Nine out of ten theorists agree: Volition, while constitutive of humanity, leads immutably to anxiety (in the "doomed to freedom" sense), from which it follows that the subversion of volition is simultaneously utopian and dystopian in its socio-political impulse; it liberates us from the burden of assuming autonomous subject positions in the world, but in so doing, it undermines the very core of our being. I hardly need to re-iterate for all of you the difficulties of liberal subjectivity—constantly excercising agency in order to make rational choices, taking steps to get closer and closer to one's authentic, Platonic Self. The opening scene of Stars in Your Pocket Like Grains of Sand affirms these basic coordinates of humanity: to be human signifies the ability, and the material wherewithal, to achieve more than a monosyllabic response ("yes") to questions like "Do you choose happiness?"—to realize, in fact, being human means contending with the complexities of this question, even when that process requires flouting happiness as such. (This is why Nietzsche's "last men" are so nightmarish in their self-satisfied willing of manufactured pleasure: their rallying cry, "We invented happiness," is monstrously hollow, a slogan of pure jouissance, in which lack and excess fuse perversely and endlessly, without meaning, without humanity.) This opening scene is remiscent of another famous opening from the science fiction canon: the gom jobbar test from Frank Herbert's Dune, in which the protagonist, Paul, undergoes an evaluation of his humanity, during which he is forced to keep his hand in a pain-generator. What solidifes his human stats—a status that most readers generally treat as immutable, which is partly why the scene is so memorable—is his ability to recognize, but nonetheless withstand, the pain. The metaphyscial claim is equivalent: humanity inheres in the very space of contingency in which "autonomy"—but also pain and suffering—articulate themselves.

Both narratives potray heterogeneously comprised landscapes in which Earthly humans are, refreshingly enough, eclipsed by other planets and species. By and large, though, humanity still reigns, albeit in allegorical form, such that questions like, "Are those creatures human?" are replaced by more politically meaningful questions like, "Do the 'other' species conform to our standards of (nearly always liberal) humanism?" In this sense, the significance of Delaney and Herbert's respective work basically conforms to the problematic layed out by Freedman in the Reagan/Terminator article with which the course began: Is the political field presented in [text] humanistic or anti-humanistic—and why should we concerned citizens of the real (i.e., non-textual) world care one way or the other?

I'll confess my own cognitive dissonance at this point: I find the humanism/anti-humanism binary fascinating, but nevertheless politically bankrupt, since any adjudication between humanistic and anti-humanistic politics seems to delimit in advance (and in overwhelmingly liberal terms) what "counts" as politics. (Note: On this point, I diverge from Freedman. Although undeniable differences certainly exist w/r/t their respective modes and tropes of articulation, I would argue that humanism and anti-humanism simply express the internal split of humanism [much like the "pleasure principle" and the "death drive" are not categorically different types of subjectivity, but rather express the internal split of subjectivity itself], and it's merely an unfortunate linguistic technicality of Freedman's argument. I have trouble, for instance, when Freedman claims that humanism is present-tense Utopian in its belief that social problems can be solved by human goodwill, whereas anti-humanism is present-tense dystopian in its belief that Evil is not entirely surmountable—could this not be re-read as an expression of ambiguity w/r/t the temporality of Utopian discourse, i.e., the way in which Utopian imaginaries are inherently futural, and for that reason, necessarily ascribe certain dystopian qualities to the present moment?)

All said, I'm drawn to, but also put off by, Freedman's work—and Delaney's and Herbert's—because the need to move beyond humanism, in ways that evade what I'm inclined to label as the *totalitarian* pitfalls of post-Reaganite anti-humanism, seems so clearly necessary. One possibility for critical inquiry in this regard lies in the concept of undeath, which plays on the linguistic ambiguity between "non-human" and "inhuman"—whereas the former simply negates the positive content of "humanity" (e.g., alive, conscious, etc.), the latter supplements "humanity" with an excessive, unsettling quality (the inhuman figure is "more human," in some sense, than the human him/herself). Could we propose something similar with regard to Freedman's humanism / anti-humanism distinction? What would it mean to explore the "politics of inhumanity" as an explicit antidote to the obverse complimentarity of humanistic and anti-humanism?