Textes post-humains

Marcello Vitali-Rosati

Montreal - 31 Mars 2021

Définir l’humain?

Illustrer un texte.

Vetruvio, architetto, mette nella sua opera d’architectura, chelle misure dell’omo sono dalla natura disstribuite in quessto modo cioè che 4 diti fa 1 palmo, et 4 palmi fa 1 pie, 6 palmi fa un chubito, 4 cubiti fa 1 homo, he 4 chubiti fa 1 passo, he 24 palmi fa 1 homo ecqueste misure son ne’ sua edifiti. Settu apri tanto le gambe chettu chali da chapo 1/14 di tua altez(z)a e apri e alza tanto le bracia che cholle lunge dita tu tochi la linia della somita del chapo, sappi che ’l cientro delle stremita delle aperte membra fia il bellicho. Ello spatio chessi truova infralle gambe fia triangolo equilatero

The almost unique interest in the divinae litterae that characterized the Middle Ages is replaced by a profound attention to the humanae litterae. The divine texts have a metaphysical value that goes beyond their actual inscription: they are the word of God. Human texts have meaning only in an immanent dimension. Humanity, humanitas, is redefined on the basis of this idea. Instead of being made in the image and likeness of God, humans become the ones who read and write. Already in the Middle Ages, the human being was a result: the result of the sacred text that defined its essence in the image and likeness of God. But the value of these texts went beyond the text itself and took on a metaphysical meaning: therefore, the essence of the human being took on an absolute and indisputable value. The human being is at the center of the world because God placed him there. When the human being is the reader and writer of texts, these texts are material, determined, immanent texts. The human being is the result, the derivative of these texts. Classical texts are the material that produces the human being, he or she who is no longer a starting point, but rather a point of arrival. Humanitas is not given, it is acquired: by reading and loving the humanae litterae.

Divinae litterae

à l’image et selon la ressemblance de Dieu

Un changement de matière

Humanae litterae

L’humain est le résultat de la matérialité du texte et non sa cause

Posthuman studies

My posthumanist account calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of human and nonhuman, examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Second Printing edition. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

Inhumain, posthumain, préhumain

Écritures numériques, écritures préhumaines

un sens préhumain - ou inhumain
avant le concept d’“humain”

The digital fact undoubtedly plays a fundamental role in this idea of non-human writing. It offers many examples of signs, traces and technical inscriptions that are essential as meaning, but which escape the control of strictly human mechanisms of meaning. These scripts have both the characteristic of presenting themselves as sign inscriptions which can be considered finally as a series of characters or more precisely of letters - simply the result of an encoding of letters in bit: 1 letter = 8 bit, to to know 1 byte - and the characteristic of being impossible to write and read by human beings. A binary file, an algorithm, a database are ultimately series of characters that a human being can visualize on a screen - or print on a sheet of paper - but whose writing and reading are reserved for machines. One may say that digital environments as artifacts, and therefore they are precisely human productions only serving to prolong human thinking. However, this objection is based on a very essentialized conception of human - the same conception that we have just criticized following Hayles, Wolfe, and Barad. Technological mediations can be interpreted as prehuman because the human is what derives from a series of interactions of agents, of which technology is just one part.