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Negarestani - Labor of the Inhuman Part 1
Reza Negarestani's The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I treats the human as revisable and makes conceptual labor into an ethical and political demand.
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Core idea
These pages matter because they give the clearest account of Negarestani's mature inhumanism. The human is treated as revisable and constructible, and philosophy becomes a labor of transformation rather than an elegy for lost essence.
The mechanism is explicitly constructive. Conceptual engineering, revision, and rational navigation replace both nostalgic humanism and Landian anti-philosophy as the dominant way of thinking the inhuman.
That matters because this cluster marks one of the archive's most important departures from its own darker inheritances. It shows how post-CCRU theory-fiction can mutate into a demanding rationalist program without losing conceptual intensity.
How to read this text
Read for the verbs of construction, revision, and engineering. Those are the quickest route into how Negarestani is changing the meaning of the inhuman.
Track where the page explicitly distances itself from anti-humanism as doom, finitude, or exteriority-worship. That is where the distinctiveness of this line is clearest.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Reza Negarestani The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I: Human Inhumanism is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project of enlightened humanism. As a universal wave that erases the self-portrait of man drawn in sand, inhumanism is a vector of revision. It relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposed evident characteristics and preserving certain invariances.
Definition · paragraph 1
Reza Negarestani The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I: Human Inhumanism is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project of enlightened humanism.
Definition · paragraph 3
What specific commitment does “being human” represent and how does the full practical elaboration of this commitment amount to inhumanism? In other words, what is it in human that shapes the inhuman once it is developed in terms of its entitlements and consequences?
Definition · paragraph 3
What specific commitment does “being human” represent and how does the full practical elaboration of this commitment amount to inhumanism?
Definition · paragraph 1
As a universal wave that erases the self-portrait of man drawn in sand, inhumanism is a vector of revision. It relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposed evident characteristics and preserving certain invariances.
Appears in sections
Reza Negarestani and Inhumanism Primary section
Negarestani, inhumanism, and the philosophical afterlives that extend beyond shorthand accelerationism.