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This Hunger of the Word, common to the whole of modern poetry, makes poetic speech terrible and inhuman.
-Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero1
Dilemmas
Inhumanism is one of the great modern productions, as barbarously polyglot as automobile. Ananthropism and inhumanity are, in contrast, as pure and urbane as autokineton and ipsemobile, while car conceals a classical engine made from Celtic parts under a rather battered and banal modern hood. Splicing philology with sexology, Havelock Ellis once complained that homosexuality, another barbarous modern coinage, is "a bastard term compounded of Greek and Latin elements."2 "'Homogenic' has been suggested as a substitute," he mused.3 Inhumanism compounds a Latin prefix of negation, the Latin adjective corresponding to homo, and the Greek suffix of verbs in -iζ[varepsilon]ιν. So whereas inhumanity and humanity alike trace their lineage to humanitas, a Latin noun of quality or state, inhumanism is verbal, suggesting a process and an imperative, like modernism and its many creeds and clubs: be modern, express yourself, construct in cubes, seize the future, and surpass the real. The Greek suffix turns a term "into an advocacy, a promotion, a movement presumably centered around a systematic philosophy, politics, ideology, or aesthetics."4 For those who hurled such labels in abuse, it diagnosed "irrational adherence to the principles of a cult."5 But 556 inhumanism hails the negation of an old cult, humanism, whose polyglot barbarism is early modern. So if the etymology of car reminds us that the Romans once borrowed a Celtic root (Gaulish carro-) to name a two-wheeled wagon (Latin carrus), the morphology of inhumanism records both conceptual opposition and historical transition, a transition in which concepts or systems or principles persist even in their negation.
Inhumanism suggests a posthumanism, then, but something else as well. Though the terms do often overlap, inhumanism emphasises active negation, nonhumanism mere difference, dehumanism a removal or reduction, and antihumanism a rivalry or antagonism. Moreover, the dialectic of history and concept in inhumanism, as its prefix and its suffix circle round its human, has a double value. While inhumanism hails the negation of that old cult, it also commits to the new cult of inhuman, whether that means hailing things or animals, gods or machines. Take William James's use of these terms in his 1906...