Do we really need a “Digital Humanism”? A critique based on post-human philosophy of technology and socio-legal techniques

Abstract

Few concepts have been subjected to as intense scrutiny in contemporary discourse as that of “humanism.” While these critiques have acknowledged the importance of retaining certain key aspects of humanism, such as rights, freedom, and human dignity, the term has assumed ambivalence, especially in light of post-colonial and gender studies, that cannot be ignored. The “Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism,” as well as the recent volume (2022) titled Perspectives on Digital Humanism, bear a complex imprint of this ambivalence. In this contribution, we aim to bring to the forefront and decipher this underlying trace, by considering alternative (non-humanistic) ways to understand human-technologies relations, beyond the dominant neoliberal paradigm (paragraphs 1 and 2); we then analyse those relations within the specific context of legal studies (paragraphs 3 and 4), one in which the interdependency of humans and non-humans shows a specific and complex form of “fundamental ambivalence.”