Genealogy of Species as a Limit-Concept

Abstract: This essay problematizes "species" at a moment when this concept has become ubiquitous in and indispensable to ecological thought. Through a reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Alexandre Kojève—who, I argue, is a key precursor of Chakrabarty's thought—I show how "species" sits in dialectical tension with the category of the "human," and argue that while the latter has been thoroughly problematized across fields, its dialectical relation to "species" has not. I thus attend to "species" as an anthropological "limit-concept," illuminating how this term has been constructed as an antithesis to the historical human that is itself constitutively without history and without speech. I not only question this assumption, but, via genealogy, also trace it back to a colonial matrix that makes clear the ways in which anti-Blackness modulates this dialectic between "human" and "species," consigning Black subjects to the position of the specimen. In genealogical perspective, moreover, one sees that the "species" limit-concept also includes a decolonial counter-analytic, which I locate in the work of Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter. Both thinkers trouble "species" as a category of racialized experience, proposing, in turn, that those forced to inhabit "species" might also interrupt its production of the human as Man. When the movement of the anthropological dialectic is stalled, I claim, it appears now as a material image, an insurgent visuality. Ultimately, then, I contend that critical attention to the history of the (de-historicized and de-historicizing) concept of "species" and to the role of race within it enables us to see our ecological conjuncture otherwise. Deepening our engagement with this history can help us understand what this category has done to the myriad others-to-Man to whom it is addressed, and what they have done in response.