To a large extent, scholarly interest in the inhuman condition has been concerned with examining how boundaries have come to be drawn around the human and how humanity has been policed by these boundaries. There is now considerable agreement on the ‘inextricability of human and inhuman’ in current scholarship with attention turned to examining the forces that bring about the condition. I use the neologisms (in)human and (in)humanity to convey the spatio-temporal character of the inhuman-human link. Written this way, with the ‘in’ enclosed by parentheses outside the word ‘humanity’, the symbols signify a certain kind of subjectivity and relationality that captures the complex entanglement of the relationship: the inhuman is outside humanity yet also (silently) embedded within it. It denotes an uncertain, denied, removable, displaceable, erasable subject – a negated subjectivity. Yet it can also be read as a relationship of dependency, interdependency and perhaps even a struggle for independence – a relationship in conflict out of which can emerge something new, perhaps.

 

Based on a chapter of my PhD Thesis In the Waiting Room of Humanity: Rupturing Cosmopolitan Ethics, Re-visting Kant, Refracting (In)human Rights, this paper develops my account of the (in)human by outlining the theory of the diagram of humanity underlying the conflict in contemporary cosmopolitan ethics. I call this the Anthropocentric Waiting Room.

 

I adopt Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot as an allegory for the Anthropocentric Waiting Room drawing on three themes in particular: the master/slave dialectic, the human/animal boundary, and corresponding speaking/non-speaking subjectivities. I examine how each binary opposition occurs as modes of being in specific historical contexts (colonial histories; the history of Western philosophy and the historical context of archival knowledge) through three theses inspired by Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. These three theses challenge first, the conceptualisation of historical time as linear, progressive or as something that is inscribed to memory completely, and second, the conceptualisation of ‘humanity’ as a universal, absolute or finite form if we want to acknowledge the violence of inhumanity that accompanies it. Then, building on the insights of Johannes Fabian and Dipesh Chakrabarty concerning how our systems for understanding, or ‘knowing’, the human have been responsible in creating and perpetuating the conceits of ‘humanity’ and ‘history’ through temporalizing and spatializing difference in anthropology and history, I suggest how ‘diagrammatic thinking’, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion the diagram as an ‘abstract machine’, might enable a similar awareness in the field of cosmopolitan studies.

 

My purpose is to offer the Anthropocentric Waiting Room as an analytic that captures certain aspects of and tendencies within the field of cosmopolitan thinking today. I argue that rather than presuming ‘humanity’ in the domain of cosmopolitan thinking, an analytics of humanity asks us to examine moments in which cosmopolitanism’s humanity is called into question, whether such moments occur in our methodological practices or in the histories and presumptions constituting our ideas and to reflect on the forces that have diagrammed the particularities of the (in)human condition.

 

Ida Nursoo is a current PhD candidate student at the Research School of Humanity and the Arts. Ida’s thesis is called In the Waiting Room of Humanity: Rupturing Cosmopolitan Ethics, Re-visting Kant, Refracting (In)human Rights.