Posthümanist Öznellik Anlayışının Dil ve Anlam Meselesindeki Yankısı

Abstract

Rosi Braidotti argues that the humanism tradition’s conception of the human being as an autonomous mind cannot be used to describe today’s humanity. The posthuman attitude replaces the dualist ontological distinction between the agent subject and the passive object and the hierarchical superiority of the subject over the others; it aims to put an understanding of a living, self-regulating vital matter and a subject that finds its own subjectivity in the entanglement of its relations with others. This attitude, with a Spinozist monistic approach, considers human and non-human-others on a horizontal ontological scheme, rather than vertical one. Posthumanism, which criticizes the problems that the hatred and the violence towards the non-self drags the world politically, geologically and ecologically, offers us a new perspective in which “difference” is affirmed. The dual nature of dualist ontology, which critical posthumanism stands against, also manifests itself in the philosophy of language in the issue of the fixed essence of meaning and its phenomenal differences in usage. I think that there are parallels between the second period philosophy of Wittgenstein, which rejects the fixed nature of meaning and emphasizes its construction in use, its dependence on local conditions, its “nomadism” and “relationality” in a sense, and post-human pluralist understanding of the subject. In this thesis, we aim to examine the alternative ontology of posthumanism and its representation of subjectivity. By showing the relevance of this representation to the issue of “meaning” and certain problems of the philosophy of language, we hope to make a theoretical contribution to the multi-layered understanding of the posthuman subject from the perspective of philosophy of language.