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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Our managing producer Dylan Montanari tells me that the file name for the show we're airing today is E-O 10151.
That makes it technically the 151st episode of entitled opinions, which began back in 2005 when we were still all children.
I wonder by my trough what thou and I did till we loved, were we not weaned till then, but sucked on country pleasures, childishly.
151 sounds like an awful lot of shows to me, and I would be shocked if we ever hit the 200 mark.
As Captain Kilgore said in Apocalypse now, someday this war is going to end.
Someday entitled opinions is going to end too because there's such a thing as too much of a good thing.
And after 150 shows, well, we're getting there.
It won't be long before Sherlock Holmes meets Moriarty on the bridge.
Is there life after entitled opinions? Who knows?
But the end time is not now, friends.
We have another season or two in us, I suspect.
And meanwhile, we have a show on tap today that you're not going to want to miss, because I have a guest with me in the studio who has a great deal to say about the posthumous, or about what comes after the end.
So stay tuned for the 151st episode of entitled opinions, our topic, the posthuman.
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Those of you who have followed this show over the years know that your host is highly suspicious of biotechnology, cybernetics, virtual realities, and the aggressive efforts we see all around us to transhumanize the human species.
Biotechnology, in particular, unsettles me, reminds me of Dante's Jerryon, the weird monster who ferries Dante and Virgil into the circle of fraud in Inferno 17.
Jerryon has the face of a kind, gentle man, but he has the body of a furry animal and the tail of a giant scorpion.
So too, biotechnology has the face of benevolence, it promises an ever greater enhancement of our health, our moods, our looks, and our longevity.
It promises to alleviate suffering and abolish discomfort, it promises a eugenic future, free from defects, disappointment, and even death.
But it's the biotechnology scorpion tail that worries me because it injects an anxious poison into the very essence of the human.
I don't know whether or not I'm a humanist yet I know that I don't share the transhumanist's belief that humanity is a condition for which we must devise a cure.
Oh, I believe in the curse of the human condition, all right. Like everyone else, I am cursed by an awareness that nature's demands don't answer my demand that my having been born and my being here make a difference that makes sense to me.
In the words of the philosopher Stanley Kavell, I quote, "The commonest, most ordinary curse of man is not so much that he was ever born and must die, but that he has to figure out the one and shape up to the other and justify what comes between, and that he is not a beast and not a god, in a word that he is a man and alone."
All those, however, are the facts of life. The curse comes in the ways we try to deny them.
Denial for me is the scorpion's tail. Denial seeks to forget what ham reminds us of in Beckett's endgame that we are on the earth and that there's no cure for that.
It's crucial to remember that because way too often the promises of a cure wherever they come from only aggravate the condition.
As human beings, we are both inside and outside of nature and we suffer from both our inclusion and exclusion from nature.
This is the curse that for all our exuberance and ingenuity, we always end up hitting against nature's limit.
Is freedom compatible with this kind of limitation? Yes, it is, as long as we don't confuse freedom with emancipation.
Freedom begins with acknowledgement and ends with what Nietzsche called Amor Fatty or the love of necessity.
The slave is a slave to the degree that the master refuses to acknowledge his humanity, but when the shackles are thrown off and the master gets overthrown, it is up to the liberated slaves to acknowledge their humanity for themselves.
A slave morality is one that fails to do this.
Nature is not our slave, it does not need our acknowledgement. By the same token, it is not our master and cannot acknowledge our humanity.
Only we can do that. Not through mood-enhancing drugs, not through stem cell rejuvenation, not through eugenics, but through an existential authenticity that takes the form of acknowledging the fate or facticity of our human condition.
I have a feeling that the guest who joins me in the studio today agrees with some of what I have said in these opening remarks, but also disagrees with a lot of what I have said.
Eva Domenske is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Poznan in Poland.
She has also been a visiting professor at Stanford for one quarter a year for the past ten years.
She specializes in comparative theory of the humanities and social sciences, in the philosophy of history, and in post-humanities and ecological humanities.
She is the author of many books and articles, will be posting her impressive academic profile on the website of entitled opinions, but let's get our conversation with her going right away.
Eva, welcome to the program.
Welcome and thank you very much for inviting me here. I'm happy to be on a few times.
Great. We'll have an opportunity to argue about some of the claims I put forward in my introduction, Eva, but to start with, would you please clarify this concept of the post-human a little bit?
What exactly do we or should we understand by post-humanity?
If I would have to identify main representatives of post-humanism, right now I would definitely call Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Carrey Wolf, Rosie Brite, also Nicola Zeroz, and his very interesting book, The Politics of Life.
But first of all, there is a huge difference between how the post-human is defined by scholars who are coming from biology, but working in the humanities like Donna Haraway and scholars like Bruno Latour.
So let's take maybe one major feature that all the scholars agree.
The post-human condition, I would say, is not related to the problem of the post, which means that something is going to be after the human.
The post-human post-humanity is already here. The future is today. One basic question is the problem of how we define and redefine human nature and we still want to believe in human nature.
So my question would be not what doesn't mean to be human in order to define what the post-human is, but do we really want to be human? Do we really still want to be human? And this is my question to you. Do you want to be human? Why you want to be human? You are so critical about human subjects.
You are speaking about all these negative things and the curse of death. So why bother?
Well, I said that I don't know whether I'm a humanist or not. I guess there's a little too much high-to-garianism in me where when he wrote the letter on humanism, he said that if humanism is to be rescued, that we have to think about a higher form of humanism than the traditional one, which sees man or human beings at the center of the universe.
And which accords a special kind of dignity because of the moral free will and so forth. I know that the human condition is a curse I said so, but it's not a question of why do I want to continue being human? I don't believe that there is a choice in the matter. That's why I invoke Nietzsche's Amo de Fatty, the love of fate or the love of what is necessary because I just agree with the transhumanists is that I don't think that we are in a position of humanism.
We are in a position where we are going to be able to free ourselves or liberate human beings from the biological constraints on our species. So acceptance, acknowledgement and a certain kind of living with that condition is a starting point for the full realization of our humanity from my point.
Well, I would say, and thank you very much for this remark because you give me a lot of inspiration for my future consideration here.
Well, it seems to me that you cannot be post-human because you don't want to acknowledge that there is a necessity to rethink the main issue right now, which is the question of anthropocentrism.
Post-humanist, post-humanist is all about this centering human subject. What I mean and what is also related to my question, do you really still to be human again? It's still human.
It's a question that we already have in your mind about so many microbes, so many organisms that makes you multi-species persona.
So, and do you acknowledge it? Yes, I don't deny it. In fact, I said in my opening remarks that the human is both part of nature and outside of nature, we're both included and excluded from it.
And that in a certain sense, we suffer from both the excessive inclusion that we are organic and whatever happens to my body, my multi-species body, you know, affects what the tradition might have called the soul.
I'm aware of that and I suffer it. At the same time, I know that I am not included in nature the other species that constitute my organic being are included in nature.
There is an outsideness, there is my access to intelligibility or my access to what Heidegger calls the being of beings is something that I do not share with the natural order.
It seems to be extraterrestrial if you want to use a metaphor for it. So, it's both at the same time.
And I'm not anthropocentric. I agree with you. We are multi-species in our organ being or in our biological being.
But my question for you is, do you agree with the transhumanists who have this, I think, wildly anthropocentric agenda of using human research, technology and science to liberate our species from its biological constraints?
Are you with them on that?
I agree that transhumanism is very anthropocentric and that's why I'm also skeptical. On the other hand, you must admit that, for example, graduate students who are taking a project before the exams are already transhumanists.
Because they are taking medicine that's supposed to cure depression to enhance their brain capacity.
Are they transhumanists? Yes, they are. How about disabled people who are using endosculatons? That transhumanists? Yes, they are.
So, you know the advantages and disadvantages, but from speaking, I am more interested in critical posthumanism than in transhumanism that has many political agenda behind it, of course.
And the transis for Qia, mind his book on the biotechnological future, well, has something to say about that.
That's why I would prefer to go into subject which are very much into my word view.
Because what we are speaking about is not only about epistemology philosophy, it's about our deep understanding of how we relate to the word.
So epistemology, as we know, is never innocent. So if we choose, let's say, to be a transhumanist or posthumanist, we are actually choosing some very distinct word view.
I agree with that. So for our listeners who might have some doubts about what even the word posthuman means and how it might be different from transhuman, can I ask a following simple question?
