Limits of the Human
Limits of the Human
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人类的极限
DOI：
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发表时间：
2011
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
F. Jenkins
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
D. Ganguly;F. Jenkins
现代性通过作为人的价值和意义来定义它的文明和时代，它的政治愿望和道德规范。正是从人类共同的权利、需要和性质的角度，才把普遍法律视为有效和真实的。然而，今天，人的概念本身似乎处于危机之中，因为我们承认，我们的集体力量加速了我们星球走向灾难性未来的下滑，或者面对冷战之后众多的地缘政治冲突和暴力地点，国际人权制度表现出了冷漠。由于对后人类未来的预期，无论是智能爆炸，未来学家雷·库兹韦尔（Ray Kurzweil）称之为“奇点”的事件视界，还是人类基因组计划和哺乳动物克隆技术的进步使生物学重新设计的人类主体，都对伦理学的基本原理提出了挑战，我们迫切需要为我们的时代重新调整人类这一类别在两个世纪的批判性思考和表述中所获得的概念份量。Angelaki的这一特刊将自己定位于当代批判思想的氛围，这种批判思想起源于对这种极限情况的思考。清醒、颤抖、奇妙和创造性，这些思想衡量了人类在这个星球上的存在。它用毁灭的倾向来衡量人类超越的能力。它思考我们的非人类其他人的命运，不仅仅是动物和生物体，而是惰性物质;并考虑技术调解痛苦的生活世界，构成新的公共领域的可见性。令人惊讶的是，它扩大了人类的历史性，以标志着我们对地质时空的干预，从而预示着一个新的地球时代，人类世，这个术语给我们的生物物理系统留下了不可磨灭的印记。如果从生态学的角度来看，人类已经成为一个与自然如此脱节的因素，以至于它有可能使许多形式和物种的生命濒临灭绝，那么似乎所有激发现代性的自我概念是进步的，人道的和历史上必要的，而不是证明是对生命可能性条件的不受监督和危险的实验。同样的想法也适用于我们在全球媒体极端暴力图像中遇到的人类极限。危机和痛苦的不同影响，引起了
Modernity defines its civilisation and epoch, its political desires and ethical norms through the value and meaning of being human. It is in terms of the rights, needs and nature of a common humanity that universal laws are conceived as valid and true. Today, however, the very concept of the human appears to be in crisis as we acknowledge our collective agency in precipitating a slide towards a catastrophic future for our planet, or register the aporias of the international human rights regime in the face of the multitudinous sites of geopolitical conflict and violence that have succeeded the Cold War. As the fundamentals of ethics are challenged by the anticipation of a post-human future, whether of an intelligence explosion, an event horizon termed ‘‘singularity’’ by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, or of a biologically re-engineered human subject enabled by advances in the human genome project and the technologies of mammal cloning, we face a pressing need to recalibrate for our times the conceptual weight that the category of the human has acquired over two centuries of critical reflection and representation. This special issue of Angelaki orients itself to a climate of contemporary critical thought that originates in the contemplation of such limit cases. At once sober, tremulous, wondrous, and inventive, such thought takes the measure of humanity’s presence on this planet. It weighs the human capacity for transcendence with its predilection for annihilation. It ponders the fate of our non-human others, not just animals and living organisms but inert matter; and contemplates the fields of techno-mediation of suffering lifeworlds that constitute new public realms of visibility. Startlingly, it scales up human historicity to mark our intervention in geological space-time, thus heralding a new Earth era, the Anthropocene, a term that gives ominous credence to the indelible imprint of the human on our biophysical systems. If in ecological perspective, the human has become an element so disjoint with nature that it threatens to bring many forms and species of life to the threshold of extinction, then it may seem that all that has inspired modernity’s self-conception as progressive, humane and historically necessary proves instead to have been an unmonitored and dangerous experiment with life’s very conditions of possibility. The same thought may apply to our encounter with the limits of the human in global media images of extreme violence. The differential impact of crisis and suffering, giving rise to EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION