Javier Moscoso Cala - A New Humanism? The Precarious Condition of the Human in Judith Butler

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

  This episode features a presentation from Javier Moscoso Cala   Abstract: ‘A New Humanism? The Precarious Condition of the Human in Judith Butler’ To be qualified as human is a troubling matter after anti-humanistic critiques to humanness. Despite this, some thinkers such as Judith Butler have returned to using the term "the human" to refer to 30 something more than a universal whose production is exclusionary. In this paper I propose to deem the human in terms of a precarious condition intertwined in the midst of animal life and nature. This human life is persistently exposed to violence as derealisation of life and humanness. This refurbishment of the human allows us to think of it as a process open to the future. The movement of the human is characterised by a dynamic of catachresis, subversive reiteration and performative contradiction. The possibility of reiteration and performative contradiction is made possible when derealisation lives unexpectedly speak to the human on its own terms. This point refers to the instability of every form that the universal of the human takes, its attributes and its movement. Yet it is still possible to wonder about the condition of precariousness in which the universal of the human always takes place. The unstable relation of the human to the natural, the animal, life and technology leads to unstable limits of what is recognisable as human. The possibility of violence intrinsic to the human reveals its inevitable condition of vulnerability, whereby not only is any life exposed to injury but also to no longer being considered a human life. Judith Butler is an author who manages to restore the human by thinking on its condition and not on its attributes. The condition of crisis and precariousness of the human, made and unmade by language, its multiple relations and normativity, opens every figure of the human to a future that is yet to come.   Biography: Javier Moscoso Cala is a Postgraduate Researcher at University of Malaga. His interests are vulnerability and the human in contemporary philosophers Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler. He recently published "Apuntes para una política precaria del duelo en tiempos de covid-19", in Nacho Escutia, María Begoña Fleitas and Teresa Oñate (ed.) Pandemia, Globalización, Ecología, Madrid, Fénix-UNED, 2020, 85-94. He presented several papers in local and international conferences in Spain and is in charge of Derivas. Seminario Permanente de Estética at Complutense University of Madrid with three other colleagues.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/