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Reflections on a Post-Human World


The transmutation of homo sapiens from a biological or ethical being to an obscure code is the true transformation of "Biopolitics". In the first stage, conventional morality through customs shaped the conditions for a new born to value and nurture what a society valued the most. The divine comedy of kings, later on, asserted with zeal, the paternal love for its subjects. Revolutionary literature and activism produced the rights of Man, in discourse of Rousseau, of course, women were accepted as similar to the idea of man, which was rejected by many a thinker, including Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Simone de Beauvoir, Friedrich Engels, etc. 

Second transformation could be traced in the contractarian morality, from there only, ethical man was stabbed to death, a new idea of man emerged, conceived in the Kantian autonomous character, which revolutionized the contractarian morality. State in a way emerged through justificatory pen of contract. 

At the third stage, "Governmental Reason" (Michel Foucault, Birth of Biopotics) was produced through artificial binary of freedom and security. Neither of two ever existed at absolute term. Utility became, at this stage, the sole justification of govermentality. And market became the self-acquired meaning of freedom. The "Market of Freedom" was produced and justified through minimum government and the maximum market. And the template of the moment was, of course, "Sell otherwise perish"!

Fourth stage is truly revolutionary one. It has already brought forth the disappearance of man from site; the ethical man, the divine man. Code is now a reality; the invisible man is the future; a post-human world is not a distant conjecture. It is, in fact, a reality.

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