Contenu du sommaire : Abolir la condition humaine : entre chimères et calamités

This article questions the media and political expansion of the transhumanist religion, its claim to give a technoscientific solution to all the problems, as well as its ambition to extend modernism to the abrogation of the human condition. With the insignificant and futile promise of immortality, this religion completes the scientist imaginary and the totalitization of the domination of capital, yet at the origin of the deadly dynamic of the current ecocide. Hoping to escape this ecocide thus requires to modify the place of death in the industrial societies.

How can we overcome this situation of double exclusion: either humans without a world, or a world without humans? By proposing a new alliance of the Earth and the human beings. In order to leave a place for the humans without the latter phagocyticizing the non-human and ending up self-destructing, we must constitute an ethics and a politics neither humanist, nor posthumanist, but ante-humanist, that is to say anchored in that which in the human being precedes her humanity and communicates with that which is stranger to her. Launched to ward off the categorical imperative of becoming, the human call to remain inhuman is the refusal to conform to the requirements of the world's destruction.

Transhumanism develops a technoprophetism, a new religiosity, a way of salvation with the aim to free man from his ancient corporeal foundations henceforth considered as weights. Disease, tiredness, aging, weakness, death will be eliminated, and the brain capacity will be infinitely extended thanks to computer data storage that will give an immediate knowledge of languages, technics, excessive sensory possibilities, etc.

The word “posthumanism” refers to a group of works aiming at “enhancing” the capacities of the human being, and to the ideology that justifies them. The partisans of posthumanism define it as an accomplishment of humanism, expecially as they do not explicitly contest the values of democracy. This article shows that actually posthumanism constitutes a radical antihumanism, and that, motivated by a hatred of the human condition, it tends towards no less than a biotechnological secession.

The concept of “biocoloniality of power” reflects the current logic of the capitalist system in its neo-colonial form. The role of multinational companies and local elites is crucial in the socio-political and ecological conflicts taking place in the South. Indeed, these conflicts demonstrate the antagonism of classes on one side, and the anti-imperialist struggle against the anti-colonial and heteronomous modernity on the other. We intend to analyze the environmental issue—including the socio-environmental conflicts—in the Latin American context.