ANGELAKI

journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 18 number 2 june 2013

C ary Wolfe’s response to “The Posthuman-

ism to Come” revolves primarily around
two central contentions: (1) that my article
draws upon a number of Derridean principles
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to which Wolfe is equally and explicitly com-

mitted; and (2) this shared affinity with
Derrida neutralizes in advance my suggestion
that Wolfe fosters a progressive or perfectionist
rhetoric. Certainly he and I do agree on a
number of points, from the political and
ethical urgency of affirming the precarity, pas-
sivity, and vulnerability to finitude that we
share with animals, to the rejection of the huma-
nist presumption that language, suffering,
death, and mourning are exclusively human
phenomena. Indeed, “The Posthumanism to
Come” not only concedes this mutual debt to
Derrida but it also acknowledges that What is
Posthumanism? theorizes posthumanism in
terms of a disjunctive temporality whereby “it
comes both before and after humanism,” thus
apparently marking a departure from the logic
of historical rupture that characterized some of
Wolfe’s earlier work.1 Summarizing this view,
I write that “the posthuman is also the antehu-
man, the animality that ‘precedes’ the historical
elevation of the human above all other life
forms.”2 Wolfe is therefore absolutely correct
that his book explicitly argues against both per-
fectionism and the belief that posthumanism
can fully separate itself from humanism.
Of course, my central point was that he rein-
scribes a perfectionist scheme notwithstanding
his claims to the contrary. If posthumanism
does not come after humanism, if posthuman-
ism is not finally “post,” then why continue to
insist on a term of dubious relevance and useful-
ness? Yes, books require titles, as do book
christopher peterson
NORMAL MONSTERS
AND MONSTROUS
MONSTROSITIES
a response to cary wolfe
series, conferences, journal articles, theoretical
approaches, and so on. Yet my claim is that
“posthumanism” is quickly becoming a
fetishized slogan, one in a long line of scholarly
movements and reorientations that have chris-
tened themselves with the prefix “post.” Strictly
speaking, all names are fetishistic in so far as
they are signs of a disavowed absence of the
“thing itself” for which the name functions as
a substitute. Names are never entirely adequate
to the task of signification to which they are
assigned. In order to underscore this inade-
quacy, I concluded my article with a brief dis-
cussion of Derrida’s “Letter to a Japanese
Friend,” which reflects on the unavoidable
deficiency of the term “deconstruction” in so
far as it implies a negative or destructive

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/13/020191-6 © 2013 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2013.804999

191
 a response to cary wolfe
operation. Derrida certainly never shied away
from using this term, yet he did lament that
both his champions and his critics tended to pri-
vilege it over other key terms that populated his
oeuvre, such as trace, différance, dissemination,
specter, and so on.3 He was therefore obliged to
wrestle with the implications of a term whose
initial attraction was largely attributable to the
dissonance that it sounded against the reigning
discourse of structuralism. As Derrida notes,
deconstruction became “associated with ‘post-
structuralism’ (a word unknown in France
until its ‘return’ from the United States)”
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(272). In “Some Statements and Truisms
about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasit-
isms, and Other Small Seismisms,” Derrida
more directly confronts the language of the
“new” and the “post,” remarking that
there was a time when titles and letterheads
followed the establishment of the institution
and the work of its founding members.
Today we know that it is sometimes better
to start with letterheads and self-represen-
tation. All the founders of institutions know
this. As for deciding if titles in “new” are
more efficient than those in “post” […] if it
is more appropriate to periodize violently
and make the historicist telos the herald
who announces a new era or the hero who out-
dates or brings down an old dragon, it is a
matter of detail. It is basically the same
gesture, the cultural stratagem as the inevita-
ble by-product of the oldest of historicisms
[…] This recurrence of the stratagem is
sometimes widespread and reveals too much
impatience, juvenile jubilation, or mechan-
ical eagerness. It then becomes vulgar.4
For Derrida, the nomenclature of “poststructur-
alism” and “deconstructionism” betrays an
appropriation of deconstruction that seeks pre-
cisely to stabilize itself “each time that there is
self-presentation of a, or more problematically,
of the theory” (88). To be fair, Derrida observes
that the term poststructuralism, together with
the stabilization that it seeks to enact, “isn’t
an evil, and even if it were one, it would be a
necessary evil” (88). Necessary or not, “posthu-
manism” too is certainly not “evil.” Yet clearly
its appearance in scholarship explicitly
influenced by Derrida corresponds to a familiar
process of transatlantic exchange: a linguistic
and cultural translation through which Derri-
dean insights into the human/animal relation
have mutated into a language of posthumanism
that is quite literally absent from Derrida’s
work.
Indeed, Derrida never uses the terms “post-
human” or “posthumanism” anywhere in The
Animal That Therefore I Am or in either
volume of The Beast and the Sovereign.5
Given his suspicion toward the language of
“posts,” together with his scepticism toward
pronouncements of historical ruptures or
“turns,” assertions that disavow the spectrality
by virtue of which the past continues to
impinge upon the present, we can surmise that
Derrida did not find the language of posthuman-
ism especially germane to his ruminations on
the topic of animality.6 That he did not avail
himself of the term posthumanism certainly
does not mean that we ought to ban its use in
critical discourse on human/animal relations
out of some blind act of fidelity. Far from pled-
ging a certain deconstructive allegiance, my
claim is that the effort to articulate a positive
definition of posthumanism ultimately betrays
an effort to fortify its name and identity.
What would it mean if we were to concede
that posthumanism cannot finally be defined
or known? What if the question “what is posthu-
manism?” were no more answerable than the
question “what is the human?”
The stabilization of “posthumanism” thus
risks reproducing the principle of perfectionism
that Wolfe overtly rejects. To “know” the post-
human, to define and delineate its boundaries by
seeking to distinguish between approaches
called “humanist posthumanism” and “posthu-
manist posthumanism,” presupposes posthu-
manism’s arrival in the present. To define the
posthuman, in other words, is already to
announce its advent. It is therefore not enough
to assert posthumanism’s infinite deferral, as if
we would know it when we saw it despite its
impossible manifestation, as if what is or is
not “to come” can be known in advance. That
the posthuman cannot fully present itself
means that we would not know it from Adam,
192

