ofthe ‘human being’ is ‘the main source of that moral sensibility which wemay then be able to extend to nonhuman animals’. In explanation, shewrites,

[. . .] if we appeal to people to prevent suffering, and we, in our appeal, try toobliterate the distinction between human beings and animals and just get peopleto speak or think of ‘different species of animals’, there is no footing left fromwhich to tell us what we ought to do, because it is not members of one amongspecies of animals that have moral obligations to anything. The moral expectationsof other human beings demand something of me as other than an animal; and wedo something like imaginatively read into animals something like such expectationswhen we think of vegetarianism as enabling us to meet a cow’s eyes. There is nothingwrong with that; there is something wrong with trying to keep that response anddestroy its foundation.15

Or as she has earlier put it, ‘the ways in which we mark what humanlife is belong to the source of moral life, and no appeal to the preventionof suffering which is blind to this can in the end be anything but self-destructive16 (Stanley Cavell reveals something of the same sensibilitywhen he writes, ‘what is so human is that we share the fact with otheranimals, that animals are also our others. That we are animals. Beingstruck with this is something one might call ‘seeing us as human’. It is afeeling of wonder’17).

Extending on this, I would argue that we have to recognize not onlythat humans are alone in the position to extend moral status to otheranimals, but also that in the absence of the distinctive concept of the‘human’ there can be no form of moral discrimination whatsoever, noargument even to the effect that animals should be treated on a parwith us as subjects, and so forth. . . ; and while it may be true that wecannot finally know how the world is subjectively experienced by othercreatures, we know enough to know that they do not represent us eithercognitively, or morally, or aesthetically; nor can they think of themselvesas having responsibility towards us in the way that many humans dotowards them. I am not denying here that some companion animals, dogsin particular, will sometimes exercise quite striking forms of care andconcern for their particular owners or handlers. What I mean is that otheranimal species do not conceive of, nor exercise, any universally applicableform of concern for the members of other animal species, humansincluded. I mean, too, that they have not produced representations of us

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humans − whether orally or in writing or pictorially − nor philosophicalarguments in any form about their relations with us. The sensibility thatmakes us (or should make us) hesitate about assimilating other animalspecies too closely to human beings must surely also allow us to recognizethe extent of failure of reciprocity at this level between ourselves andother creatures. Not only can no other animal recognize a right or feel anobligation to respect it; most other animals are also profoundly indifferentto the welfare of other species beings, and fortunately so in many ways.Most animal species, including some of the more popular with humanbeings, would die of starvation were they to experience any human-stylemoral compunction about the suffering of the other creatures they dailycatch, tear apart and eat alive. What is more, none of them can begin toimagine what it is like to be a human being, let alone write about thatimagining. In its narrative of saintly self-abnegation to animal interest,Seamus Heaney’s poem, ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’, offers a poignantreflection in its opening verses on some of these extreme asymmetries ofsensibility:

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, insideHis cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiffAs a crossbeam, when a blackbird landsAnd lays in it and settles down to nest

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, thetucked

Neat head and claws and, finding himself linkedInto the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his handLike a branch out in the sun and rain for weeksUntil the young are hatched and flown.18

Human exceptionality is here manifest, not in some arrogant indifferenceto animal well-being, but in self-abnegation to the animal’s ends.Whether it be prayer, compassion, imagination, or the writing of poetry:they all, in differing ways, speak to the nature of the abyss betweenourselves and all other animals, however divergent they are in theirparticular species characteristics and capacities. This abyss should berespected both culturally and politically even as we continue to ponderits implications and what we should do about it.

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But it is an abyss, it seems, denied by those who refuse to grantthe importance of the cognitive and emotional characteristics specificto human beings – and denied incoherently insofar as the denial itself ispresented as some form of ethical advance. Some posthumanists comevery close to denying that there are any significant differences at allbetween humans and other animals. Thus Tim Morton, in his recentbook The Ecological Thought, writes,

‘Do nonhumans possess language? Yes. How about imagination? Check. Reason?Copy that. [. . .] Can nonhumans feel compassion? Of course. Do they have asense of humour? Why not? [. . .] Humans are fairly uniquely good at throwingand sweating: not much of a portfolio. . . ’ ‘The ecological thought’, then ‘shouldnot set up consciousness as yet another defining trait of superiority overnon-humans . . . ’.19