Sometimes when I look at the posthumanist discourse and theory, and I think that when I read your work, you are insistent on pointing out all the continuities between the human and the other species in the natural.
And therefore, that on the one hand it seems that the posthuman or the transhuman wants to re-naturalize the human or reintegrated into the natural and say that we're one species among others.
On the other hand, you have a different kind of species of transhumanists who want to become utter masters of our own fate.
And therefore, transhumanize us in the direction of the gods. So when I quoted Kavell, he says, man is not a beast and is not a god, but something is a man and he's alone.
One part of the discourse wants to see the human in radical relationality to the animal. The other seems to want to make us immortal of some sort. Do you agree that there's at least a tension or fault line in the posthumanist theory here?
Well, I am afraid of biopolitics and I feel that your skepticism about human condition seeing the human in terms of curse because of the novel death would be a privilege in the future.
So all this quest for immortality for me is really very, very questionable. And I think that we should remember that we should die instead of being so obsessively looking for immortality.
So in this point, I am against transhumanism. I think that the death is a very natural condition for everybody, for all species, and well, remember to die. However, I think that the most important question right now is how we, personal escolers could define ourselves as transhumanists or posthumanists if you are interested in that.
So for example, let's say that transhumanism is also about human enhancement by education.
So how about building? You know that I'm interested in virtue epistemology in self-disciplinization.
It might be an aspect of transhumanists thought, however, completely differently understood as Nick Bostrom, who is the main guru of transhumanists, would define it.
So the question is not to follow all the transhumanists existing definitions, but maybe build alternative approaches to transhumanists.
Why would one need to call it transhumanism if it has to do with the buildings phenomenon and cultivation, where I can speak of transhuman, the first person that I know of to use the words, "transhumanar" is "dant" where in "patadizo," that's what happens.
So transhumanize yourself by becoming beatified. So in what way is self-cultivation and the cultivation of virtue posthuman or transhuman? Why can't it just be human?
Well, let's talk about empathy. Jeremy Rivkin recently recently in his book Empathic Civilization said that right now to be human means to be homoemparticles.
This is essence, right? And what is this? Jeremy Rivkin?
So this is a sense that you're supposed to cultivate from very early childhood as well as the sense of hearing, sense of taste and so on and so forth.
So for me, if you cultivated in such a way that you become empathic not only to another human being but also to another form of life with some developed neurological system, of course, this would be a part of my individual idea of what transhumanists might be.
Well, fine, Eva, but we're going to have to get a little meaner about this issue because every Stanford student who successfully goes through the application process spouts the rhetoric of empathy and is always done good either for the fellow immunological consciousness.
This is New Age dogma. It's an absolute conformism and there's no need to call on us to be empathic. It's because it's become the new sort of religion whether we like it or not.
Or really. What about the trauma studies? Trauma studies is based on the idea of compassionate and empathy to other people who are suffering. So this is not new age stuff.
But I would ask you the following question. It's very easy to be empathic with somebody suffering. How can you cultivate to be empathic with somebody else's success and joy?
I guess if I wanted to answer that question in a thorough manner, I would probably myself go back and read who so? Who was one of the great theorists of compassion and not only for human compassion but compassion for all sentient beings and so forth.
What I'm trying to get to is where this, I think that you believe that we live in a new regime and it's a kind of recent regime where we have actually gone beyond the traditional human regime and that we are already in a kind of post-human regime.
I want to know what is so different about it when I can find examples from the human regime like Rousseau or education or done to account for some of these things that you're describing.
Well, I won't say that this is a regime. As a scholar, I would say that we are witnessing a very rapid development of a new paradigm which might be called post-humanities by humanities non-antropocentrachumanities.
I think it's obvious. Of course, I'm speaking here about cutting edge ideas and about avant-garde scholars not about mainstream.
I want to be very clear about that.
So, yes, we have this new paradigm and how it developed, I think that the witness of collapse of post-modernies in the late 90s and what accelerated our interest in plant studies, animal studies, things that this and so on was on the one hand existing already within the framework of our philosophy, Western philosophy,
and later structurally, post-structurally symptoms of criticism of human subjects which was within framework of constructively understood as a culture or social construct.
On the other hand, it was a rapid development of biological sciences and also growing interest in a culture and this tendencies overlap.