that its arrival would be no more presentable or
identifiable than “the first man” whose initial
task of naming the animals sought to raise the
human above the non-human, the Adam who
asserted his humanness precisely through this
primal act of species identification, just as the
posthuman aspires to name and know itself as
such. Posthumanism thus arrives on the scene
as an exemplary case of what Derrida calls
“normal monstrosities,” which announce them-
selves in advance: “Monsters cannot be
announced. One cannot say: ‘Here are your
monsters,’ without immediately turning the
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monsters into pets” (“Some Statements” 80).
Posthumanism resembles a normal monster
not only because it is sewn together with Fran-
kensteinian precision from the corpses of pre-
vious postisms and newisms but also, and
more crucially, in so far as it domesticates
those “monstrous monstrosities which never
present themselves as such” (79). Once we
decide on what it is, posthumanism becomes
far less unsettling, an all-too-tameable, disci-
plined – and therefore disciplinary – pet.
Wolfe may explicitly deny the possibility of
the posthuman’s full and final arrival, but the
language that he employs in response to “The
Posthumanism to Come” consistently stresses
stabilization, identity, and self-knowledge.
Consider his claim that “perfectionism and
one-upmanship are not just irrelevant to my
argument, in other words; they are actively
impossiblized by it.”7 How can one not be
struck by this recasting of “impossible” into a
verb that is clearly designed to enforce perma-
nence and stability, to foreclose the possibility
that one’s language might say something other
than what one intends? Does not the assertion
of an active, wilful impossibilization betray pre-
cisely a penchant for one-upmanship, as if to
imply an immunity to criticism thanks to
which one has always already outflanked the
other? Responding to the suggestion that his cri-
ticisms of other theorists for failing to transcend
humanism correspond to what Derrida calls the
“mimeticism of bêtise,” Wolfe asserts that such
a reading of his work is “actively and, as it were,
permanently undercut by the theoretical com-
mitments that frame the book” (192). Once
193
peterson
again a rhetoric of self-knowing, deliberate
agency seeks to install a presumptive perma-
nence. With regard to my invocation of bêtise,
he reduces this term to its conventional, uni-
directional force according to which it functions
only as a term of accusation in which the one
who alleges bêtise remains utterly unscathed.
This reduction thus completely ignores the
mimetic structure by virtue of which the lack
of judgment or error that one identifies in
others can always be one’s own. No matter
how much we seek to soften or moderate its
impact, any critique of the other, which is to
say, any judgment of the other’s lack, defect,
or shortcoming implies an accusation of bêtise,
even if this word is never explicitly uttered.
Who can deny that every critique is motivated
at least minimally by the pleasurable illusion
that we are invulnerable to the defects that we
have discerned in the other? My point was
thus not that Wolfe is unduly harsh on those
whom he critiques, that he unjustifiably
accuses them of bêtise, but rather that the self-
description (albeit implied) of his own work as
“posthumanist posthumanism” functions to
rhetorically distance himself from those whose
work is judged wanting because it employs an
outmoded humanist methodology. This hyper-
bolic language thus seeks to inoculate itself
against the contagion of bêtise to which none
of us are immune.
As Derrida remarks, the mimeticism of
bêtise is aggravated both by its equivocality in
French and its resistance to English translation.
When one accuses someone of bêtise, one can
never be entirely certain what one is saying. Is
it stupidity, error, lack of judgment? Does it
imply that the other is dumb as a beast? Is it
an essential character trait or a circumstantial
and contingent phenomenon? Indeed, bêtise
can imply “an accident of what one does. I did
a bêtise, I did something stupid, does not
mean that I am bête but on the contrary: just
when I am supposed not to be bête, I let
myself go, I surprised myself by doing a
bêtise” (149). While bêtise often belongs to
the sphere of accusation, moreover, it can also
apply to unwanted or negative events for
which no agent can be held accountable: “If it
