“Like a Face Drawn in Sand at the Edge of the Sea.” Vicissitudes of the Posthuman Forty Years After Foucault’s Death.

“Like a Face Drawn in Sand at the Edge of the Sea.” Vicissitudes of the Posthuman Forty Years After Foucault’s Death. 

KEYWORDS: Foucault, archeology, posthumanism, human-machine interaction, more-than-human. 

The Order of Things wished to show the emergence and disappearance of the configurations of knowledge in their empirical arising. Among them, we see man taking his ambivalent place as both mysterious object and sovereign subject of western knowledge, only to soon disappear along the lines of the image we captured in the title. But, however deferred, historiographical and epistemological problems return incessantly, questioning the status of discontinuities in the archaeological project: what backdrop would be able to account for both the emerging and the fading away of orders of identities and differences? To what logic do their mutations respond? What explanation is offered?

According to the archaeological instance, posthuman is then manifestly not a condition of existence but an open process: the uncertain outcome of the mutations of these conditions of possibility, of their precipitation.

What does it mean to question this diagnostic today? What mutations have taken place or struggle to do so? What are the stakes? Would it be legitimate to say that today we speak from the space of knowledge left vacant by the disappearance of the figure of western knowledge that gave rise to the humanities?

The workshop's aim would be to draw a map, though bound to be partial, fragmentary and mobile, of a range of practices both in research and in applied fields related to the tools forged in the debate pertaining to posthumanism. This could be done, on the one hand, by exploring the current functioning of the toolbox elaborated by the thinker in the 1960s and early 1970s, and on the other hand, by interrogating the way in which these tools have been brought into contact and fruitful interaction with different theoretical inputs and epistemic and political instances (feminist, anti-racist, queer, post-colonial, ecological, a.o.).