ABSTRACT

Recent transdisciplinary formations in the humanities, including new materialisms and ANT, but also in black studies, are recalibrating our understanding of the human and the posthuman as categories of analysis. They have revealed the post-Enlightenment conceptualisation of the universal human to be both epistemologically untenable and violently Eurocentric, and furthermore laid bare how techniques of differentiation along axes of gender, race, sexuality, religion always also serve to institute the human and its nonhuman, posthuman, more-than-human, less-than-human counter parts. Theorising the material-semiotic figuration inhering in the German compound noun ‘Kopftuchmädchen’ (headscarfgirl) – a term that emerged out of and has become synecdotal for anti-Muslim public discourse – this article proposes that the human and the posthuman should be understood as structuring objects and subjects of knowledge in the study of Orientalism. After all, most contemporary Orientalisms mark cultural difference as a grander problem of (intra)human difference, one distinguishing between a (Western) culture of universal humanity and an (Orientalised) culture of problematic posthuman entanglement. The afore-mentioned compound noun points to a self-referential entanglement of matter and meaning that Occidentalises that which it posits as Universal Human and Orientalises its human-nonhuman Other, while thereby also concealing, in Latourian terms, ‘the West’s’ own nonmodern, human-nonhuman constitution(s).

摘要

最近人文学科的跨学科形成，包括新唯物主义和黑人研究，以及黑人研究，正在重新调整我们对人类和后人类作为分析类别的理解。他们揭示了启蒙运动后关于普遍人类的概念化在认识论上是站不住脚的，而且是强烈的欧洲中心论，而且还揭示了沿着性别、种族、性取向、宗教轴的分化技术如何总是有助于建立人类及其非人类，后人类、高于人类、低于人类的对应物。本文对德语复合名词“Kopftuchmädchen”（头巾女孩）中固有的物质符号学形象进行理论化——该术语出现于反穆斯林公共话语中，并已成为反穆斯林公共话语的提喻——本文提出，人类和后人类应该被理解为结构化东方学研究的对象和知识主题。毕竟，大多数当代东方主义将文化差异标记为人类（内部）差异的一个更大问题，一个区分普遍人性的（西方）文化和有问题的后人类纠缠的（东方化）文化的问题。上述复合名词指向物质和意义的自我指涉纠缠，西方化了它所假定的普遍人类，东方化了它的人类-非人类他者，同时也隐藏了，