That's why we have all these interesting propositions, proposals, methods, approaches, like flat ontologists, growing interest in traditional ecological knowledge, new animals, new tautomies. By the way, I am a new animist.
I am a new one, and so far as I'm an old one because I think the old one is great.
Let's talk about that a little bit because the new animist is not about believing in spirits in the tree.
The new animist is about the red definition of personhood. You are an animist if you are able to see in the other form of life, not only organic form of life, but also non-organic like a rock, a person.
So that's a very interesting move. Of course, I rely here on the book by Graham Harvey in Animus, which I really recommend because it has a very interesting idea.
So it's not about spirits, it's not about all the animists because I know how scholars would think about it as an anthropological idea.
But here, we are dealing with a proposal which probably might form a substantial feature of how we feel about human condition in the future.
I mean, to be human is to be able to recognize the persona in another subject. It might be a rock person, as Harvey would say, it might be an animal person.
And it really question our understanding of philosophy, which is called "personalese".
I'm all for it, Eva. I tell you, I, you know, that Vico is one of my great heroes, and Vico looks to the origins trying to figure out what kind of psychology, what kind of religious beliefs animated the first animistic religions, where everything in nature was personified.
"personification", he says, is the fundamental trope of primitive consciousness, let's say, a legendary consciousness.
And therefore, to, I think that's why I think that to the spirit of what the Stoics call the Soul of the World, the Anima movie.
That is something that sees spirit and soul, and even in personified forms everywhere, in plants, rocks, and...
It's not about spirits, don't, don't, don't, don't infantilize it, because we are...
The why, why call it animism, if it's not about spirit, the word "anima" comes from the word "soul", let's take and change the word.
Yes, that's true, but, you know, it has a different take. It's more about energy, about Zoe.
It's, it's also about Melma, and by the way, you know...
Melma is spirit.
Well, I know, but it's different to understood. What I want to say is that I have to be honest to our audience.
I ask Robert to stay in the same room, and I have some concrete purposes.
Okay, let me explain what that means, because often I'll record these shows where we have booths, which are separated through a window,
and we hear each other through our headphones, and we see each other through a window, where you want to sit inside the same room.
Yes, and I wanted it, because I was reading recently a very interesting article on anthropology of microbes, and it's about how we can redefine our identity in terms of our common microbeon.
So, if we were in the same room, we are extending our microbeotic self, let's say we are creating something together, and I think it's a very interesting idea how the identity might be redefined from more biological point of view, remembering that microbes are the old organisms in the world.
Yeah, that's how I'm about that. Listen, for you, it's a microbeiotic, for me, it's a microeiotic, because I'm very close to you, and you're right there, and you can call it a swirl of energy, and it can be microbeiotic, or it could be something altogether more...
Well, I can go further with that, because many scholars working on posthumonies and the call of the
difficult human is talking about exchanging the breath, speaking about myoma, about touch, and it's not only about the spirits, it's about the force of life, it's about exchanging this biological material.
I don't want to be seen as a biological determinies, but I'm so frustrated by all this idea that everything is socially constructed, and we're on the same page.
Why don't you move closer?
Because it's a change of breath. It just sounds like ordinary human, amorous behaviour to me, kissing is an exchange of breath.
Well, you obviously haven't read Donahara's book "Compagnile Species Manifesto", because it's about also getting in very close contact with animals.
What about plants? Do you coerce your plants?
I have talked at length on this show before about chlorophilia.
Yes.
Not only bio-philia, but it's specifically chlorophilia, and I believe in it, and I feel it.
And for sure, I suffer when I'm deprived of the presence of plants and chlorophyll, yeah.
So do you know that plants also experience a dead leg?
Well, I would surprise me. No, I didn't know it, but it doesn't surprise me.
Well, you're talking about this. There's been a shift in the paradigm.
Let me read you something that you have written in a presentation I went to a few weeks ago, where you say,
"The colors should begin to approach the past from the vantage point of the future rather than the present.
Our choice of research problems and research methods are ways of constructing knowledge of the past need to be guided by this future-oriented perspective,
and ought to address the question, what kind of knowledge of the past will humans need in a post-human world?"
And that is a crucial question, especially if you think of knowledge as a survival skill, because there's another quote here that you --
from -- I don't know how to pronounce his name, Hendrik Skollymowski.
