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To anticipate the answer to the question of who comes after the posthuman, I will give a one-word answer: the pre-human. I also want to begin by recalling the question that I have varied for the title of this essay. In 1991, in a profoundly deconstructive manner, Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy posed the question, "who comes after the subject?" Implicit in the phrasing is that the very possibility of the question entails a subject, or a "who". To think about what might be other than the thinking subject is both the most Cartesian of gestures (allowing for a subject or question beyond the given), and already post-Cartesian in striving to think beyond the subject. As both Derrida (1969) and Deleuze and Guattari have argued: the supposed ultra-humanism of Descartes was also a hyperbolic surpassing of the human, either by way of a doubt that destroys the concrete existence of "man" or by the creation of a "persona" that has little to do with the living human being: "Even Descartes had his dream. To think is always to follow the witch's flight" (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 41). Part of the force of deconstruction lay in this strangely inhuman border of the inescapably human: if there is such a thing as the human that exists beyond the level of species being, or defines humans as a species, it is a certain capacity to negate or question whatever is given as their humanity.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137453693_13

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