 a response to cary wolfe
is bête that I cannot finish preparing my lecture
because my computer broke down, it is bête
although no bête is responsible for it, nor
anyone’s bêtise” (140). Depending on the
context, bête and bêtise can imply an accounta-
ble agent or an unaccountable happening or
event; in addition, these terms can equally
suggest either an inherent trait or an accident
of circumstance according to which a person
who we do not judge to be “truly” bête neverthe-
less acts bêtement. That both bête and bêtise
oscillate between describing persons and
events, as well as between designating essential
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character traits and inadvertent, aberrative
conduct, underscores that these terms both
assert and deny accountability. What is the
origin and source of bêtise? To whom does
bêtise belong? Is bêtise precisely the sign of an
impropriety that is not the property of any
one, a property that is both communal and
communicable?
Derrida devotes two entire lectures to these
terms in The Beast and the Sovereign and I
cannot fully reconstruct this complex analysis
here, but the crucial point that I wish to stress
is the intersubjectivity of bêtise. To compre-
hend bêtise in terms of contagion means that
it cannot be understood outside the “phenom-
ena of ‘being-with’ […] There have to be
several of you at it […] One is never bête on
one’s own, that’s how it is, even if this excuses
or exonerates nobody” (1: 158). Wolfe can
come to the conclusion that my reading is an
“ungenerous” and “irresponsible” characteriz-
ation of his treatment of those theorists with
whom he disagrees only by denying the
“being-with” of bêtise, that is, only by reducing
it to the other’s error, lack of judgment, or stu-
pidity (Wolfe 192; Derrida 158). This reduction
is confirmed when he suggests that my reading
is “all bark and no bite,” thus conjuring the
image of an animal whose actual potential for
injury is unequal to its threats (Wolfe 193).
Yet this metaphor presumes an aggressive,
oppositional structure that denies the mise en
abyme of bêtise. The allegation of bêtise can
no longer bite, or at least its teeth are pro-
foundly dulled, once the boundary between
accuser and accused is no longer assured, once
we no longer know whose bêtise we are talking
about. If Wolfe thinks that my intent was to
bite, in other words, then he is barking up the
wrong tree.
To claim that no posthumanist project can
ever be worthy of the name that it gives to
itself is not to argue for a better or more appro-
priate title. Although I suggested that the post-
human is also the antehuman, this latter
formulation is admittedly not very “sexy.” No
one would champion a movement called antehu-
manism because it lacks the promise of novelty
and futurity, if not the jubilatory pleasure, that
posthumanism affords.8 In any case, to substi-
tute one category for another does nothing to
displace the impulse to categorization itself.
That bêtise implies accusation, Derrida notes,
means that it is “a way of categorizing the
other” (1: 150). He goes on to remind us that
the Greek kategoria can imply accusation or
blame, a connotation that is never entirely
separable from its more apparently neutral epis-
temological function of making known or know-
able. Radicalizing further, Derrida suggests that
bêtise not only implies categorization and poss-
ible accusation but also that categorization is
exemplary of bêtise: “I would say that defi-
nition, where it stops in the ‘S is P,’ in the defi-
nite article le or la, is always bêise, the very
definition of bêtise. Bêtise is defining as much
as defined […] The category is a signature of
bêtise” (161). Ironically, definition is the defi-
nition of bêtise. Definition defines bêtise as the
closure of meaning.
What is Posthumanism? takes as its point of
departure the utterly diverse and often irrecon-
cilable definitions according to which the term
posthumanism has been employed by thinkers
and theorists from a broad array of intellectual
traditions. Wolfe thus views this “confusion”
as an “opportunity” to define posthumanism
in more precise terms, to arrest its semantic
promiscuity (xi). This reclamation of posthu-
manism inspires the distinction that he makes
between “posthuman” and “posthumanist”
theory. Whereas the former is associated with
thinkers such as Katherine Hayles, who
(Wolfe alleges) envisions a transcendence of
human embodiment, the latter stresses a
194