Skollymowski, problems of rationality and biology, where he says, "Our knowledge and we should never forget this is a supreme instrument in aiding the species in the process of survival."
So --
Yes. Well, let me be for a moment, Polish-patriard.
Hendrik Skollymowski was a piece of philosophy of how introduced the concept of a philosophy.
So the quotation, of course, is an odd one.
It has to be -- he's not resized.
It is from the late -- from early '70s, I think, or a middle of the '70s.
So it was the time that we witnessed this attempt to combine natural sciences with the humanities,
and we know that we ended up with sociobiology, and this is not returned to this kind of investigation.
I'm a historian, very multidisciplinary-oriented, so I am interested in --
knowledge about the past.
I rather not use the word history because history is a very specific approach to the past,
which was developed within the framework of Judo Christian, Western tradition.
And I am very much interested in including, not Western and non-Western approaches to our knowledge about the past or of the past.
So basically, I heard from Anat Singh concept on non-historical humanities,
and I think that this is a very interesting term to develop.
Yes, I do believe that right now we should be future-oriented, and exactly the --
ask the question that I proposed here.
Of course, my colleagues' historians are very upset about that,
because they claim that history is not about prophecy.
And of course, they are right somehow.
However, I would say that as a humanist, we should refer right now to big picture questions.
So whatever the question might be is the question of the future of democracy,
ecological future of the planet, the problem of human subject, and relationship with other species, whatever.
But this should be the background of our consideration.
And the planetary perspective attracts me much more than global perspective.
And that's why my question for today, for scholars, why interested in the past, from different disciplines,
how -- what kind of knowledge of the past exactly we need for the future?
You know, what kind of problems and concepts we should highlight in order to build,
as Latour would say, a knowledge of how to live together in conflicts.
I'm absolutely sure that we are dealing right now with the problem of utopia.
We need utopia.
And I'm not speaking about some romantic idea of living in harmony and symmetry with nature in contrary.
We know that our world is full of conflict, and it's going to be like that in the future.
So my question is how we can build more positive idea about the future.
For example, your introduction was full of apocalyptic and catastrophic statesmen.
This was -- this is -- I understand where it's coming from, but there is a lot of proposal to including our thinking,
the concept of critical hope, critical hope, not naive hope.
But the critical hope that would be performative, that would actually stimulate crisis,
which is supposed to be creative, then to neutralize them.
And as far as we have scholars who completely disagree about certain aspects of the problem,
we should be aware that still, the many scholars who agree that some problems are crucial for today and tomorrow.
And this is the most important problem, not the answers.
The most important thing is that we agree that certain problems are crucial.
So who are some of these scholars that you would recommend on this issue of critical hope?
Well, definitely Rosie Brideotti, but also there is a very interesting anthropologist from New York, Carpansano,
who wrote a very good article on analytical aspect of the category of the hope that I would recommend.
So he has hope and anarchy, intellectual anarchy.
I'm not speaking about anarchy as a kind of terrorist idea, but I'm speaking about anarchy to be against dominant power,
to be unlawered, to dominant power, to also teach students how to rebel and how to bring their own ideas,
how to use their imagination, because, frankly speaking, I feel that they are not so important.
They are not so many space in academia to cultivate imagination.
Of course, if you are working on poetry, if you are working on art, movies, this is a good space.
But in history, no, historians shouldn't have imagination.
This is, it's supposed to be dangerous.
In fact, I was reading an interview that you gave in the journal, "We Think in History."
And you invoke the distinction that Foucault makes between history and counter-history,
and where history would be the version that the Romans would give an account of their history from the point of view of the authority,
that is the Roman Empire, whereas counter-history would have its paradigm in biblical history,
where it tells the history from the point of view of the oppressed and the old story.
But you go on there to say that since counter-history has become history,
and so much of it is about the history of the oppressed, then,
who are the new others that have to, that, who are the others for the contemporary historical discourse
and standard others like Aboriginals, natives, women, gay, and lesbian, disabled, etc., have been naturalized and domesticated.
That is why I have begun to be interested in non-anthroposentric history.
It seems to me that contemporary counter-history is to be found in the domains of the non-human,
let's us say animals, plants, and things which are our current others.
Do you believe that a history of the future is going to be,
if it is going to be a history of animals, plants, and things,
in what way will it be different from, let's say, zoology in the case of animals, of botany in the case of plants,
and, you know, I don't know what you would call the history of things, but there's already a news-distant tradition.
