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Negarestani - Labor of the Inhuman Part 2
The continuation of Labor of the Inhuman, extending Negarestani's constructive account of revision, normativity, and the remaking of the human.
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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 13
His current philosophical project is focused on rationalist universalism beginning with the evolution of the modern system of knowledge and advancing toward contemporary philosophies of rationalism, their procedures as well as their demands for special forms of human conduct. e-flux journal #53 — march 2014 đ Reza Negarestani The Labor of the Inhuman, Part II: The Inhuman 13/14 03.06.14 / 19:33:30 EST
Definition · paragraph 3
It is, as Foucault suggests, the unyielding wager on the fact that the self-portrait of man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.2Every portrait drawn is washed away by the revisionary power of reason, permitting more subtle portraits with so few canonical traits that one should ask whether it is worthwhile or useful to call what is left behind human at all. đđđđđđđđđđInhumanism is the labor of rational agency on human.
Definition · paragraph 1
Reza Negarestani The Labor of the Inhuman, Part II: The Inhuman Continued from “The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I: Human” đđđđđđđđđđEnlightened humanism as a project of commitment to humanity, in the entangled sense of what it means to be human and what it means to make a commitment, is a rational project.
Definition · paragraph 4
Conservative humanism places the consequentiality of human in an overdetermined meaning or an over-particularized set of descriptions which is fixed and must at all times be preserved by any prescription developed by and for humans. Inhumanism, on the other hand, finds the consequentiality of commitment to humanity in its practical elaboration and in the navigation of its ramifications.
History · paragraph 1
By situating itself in the rational system of commitments, humanism posits itself as an initial condition for what already retroactively bears a minimal resemblance, if any at all, to what originally set it in motion. Sufficiently elaborated, humanism – it shall be e-flux journal #53 — march 2014 đ Reza Negarestani The Labor of the Inhuman, Part II: The Inhuman 01/14 03.06.14 / 19:33:30 EST
Appears in sections
Reza Negarestani and Inhumanism Primary section
Negarestani, inhumanism, and the philosophical afterlives that extend beyond shorthand accelerationism.