But even when differences are acknowledged, the problem remainswhenever these are treated as all on a par. Haraway, for example,accepts that there are differences between all species of animals, humansincluded, but she seems to want us to accept that there is no reason toprivilege any species over any other. On the contrary, in her recent book,When Species Meet, she talks of the ‘fantasy of human exceptionalism’,and describes it as an ‘outrage’.20 But I think if we take these argumentsat face value, we cannot at the same time grant them ethical status.For example, if we seriously question whether we should continue toprivilege human intellectual and emotional capacities in our dealingswith other forms of being, then this new posthumanist schema willalso subvert the range of normative distinctions associated with theearlier moment of human exceptionalism. If we were indeed to giveup any privileging of distinctively human characteristics, including,presumably, the idea of the human person as enjoying some specialclaim to self-realization, then why should we any longer find the idea ofthe clone morally problematic or think of cloning as undermining ourhuman species-being? The issue becomes even more acute in relationto machines. Even those who would have us blur the mind-machineconceptual division, have argued for it on the basis of the quasi-mind-possession and ‘ensouled’ qualities of advanced computerization. But ifthese capacities or attributes are themselves regarded as problematic,because rooted in some regrettably ‘humanist’ endorsement of humanpowers of cognition and reflexivity, in some preferring of ‘minds’ and‘souls’, then why should the approximations of artificial intelligence tohuman capacities be accorded any special attention in this context? Why,

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indeed, should any more value be accorded to robots and computers thanto electric whisks or shavers?

THE IMPLICIT COMMITMENT TO HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM

But let me return at this point from these somewhat extremespeculations, and focus more narrowly on the way in which the wilderreaches of this kind of conceptual absurdity are only avoided because ofwhat I would claim is an implicit commitment to human exceptionalismto be found in the more interesting parts of the argument of those whopresent themselves as having gone beyond that framework.

Let us take here, as one example, Donna Haraway’s argument thatwe need to become more ‘caring and responsible’ in our killing ofnon-human animals, or in our experimentation with them. We can killand use animals in experiments, she suggests, but we must do it more‘responsibly’, not in a way that presumes our human superiority orexceptionality. Certainly, fewer animals might die or suffer through ashift to that more accountable regime. But why, in the last analysis,can we be justified in continuing to kill or experiment with them atall, however responsibly we do it, if there is no recognized ground ofour own ‘right’ to do so – no acknowledged quality of being humanthat can be invoked to legitimate animal eating or experimentation?Haraway cannot have it both ways – either there is something specialabout us humans which can justify the instrumental exploitation of othercreatures, or there is not, and if, – as she seems to claim in talking ofhuman exceptionality as a ‘fantasy’ and ‘outrage’ – there is not, then wesurely cannot on her argument tolerate that form of abuse?

Let me stress here, it is not that I think she is mistaken in supportingmeat eating or even animal experimentation, and I can go along withher advice about our need to be more responsible in the methods andtechniques we bring to it. My quarrel is with the incoherence of thearguments she adduces in support of this – which, I suggest, can onlyprove persuasive because reliant on a tacit acknowledgement of thehuman exceptionalism she claims she is explicitly rejecting.

These thoughts echo an earlier article in which I criticized Haraway’sdiscourse in ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’ on the grounds that her callfor ‘responsibility’ in the construction of boundaries between humans,animals and machines was undermined by her advocacy of the pleasuresof their blurring and confusion.21 Given the emphasis placed by theargument for animal liberation on the bodily suffering caused by the

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abusive machines of agribusiness, I suggested that it was difficult to seehow Haraway could both defend human-animal connectedness and avoida romantic-redemptive framework of thinking about ‘nature’. But I alsoargued that it was better for Haraway to be guilty of confusion than tohave opted for the kind of soul-less techno-determinism that some othercritics might find more consistent with her cyborg argument.22

Her equivocation in The Manifesto, in other words, testifies to the self-defeating quality of any attempt to promote cybernetic posthumanismas ethically progressive. And much the same can be said of Haraway’ssubsequent discussions of Oncomouse and ‘cyborg anthropology’ inModest Witness. How, she asks there, are natural kinds to be identifiedin the late twentieth-century realm of aliens and transpecifics? Whatkinds of crosses and offspring count as legitimate and illegitimate, towhom and at what cost? ‘Who are my familiars, my siblings, and whatkind of liveable world are we trying to build?’.23 The questions seemcompelling, their moral dilemmas very apt for our times, but they appearso, arguably, only because we still do (and cannot but) observe ourorganic-inorganic, human-animal, conceptual discriminations. The ironyof any posthumanist invitation to collapse these distinctions is that if wewere wholly able to do so, we would no longer recognize the force ofthe moral issues we are being called upon to address. We would haveconceptually undermined the conditions for any form of moral, politicalor scientific critique. At that point, we might well want to ask if such asituation could be truly liveable.

