Giorgio Agamben's “Cenobitic Communism” and the Limits of Posthumanism

Abstract

Contemporary cultural theory has been overtaken with a posthumanist concern for the “biopolitical” or the definition and organization of “life.” Life, in the posthumanist turn, is re-defined as “postlife,” or as that which breaks with enlightenment and scientific attempts to contain life and actively resists categorization, conceptualization, and theorization. This essay is a critique of the “postlife” theories of the posthumanist turn, which have come to dominate both cultural theory and popular culture. Through a close reading of Giorgio Agamben's (2013) The Highest Poverty, alongside an analysis of the film Her (Jonze et al. 2013), I argue that what passes for a concern with the boundaries and treatment of life is, in actuality, a displacement of the fundamental cause of the heightening contradictions of global capitalism, namely, the exploitation of labor. By turning the contradictions of the social into the consequences of a political apparatus determined at the level of ideas, posthumanist theories of life dematerialize the causes of inequality and in their place substitute a reality without materiality and thus without any true potential for transformation.

Keywords:

• biopolitics
• posthumanism
• Agamben
• Marx
• communism

Notes on Contributor

Rob Wilkie is Assistant Professor of cultural and digital studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. His essays have appeared in such journals as Nature, Society and Thought, Textual Practice, and Postmodern Culture. His book on class in the age of digital culture, The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network, is published by Fordham University Press (2011).