Inhuman Evanescence (Critical Essay‪)‬

In On the Shores of Politics Ranciere describes the task of politics as giving substance to the evanescent moment which regulates the multiplicity of ecstatic pleasure found in the demos, what he calls a 'jubilant' ethics. Evanescence is found in the 'in-between.' The evanescent moment is defined as the event of 'the philosophical realisation of the art of politics' (Ranciere, 1995: 19). As these three trajectories of art, politics and philosophy coalesce to transform themselves as in-between discourse they emancipate the evanescent moment from being an ideational or mythic impossible utopia, opening out the possibility of a realisable utopia. The future of the image and the flesh of words are found through their seduction in excess of meaning as anticipation, gesture and effect. These ideas have many resonances with queer theory. As Ranciere corporealises politics, so too queer theory takes representations of subjectivity and sexuality away from centralised human positions into a dissipative multiplicity. Ranciere's exploration of the philosophical encounter between art and politics shows that the effacement of a centre effaces the concept of the subject as not empirical but constitutive, and 'becoming-inhuman ... is the very language whereby aesthetic fiction is opposed to representative fiction' (2007: 126). Genius, according to Ranciere, is 'not knowing,' jubilance not being an ethics found in the unrepresentable but nonetheless encountered. The category of the human seems a broad and ambiguous category, but at its core the human is used as a vindication for the search for affirmation of the powers inherent in those who seek their own categorisation as worthy subjects who simultaneously decide who counts as human and who does not. The concept precedes selves to coalesce multiple intensities into categories prepared for the possibility of existing, not the potentialities of existence. The parameters of the human offer liberation to their oppressed when alterity is included in the subsets of different possibilities of being human or when the other achieves acceptable levels of registers of being human enough. Being human can be said to be capable of one kind of perception and perceptibility. This mode is formulated by all orders of signification and all things having to be signified so they may be ordered. Nothing escapes. Concepts of the inhuman and a-human do not oppose the human. The prefix a-, a-desire, a-signification and a-human, denotes without connoting. It is before, between and beyond, most importantly without signification and opposition. 'A-' prefixed terms are no less concrete or material for being such, they simply demand the 'we' that perceives after. We seek catalysts to become inhuman and a-human in order to go without. A-humanity is neither human nor not human. The very category itself is no longer available, either for purposes of evaluation or existence. Sexuality is an example where becoming-inhuman requires a not-knowing and not-being, not through what Ranciere critiques as nihilistic humanism, but the human becoming-aesthetic, an enfleshed corporeal aestheticisation of politics, not a series of empty shopping-list perversions. Art offers us the connection with asignifiable particles that demand either we perceive beyond human comprehension, or the art cannot emerge. A-humanism does not seek additions, opposites or radical others. The inhuman shows the hypocrisy of history evaluating worthy, rational and civilised behaviour premised on the spectre of the category human being register of the qualities of actions and knowledge. Unethical behaviour is described as inhumane, while the human is refined in its capacity for unethical behaviour and the amorphous not-human (usually animal) is maligned as representative of the unethical qualities which make us human, but which we rationalise as not human because we have the power to name them as such. Becoming a- and inhuman gifts the comfort of being a subjec