What would a counter-history of these non-human objects consist of?
Well, first of all, I have to say that I am more skeptical about this idea,
because I realized that the counter-history of non-human subjects,
another term that I'm also skeptical about, because the human is still the main point of reference
in this concept, is presenting a very paternalistic approach.
And while in this way, we are still in the framework of anthropocentrism,
I'm interested in going beyond that.
So I would say that this is not about adding the non-human others to historical discourse.
This would not be productive.
This is about finding new methods, concepts, new meta-language,
to talk about multi-species meta-community,
and see to build inclusive, integrative knowledge,
so-called "bikisra" or "dipisra", planetary history.
And as I say it again, I'm speaking about avant-garde ideas, right?
I'm not speaking about dominant historical discourse,
because it's going to be like that. It's its tradition.
And by the way, it should be like that.
I'm advocating positivistic atavism.
In fact, history would survive if the workshop of history,
criticism of historical sources would survive,
because this is what keeps the discipline alive,
while scholars might pick up many different subjects.
But there are so many scholars from different fields that are talking about the past,
but they are missing something.
They do not know the methods that typical for history.
And that's why I am against, you know,
culture studies from this point of view,
because they are very abstract. They do not know how to use source criticism.
And I am after various strict professionalism.
So from this point of view,
I would like to preserve the disciplinary boundaries.
So on the one hand, multidisciplinary being open to topics,
being within the main flame of what humanity is interested in,
but on the other hand, you know, strict professional background.
In fact, you're writing a very fascinating book that,
from what I know of it, exemplifies or embodies many of the characteristics
that you're describing as a new kind of counter-history of plants,
animals and things. And it's called necros,
an introduction to an ontology of the dead body.
And here, you know, if you just look at some of the rubrics
that you have, you talk about the problem of the dead body and human remains
and a post-human future, the vitalist ontology of the corpse,
the non-dead, necrolife, transformation and so forth,
can you say something more specific about this project
to be yours on the dead body or necros?
How would you translate necros?
Because you translate it as a past, but it's really death.
Well, it is a dead body corpse, right?
I'd rather not use the word corpse because it's abjective.
However, I am interested in a major project of rethinking the ontology of the past.
And I think that speaking about the necros within the framework of post-humanism
and ecological humanism might give me an unusual take on this subject.
This is, of course, very difficult idea.
I work on this book for 10 years and probably it would take another two years to complete it.
But I want to go beyond our interest in trauma, mourning, ritual,
the tana-tology and concentrate on the dead body as organic subject rather than something
that is still very present in our culture.
Okay, so you want to go beyond everything that I dealt with in a book I wrote called Dominion of the Dead.
Exactly.
And I--
This is the next step.
I mean, I would complete, I would like to complete the book on this.
Great, thanks.
So, in my more, let's say, cultural approach to the corpse as--
Well, in terms of cultural practices of mourning and commemoration and so forth,
I do have one chapter where I talk about the universality in all human cultures of all different epochs and times
of the ritualized disposal of the human remains.
And for me is what qualifies us as human.
It's not a species thing because the Neanderthals, for example, were different species than Homo sapiens,
but they buried their dead.
And if you have burial of the dead, that's where you have humanity, humus, the burial--
So, and it doesn't have to be burial, it can be cremation.
Any kind of ritualized disposal of the corpse qualifies as the most primordial human practice that I know of.
Now, when I deal with the corpse, what I argue is that there is an organicity to the body and to the person,
and that's what the corpse is the almost scandalous revelation of a rather natural organic substrate of the personhood.
And that the function of ritualized body disposal is to restore the organic part of the person to nature or the air, the earth, or something, the water.
So that the person can have an afterlife in either in Hades or in our memories or in our--
So, liberating the person from his or her mortal remains, the corpse.
You, on the other hand, want to linger with what that actual materiality of the court, what is the fate of that?
And in what sense is this such a crucial consideration for you in this new counter-history you're trying to write?
I think that we become more and more dependent on the dead.
I'm speaking about again, about technology, transplantation, the use of human remains as natural fertilizer.
So, one of the purpose of the book is to talk about the possible use and abuse of human remains, different forms of human remains.
