Conclusion

Summary

Any attempt to draw links between and comparatively evaluate such a diverse range of thinkers as those I have discussed in this volume must necessarily be partial, both in the sense of incomplete and also in the sense of motivated by particular commitments and ideas at the expense of others. The analysis in this book has indeed been partial, although in its defence the main target of its critique has been partiality. The foregoing analysis has sought to expose and remedy the partiality of those accounts of the human which rest, in the final analysis, on a determinate host capacity or host substance. It has been argued that they are too restricted and fail to be able to account adequately for the human, and also fail to address difficult questions which arise in relation to (by these theories’ own lights) liminal humans who lack the requisite host property.

This critique of partiality has also dictated the order in which the chapters have been placed. From chapter to chapter there is a gradual increase in the number of ways in which the human is figured. Badiou and Meillassoux figure the human in terms of a central host capacity for thought. For Malabou, the emphasis on determinate capacities is replaced by an insistence on human pluripotential de-differentiation, but in her account of the persistence of identity over time the brain emerges as a host substance of humanity and personhood, limiting her figure of the human to a partial ‘internalist’ account. Michel Serres, in retaining Malabou's introduction of de-differentiation but splicing it with an external account of the human in terms of the narrative of the Great Story, develops what lies only incipiently in Malabou's latest work: a multi-modal figure of the human which does not rely on partiality either of capacities or of narrative, but seeks to benefit from the different aspects of humanity which these two modes can draw out. Bruno Latour travels further in the same direction by multiplying Serres's Great Story into a plurality of mutually irreducible modes of existence none of which is adequate by itself to capture or deliver the essence of the human.