Posthumanism, then, is better seen as a re-imagining of what it meansto be human, than as an attempt to go beyond human exceptionalism, andthe most persuasive of the posthumanist discourses are those which areprepared to recognize and talk about the lurking humanism of the formsof questioning of the nature and limits of the ‘human’ that are opened upthrough the posthumanist project. For in the last analysis, the rhetoricaladdress of the posthuman is always a call that makes sense only as anappeal to those already within the human community, even if it invites areappraisal of the confines or self-imaging of that community.

To make these points is, I grant, to invoke the critical Enlightenmentframework of thinking about human development that posthumanistshave sought to deconstruct. Yet there is a paradox at the heart ofthe ethico-political project of that deconstruction, given that the morecomplex and flexible forms of personal fulfilment that it seeks to openup around issues of self-expression, animal connectedness, gender,sexuality, disability, and so forth, have, in truth, much more in common

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with the Enlightenment project for self-realization than any priorframework of thinking about human freedom, subjectivity and self-expression.

We need, then, to resist the posthumanist resistance to making clearthe inevitable reference back to human beings as uniquely placed torepresent or reconceptualize their own and other forms of being. Ofcourse, there are some very attractive discourses that pretend otherwise,ranging from the eagle in Book Two of Chaucer’s ‘The House of Fame’who offers his instruction to ‘Geoffrey’ on linguistic semiotics andthe qualities of rumour, via Murr the Cat and the ‘It’ books of theeighteenth century through to contemporary animal-authored fictionsand discourses. But we all accept these for the conceit that they are, justas we ought to accept that it is a conceit to suppose that the forms ofconceptual revision invited from a posthumanist perspective do anythingto alter the incapacity of any but human beings to appreciate or act onthe revisions that are recommended. Posthumanist representations andontological claims, to put it crudely, are produced exclusively by and forhuman beings, and no other animal, a fortiori, no tree or stone, will everquestion its own status as a being, let alone produce a commentary on itsobservations on Derrida’s nudity.

Let me add finally by way of linking back to my earlier pointson ecological politics, that as part of my humanist position I havealways wanted to emphasize the quite unique ecological destructivenessof human beings. Much in contrast to the cyclical and reproductivemode of being of other animals, human beings are squandering theplanet’s resources through their commitment to the growth economyand its model of prosperity: a model rooted in ever-expanding materialconsumption, much of it driven now by ever more aggressive brandmarketing, ‘fast’ fashion, the continuous invention of ‘new’ needs whoseproducts are junked within weeks, or never used.

What needs emphasizing here, is not so much our kinship with otherspecies but our species-specific rapaciousness and endless creation ofwaste. Capitalism, consumerism, the shopping mall culture: all thiscan be viewed in the broadest sense as generated in response to thisappetitive dynamic which makes us quite distinct from other creatures.Yet not only is constant expansion of desire and consumption relianton social exploitation, it is also clearly ecologically unsustainable, andbecoming much more widely acknowledged as such. This indicates aneed to re-think the nature and conditions of human flourishing insuch a way as to shift the dynamic of human pleasures and modes ofself-fulfilment away from its current consumerist model of satisfaction

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and allow gratification through other, less polluting and resource-intensive modes of consumption.24

Relative to other animals, we are, as earlier suggested,‘underdetermined’ in respect of the forms of our satisfaction, pleasureand fulfilment, and thus uniquely placed to engage in consciousrethinking about the essentials of the ‘good life’. Global stability,which is itself dependent on a fairer distribution of resources and life-enhancing opportunities, will ultimately depend on the degree to whichwe manage to achieve such redistribution. My ‘humanism’ is in theserespects very much about getting human beings to recognize their uniqueresponsibilities for creating and correcting environmental devastation,both for themselves and for other species, and the more pleasurable livesthey − and many other creatures − could enjoy were they to do so.