So, that's why I would like to claim this book and I absolutely know that this is a very controversial thesis,
that the dead, the bad is more important and preserving the integrity of the bad.
I mean, integrity in terms of if you have information.
To preserving the not preserving, rather to respect, yes, but you know the question is what would guarantee this respect?
The law does not guarantee it.
How we should be sure.
How can we secure our bad after death that nothing happened with the bad without our permission, our individual permission?
We know what happened.
But, okay, can I take a little issue with you there having, again, written on it?
When I ask a question, who does the corpse belong to?
We have this very enlightenment idea that the person has proprietary rights over his or her remains.
So, you can donate it to science or you want it to.
But, I believe that the moral remains belong to the community of the loved ones of that person, because they are the ones for whom it's absolutely critical to dispose of ritualistically.
You have a whole chapter there on the Argentine mothers of the disappeared.
We know what kind of trauma and hysteria people can fall into when they are deprived of any kind of remnant of a body to bury or to confirm the dead.
I think the corpse does not belong to the individual who inhabited it.
I think it belongs to those who are the caretakers and custodians of the burial process.
Well, that's a very tricky issue because in the name of justice or in the name of science, we know from history, and we know from our present condition, that there are a lot of examples of
horrendous abuse of the human remains.
Mass graves, exhumation of mass graves, several exhumation of mass graves that are resulting in fragmentation of the body and so on.
So, several needs are one that cut in mass occur to take a Polish example.
So, my question is, how many times the body might be exhumated in order to prove something that was already proven?
So, there are ethical questions and I would say, my question is, what aspect of our culture could preserve the insecure, as I said, already the bad, from such kind of ovaries?
Well, I'm with you on that 100%.
But I would say that by adopting this position, you are militating against what I associate with the transhuman and the post-human, where now the human is part of the natural order, the corpse should be reintegrated.
You know, it can become fertilizer for the tree that it becomes part of a natural cycle of things. Whereas if I understand you correctly, you want to preserve the sanctity of the remains and create prohibitions against the unlawful interference with their natural place of residence.
Well, my thinking is not normative. I'm not thinking about prohibitions and laws. I'm just, this is an intellectual exercise that proved to be impossible to solve, you know, because there are so many issues.
I'm more interested in finding life in the dead, and that's why also you have the quotation from Plato that I like a lot.
Which I didn't read, let me read it because our listeners haven't heard it, but that quotation.
Yes, yes.
Yes, the living originates from the dead, living things and living people come into being from dead things and dead people.
Yes, so I'm interested in the cruel life. I'm interested in how dead can bring life, and of course in organics sense where the body becomes a kind of habitat for many different species, but also in metaphorical terms.
When the community or the individual is going through certain traumas or personal crisis, how it happened that you sometimes have to kill part of yourself.
And after you have to deal with that, and how I might rejuvenate this dead part of myself in order to survive and in order to leave.
Well, you have some provocative statements.
So for example, the dead body remains ashes should constitute the irreducible remnant that stays in on above the earth in one form or another.
All into technological progress, preserving the memory of a human individual has become secondary to preserving his or her remains. Very normative, I would say.
And then you have this thing that I'll ask you about later about post-salvational resurrected bodies.
First question.
Biographically speaking, does your being Polish have something to do with this concern that you have about?
The remains of dead bodies, given that you mentioned the catan massacres, there's Auschwitz there.
There's, you come from a country that is haunted with innumerable ghosts, and those ghosts are not just abstract numbers that we far, far away might read in history books.
They are actually part of the landscape that you grew up in, and is there some connection there between your interests in the necrosan and the sanctity of these remains?
I think that my first shock that is related with this issue comes with the multiple exclamation of catan massacre victims.
Can you tell us what that means?
This is a very old issue in Polish history during the Second World War, around 20,000 Polish officers, basically 50% of our head of highest rank soldiers, plus intellectuals and people from nobility,
were metordically executed by Soviet soldiers.
It was in the 40, 1940.
Distributed in different mass graves, in cutting a stash of cogeresque.
Because of so highly political issues, the German claimed the Russians, the Soviets, the Germans, the Germans, the very bad ones, the bad ones were executed over and over again by
"monical missions". When I've seen, we all in Poland were bombed by all these images from various exhumations. It's just terrible.
The bad is in favor of not touching them.
