Science, Culture, and the Human after World War II

The definition of the human is always in flux. Science offers no absolute account of “human nature”; even the species definition can be contested. The idea of human rights has faltered not only on what counts as rights and who can enforce them, but also on who is entitled to them: on who counts as “human.” Despite the instability of its definition, the human has long been a foundational term for theories of social justice. What happens, then, when scientific innovations and geopolitical transformations conspicuously challenge the definition of the human? These seminars will focus on the scientific and technological innovations and the geopolitical transformations in the decades following the World War II.

Political theorists as diverse as Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon decried the failure of the concept of human rights and called for new formulations of the human. At the same time, the biologist Rachel Carson cautioned of the contamination and exhaustion of natural resources endangering life on a planetary scale. The genre of science fiction proliferated in this period as it engaged with the scientific innovations and geopolitical transformations that placed the idea of the human in question. The narratives emerging from these works, philosophical and fictional, offer insight into a politics and poetics of life that continue to structure twenty-first debates about science and politics; they will be the subject of this seminar.

In these seminars, we will consider a broad range of works, across genres, media, and cultures. We will explore connections among concepts such as “human rights” and the changing idea of “human being” as it emerged through scientific research especially in fields renovated (or generated) by the war, such as genetics, cybernetics, and psychoanalysis. We will consider how the effort to come to terms with the unthinkable in a variety of arenas gave rise not only to new anxieties about the future (and accompanying recasting of the past), but also to new ways of thinking about the connections among artistic expression, cultural criticism, freedom, and human possibility.
Readings may include works by such authors as Paul Celan, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Antonin Artaud, Erwin Schrödinger, Norbert Wiener, John Hersey, Rachel Carson, Johan Galtung, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, Octavia Butler and such films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Manchurian Candidate, and Blade Runner.

*Please register by e-mailing: Ms. Tory Konecny vad16@pitt.edu.*
**followed by lunch for participants**