NOTES

1 Kate Soper, What is Nature? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), and ‘Nature/“Nature” ’,in FutureNatural, edited by George Robertson et al. (London and New York:Routledge, 1996), pp. 22–34.

2 Soper, ‘Nature/“Nature” ’, pp. 32–33.3 See the following authors:

Kate Soper, ‘To Each According to Their Need?’, New Left Review, 197(January-February 1993), 112–128 (p. 118). Christopher Berry, The Idea ofLuxury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Sabina Alkire, ‘Needs andCapabilities’, in Soran Reader, The Philosophy of Need (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005), pp. 22–251.

4 For a fuller account, see Kate Soper, ‘Humans, Animals, Machines’, New Formations,49 (Spring 2003), 99–109.

5 Sherry Turkle, ‘Romantic Reactions’, in The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans,Animals, Machines, edited by James J. Sheehan (Berkeley and Oxford: Universityof California Press, 1991), p. 226.

6 See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (London: Pimlico, 1975); ‘All Animals areEqual’, in Animal Rights and Human Obligations, edited by Tom Regan and PeterSinger, 2nd edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989). See also Ted Benton,Natural Relations (London: Verso, 1993).

7 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature(London: Free Association/Routledge, 1991); ModestWitness@Second Millennium:FemaleMan© Meets OncoMouse™ (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); WhenSpecies Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).See also Robert Peperell, The Post-Human Condition (Exeter: Intellect Books, 1995);Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard, CT: Harvard University Press,2000); Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 2010).

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8 Haraway echoed the calls of the ecological naturalists when she argued that‘nothing convincingly settles the separation of human and animals’ and claimedthat ‘movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness,but clearsighted recognition of this connectedness’ (Simians, Cyborgs and Women,pp. 151–152). But she also insisted in the Manifesto that there are no longer cleardelineations to be drawn between humans and machines, that we have all becomefabricated and chimeric hybrids of machine and organism, and that the cyborg canprovide us now with both our ontology and our politics.

9 Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 215–216.10 The ‘other’, Derrida tells us, in advocacy of his ‘yes to the stranger ethic’ should

never be defined in advance: not as subject, self-consciousness, not even as animal,God, person, man or woman, living or dead’. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Deconstructionof Actuality’, Interview, in Radical Philosophy, 68 (Autumn 1994), 28–41, thisquotation p. 32; cf. ‘ “Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interviewwith Jacques Derrida’, in Who Comes After the Subject?, edited by Eduardo Cadava,Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 96–119; forDerrida on animals, see Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am’, andDavid Wood ‘Thinking with Cats’, in Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity, editedby Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 111–144.

11 Atterton and Calarco, Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity (see note 10).12 Jacques Derrida, Papier machine : le ruban de machine à écrire et autres réponses (Paris:

Galilée, 2001), translated by Rachel Bowlby as Paper Machine (Stanford : StanfordUniversity Press, 2005), p. 41.

13 Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit, Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), p. 334.

14 John Maxwell Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, edited and introduced by AmyGutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 30–31.

15 Diamond, The Realistic Spirit, p. 333.16 Ibid., p. 325–326.17 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 412.18 Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (London: Faber, 1996), pp. 20–21.19 Tim Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2010), pp. 71–73; cf. Tim Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking EnvironmentalAesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

20 Haraway, When Species Meet, pp. 11–12, 106, 295.21 Kate Soper, ‘Of OncoMice and FemaleMen: Donna Haraway on Cyborg Ontology’,

Women, a Cultural Review, 10.2 (1999), 167–172.22 In this connection, I cited the complaint of one of her critics that Haraway

demonstrated ‘a humanist prejudice against the idea of machinic nature’, and wasguilty of ‘locating the notion of the cyborg within a pre-critical understanding of themachine’. (See Jill Marsden ‘Virtual Sex and Feminist Futures: The Philosophy of‘Cyberfeminism”, Radical Philosophy, 78 (July–August 1996), 6–16, this quotationp. 14.)

23 Haraway, Modest_Witness, pp. 51–55.24 See Kate Soper, ‘Re-thinking the “Good Life”: The Citizenship Dimension of

Consumer Disaffection with Consumerism’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 2.4,205–229; ‘Alternative Hedonism, Cultural Theory, and the Role of AestheticRevisioning’, Cultural Studies, 22.5 (2008), 567–587.