Figuring the “Human”

 Founded in 1959, the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan University is among the oldest in the United States. In celebration of the Center’s 50th year, we seek to reflect upon the category of “the human” in the humanities.

At the time of the Center’s founding, this category was all but unquestioned; it was assumed that “the human” transcended all cultural and history specificity by virtue of a set of universal cognitive, moral, emotional, and creative attributes. The last fifty years have brought major challenges to these assumptions. The purported unity of the human subject, occasionally unsettled by claims such as those of psychoanalysis, has been trenchantly interrogated through post-structuralist appraisals of the human subject as decentered, fragmented, heteronomous, or “dead.”  Without a stable “humanity,” the humanities themselves consequently seem lacking epistemic foundation.  The visual and performing arts similarly have become sites for enacting critiques of identity, authorship and even creativity.  The long presumed universality of human nature, although periodically the subject of critique, also has been extensively contested through feminist, race, and queer studies; paralleling these innovative counter discourses are postcolonial critiques of the dominant western notions of the individual.  In the meantime, inventions in medicine, computer science, genetics and fiction have spawned thinking about the possibility of new categories of humans – hybrids, clones, cyborgs, and avatars. Alongside such explorations of the posthuman emerged fresh examinations of the not human, those animals usually taken to be other than and less than human. This rethinking has even occurred in certain social sciences where new knowledge has suggested that rationality and agency are quite different phenomena than long assumed.

On the occasion of the Center’s anniversary, we must ask ourselves a series of questions. How has the “human” been figured over the last fifty years? How has our understanding of what it means to be human changed?  What is the relationship between the animal and the human?  Is the human a singular kind?  How have the substantial even revolutionary challenges to long-established views of human nature influenced our commitment to understand the human condition?

Last update 10/24/2007 Contact: bkeating