materiality and corporeality that humanism has
historically disavowed. I wholly agree that
humanism’s disavowal of animality betrays an
attendant disavowal of materiality. Yet how
can the distance that one takes from this dis-
avowal be meaningfully inscribed as posthuma-
nist rather than posthuman? Except as a
consequence of their arbitrary nomination,
how does “posthumanist” semantically imply
embodiment whereas “posthuman” infers dis-
embodiment? The fragility of such semantics,
together with the assertion that Derrida’s and
Luhmann’s work (and, by extension, Wolfe’s)
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marks a “decisive turn of a thinking that is gen-
uinely posthumanist” (as opposed to an
inauthentic or “false” posthuman(ist) theory?),
makes it difficult not to read him as arresting
signification precisely with the “S is P,” as
settling on what posthumanism finally is (xix).
Regrettably, I do not possess the same degree
of ontological certainty, and thus I cannot claim
that my reading of Wolfe is invulnerable to
bêtise. Indeed, I cannot take shelter in the
impossibilized possibility that I might be hope-
lessly, impossibly wrong. To be “impossibly
wrong” means to be terribly, incredibly mista-
ken – so wrong that one’s wrongness cannot
possibly be right. The impossibly wrong is the
wrong that both admits its error and impossibi-
lizes itself against it. The impossibly wrong
either does not wholly believe that it is wrong
or is not finally as wrong as one believes. As
Derrida asks, who
does not feel a little confusedly unjust,
unjustly wounding, when accusing someone
of bêtise? Who does not feel that we are
ignoring or denying, through this aggression,
however bête the person appears to be or we
want to say he or she is, the person is not that
bête, at bottom, not so bête through and
through, and that at bottom we are never
sure of knowing what we mean, that we are
in the dark when we claim that the other is
bête? (1: 166)
When we claim that the other is bête, we necess-
arily invoke a predicative formulation that seeks
to define bêtise as much as it seeks to define the
other. That “we are never sure of knowing what
195
peterson
we mean” when we say someone or something is
bête affirms a linguistic equivocality that
extends well beyond idiomatic French. That
the “posthuman” has been employed in funda-
mentally incompatible and irreconcilable ways
underscores that its horizon of signification is
no more limited than that of bêtise. This
broad scope of meanings that have attached to
the posthuman demonstrates that we can never
be entirely confident that we know what we
are saying with this word. Given that humanism
largely presumes that language means what it
says, that the gap between signifier and signified
can be closed, perhaps the only posthumanist
gesture (somewhat) worthy of
the name is one that affirms its
own impotence in the face of
the predicative injunction – one
that “knows” that it cannot
finally know itself.
notes
1 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapo-
lis: U of Minnesota P, 2010) 121.
2 Christopher Peterson, “The Posthumanism to
Come,” Angelaki 16.2 (2011) 138.
3 Jacques Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,”
trans. David Wood and Andrew Benjamin, in A
Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy
Kamuf (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 275.
4 Jacques Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms
about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasit-
isms, and Other Small Seismisms” in The States of
“Theory”: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed.
David Carroll (New York: Columbia UP, 1990)
68, 73.
5 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am,
trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham UP, 2008);
idem, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
2009); idem, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2,
trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2011).
6 In Rogues, for instance, Derrida rejects the
notion that either a political or ethical “turn” can
be identified in his work beginning in the
1980s. See Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans.
 a response to cary wolfe

Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford:

Stanford UP, 2005) 39.
7 Cary Wolfe, “Response to Christopher Peter-
son, ‘The Posthumanism to Come,’” Angelaki 16.2
(2011) 191.
8 For an analysis of the privileging of novelty in
academic scholarship, see Chris Fleming and John
O’Carroll, “Revolution, Rupture, Rhetoric,” Philos-
ophy and Social Criticism 38.1 (2012): 39–57. They
argue that novelty has ironically become an ortho-
doxy that encourages hyperbolic assertions of
scholarly innovation.
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Christopher Peterson
School of Humanities
and Communication Arts
University of Western Sydney
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith, NSW 2751
Australia
E-mail: c.peterson@uws.edu.au