The bad is only treated as corpustery, and as a subject of mourning, which is understandable.
The families would like to mourn the remains, and the Polish side would like to know the truth based on forensic examinations.
However, the question is, how many times, and what is the price of it, and what about the dead bad is themselves?
What about them? They were fragmented. These cars are only one laboratory, and the other parts of the body and the other.
This is absurd.
I agree with that, and especially if you believe that the dead bodies are our future, and that is why future-oriented humanities and social sciences should take them into account.
Can I ask you what you mean by post-salvational resurrected bodies?
Well, interesting story is that right now, in a viewer, a student of medicine, the many often that you have virtual autopsy, and not autopsy, which is an exercise on natural dead body.
You also have all these devices, virtual devices, but in order to have virtual dead body, you have to have a matrix, you have to have a model.
What appeared that the body of executed persons were sliced into pieces in order to create the virtual body.
In fact, the prosecution is not only execution, but it's also this immortal virtual life.
That's a very gothic story, and something that should be considered in terms of how we treat the body.
Then you're also very interested in a lot of things that we could talk about in terms of the organic nature of the remains.
There are also decisions people are making increasingly to classify and...
...telling into life jam.
Life jam, the synthetic diamond made of human ashes.
I'm not particularly familiar with that.
This is a phenomenal way of preserving your beloved.
The body is cremated and part of ashes are sent to laboratories, and they basically are turned into synthetic diamonds that are certified.
Each has a number, and usually what people do are putting the diamond in a ring or in the earring or a belly ring.
You can do it in California, you can do it in all United States, in different funeral houses.
If you go to website www.liligram.com, you will see.
I thought that it's a very extra-vagan idea, but actually I interviewed several people who decided to do the live jam.
Especially when a woman was very explicit about that, her son died, and she decided to have a diamond made of his ashes.
She put the diamond in her belly, claiming that in this way the boy would be back in her womb.
It's very interesting because it has a clearer analogy with many rituals among indigenous people who believe that actually you have to drink part of the ashes of the child, especially this is for mothers in order to be pregnant again.
You also talk about the Hiroshima case where there are this so-called shadow that is not really a shadow because it's the material remains of some of the victims of the atomic explosion that have become part of the stone of these steps.
They are being burned really into the stone.
And there you also have, I remember your talk a few weeks ago where you have a particular take on this issue.
Well, one of the major issues right now in the humanities is the overlap of humanities and natural sciences and the main impact is coming from biology.
And I think that this case, studying this case, really shows that we need not only multidisciplinary approaches but complementary approaches.
That if I would use her main eutics to talk about Hiroshima shadows, I would miss one of the most important aspects of it exactly what you said that they are not shadows.
They are spots.
So that's why I pick up this case because it allows me to talk about complementary, complementary approach to study certain phenomenons.
Well, it's all very fascinating. I have my brother always says, "Why do you always want to look at the new in terms of the old? You should understand the old in terms of the new, but I can't help but thinking that I feel very comfortable with everything you're saying because like you, I had a Catholic upbringing and there's the whole idea of the relics of the saints which are material vested in their not vestiges, their material remains, they're not symbols or not images.
It's the actual relics and there's a sanctity to them that I feel very comfortable with.
Well, I love your idea about human foundation of the world and this is something that I quote very often.
And in fact, I do believe also speaking to my colleagues who are indigenous and natives that if you really want to have some attachment to environment you leave, you build a house.
The best way would be to build a house and use as a fundamental, some remains of your ancestors.
So it would make symbolically the household very stable and I know that in America you don't have the strong attachment to the land because you are moving so often.
But I'm very much attached to it so my...
Well sure, and so we're all the ancient Romans and Greeks and they actually buried their dead inside the house and the sacred fire on the altars, on the hearth was the flame in which the spirit of the ancestors and have it.
So the house was basically a place of cohabitation between the living and the dead.
Yes, while you are talking about spirits, I like organic presence.
Well, Ava, it's been a pleasure to talk to you about your projects and the post-human. I want to remind our listeners we've been speaking with Professor Ava Domanska from Poland.
She teaches at the University in Poznan in Poland, but she's a regular visitor here. Every spring quarter teaching fascinating courses here at Stanford.
So thanks again for coming on. I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
Thank you very much. David's any advice for them.
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