Abstract

Posthumanism’s abandonment of language and embrace of natural sciences can impede thinking about “selfhood, embodiment, mate-riality.” The role of language in a posthuman context involves a tri-ple consideration: ethics, history, and enunciation. The ethical di-mension works through the biopolitical risk of determinism. Any ethical “situatedness” must account for history. Finally, working through Agamben’s thought via Benvenistian linguistics (which in-fluence Agamben), I examine the interplay of ethics and history with respect to enunciation as an alternative to the legacy of de-construction. The claim here is that the gaps between embodiment and materiality, and the singularities of experience and ethics, in-volve history and language as “pure means.”