WITNESSING AFTER THE HUMAN

Abstract

W hat does it mean to witness after the human? The adverbial clause suggests, first, a temporal and a conditional relation to the subject, whereby the act or event of witnessing follows, responds to, and is conditioned by the departure, or the crumbling away of, the human. This is not to say, of course, that testimony viewed from a post-humanist perspective takes place in a world devoid of humans. Paraphrasing Dipesh Chakrabarty’s statement on Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us, we could perhaps suggest that imagining witnessing “in a world without humans” would invariably mean situating testimony “beyond the grasp of historical sensibility” (Chakrabarty 197). As the contributions collected here evince, rather than being “liquidated” from the scene of witnessing (cf. Derrida, “Eating Well”), the human – embodying a variety of guises, positions, and orientations – pullulates the pages of this issue, though always in proximity to non-human or other-than-human companions. This situates the question of witnessing and testimony in the broader context of late modernity’s “profound changes in the natural world and in human–nonhuman relations” (Fenske and Norkunas 105), with the effect of unsettling, decentring, and troubling the human subject in contemporary testimonial theory and analysis (see, e.g., Chua; Gillespie; Lummaa; Oliver, “Witnessing, Recognition”; Richardson, “Anthropocene”; Tuana). The first sense of “after the human,” then, implies the irreducible complication of taking the “human” as a subject and an object of testimony. This is consistent with Sherryl Vint’s elaboration of the phrase “after the human,” which both problematizes who and what has been historically excluded from the definition of the human by “discriminatory systems of western thought” and suggests that the theoretical and analytical limitations of human-centric vernacular lie in its ambition to articulate human as a “fixed concept” (1–2). From this perspective, the “human” in testimonial theory is no longer the sole agent, author, and architect of witnessing, who displays unquestioned capacity for historical agency and exerts formative influence on “non-humans” (objects, environments, plants, animals, etc.) that have been consequently assigned the role of props and