Why The Zombie Haunts The Cyborg - Unveiling The Inherent Racism of Transhumanism

Céline Keller In my talk I will argue, based on the thoughts of the
brilliant Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter, that it is not humanism
we need to get over but the racism and duality of the self and the
other on which western humanism has been build and various times
been reinvented. Traveling back in time, we will learn, how the
value divide of heaven and earth of Christian medieval Europe and
its structuring principle of body and spirit, has enabled first,
the mighty power of the church, and was then remodeled, after
Copernicus, into the superiority of the rational man over his
irrational others, and finally with Darwin into the concept of the
biologically (“naturally”) selected (white, male, straight, and
rich) vs. the dysselected (nonwhite, female, queer, and
poor).  We then take a look at transhumanism with its
proponents, like Steve Fuller and Elon Musk, who seem to just
reinvent this never changing pattern of exclusion and oppression,
casting many of us as subhumans to be left behind.  How can we
overcome this imaginary divide and opposition? 
 Can we instead
invent a humanism that includes us all?  I will suggest that
the pop culture zombies that keep haunting us might help.  In
a world of the 1% against the 99%, when, without showing any shame,
cynical billionaires build fortifications to fight off future
climate refugees, people that, very well, could be called the
Undead. Dehumanized humans, stripped of their value and whom we are
made to believe, we will need to fight. Why do we still identify
with the privileged survivors, when watching tv shows like The
Walking Dead? Today, those imagined surviving groups of arms
carrying people, might be portrayed as diverse, but does that
really make sense? And why, is it so incredibly hard to create and
sustain solidarity, that is more than an empty lip-service? How
come, we are so fascinated, instead of appalled, with those
narratives of competition of us against them? Aren’t we all, like
the zombies, the superfluous 99%? 
In my talk, I will explore the
dark side of humanism’s history and its cruel connection to
de-humanization, racism and eugenics, and then link this
history to the future proposed by transhumanism, and suggest,
that identifying with the zombies instead of the cyborgs might
help with imagining a new inclusive humanism, we urgently
need.  ------- Some of the papers the talk will be based on:


Sylvia Wynter: Unsettling the Coloniality of
Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom Towards the Human, After Man, Its
Overrepresentation—An Argument

http://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2432989/Wynter-2003-Unsettling-the-Coloniality-of-Being.pdf


Steve Fuller - We May Look Crazy to Them, But They Look Like
Zombies to Us: Transhumanism as a Political Challange

https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/fuller20150909

Dale
Knickerbocker - Why Zombies Matter:  The Undead as Critical
Posthumanist

https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/135003/1_BohemicaLitteraria_18-2015-2_7.pdf?sequence=1