All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
(George Orwell, Animal Farm)

Let’s distinguish two equalities in this famous slogan:

1) All animals are equal (commonplace grains of sand): ex-contained equality.
2) Some are more equal than others (unique snowflakes): contained equality.

In order to keep the high equality ship of snowflakes floating, the lower equality of the commonplace grains of sand has to be excluded and pushed down. We emphasize their dialectic link as follows: Snowflakes ex-contain (contain through exclusion) the grains of sand.

Every demand for equality is a demand to be contained, because it says:

I’m not equal enough, I would like to be more equal.

So the true purpose of the demand for equality is to escape the commonplace equality. The demand for equality is an escape from equality. Let’s consider this humanist statement:

I am human therefore I deserve.

Here human has a positive sense, it refers to the maximal commons earned through civility. But to deserve is an ambivalent concept: Just as you deserve fairness, you may also deserve trouble. Thus the same statement also implies the negative meaning of being human, it also announces the minimal commons of being flawed (or the potential of barbarism, to use a heavier expression).

So the true flaw of humanism is not that it pretends that humans are excellent and that they deserve only fairness (that it is too anthropocentrist), the flaw of humanism is rather that its moralist message tacitly conserves the idea that humans are truly inferior and that they deserve the troubles they experience; while marketing an imaginary human figure, humanism smuggles its true message about the real human. Every praise for the human is actually his/her humiliation between the lines [1]. This is why:

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. (Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History)

We can distinguish two responses to the flaw of humanism:
1) Antihumanism excludes the exclusionary morality of humanism by saying: “No, you cannot run away!”
2) Posthumanism reconciles itself with humanism and converts exclusion into ex-containment by saying: “Are you aware that you are running away?”

The fact that the human disguises himself/herself as a “prosthetic God” (Freud) and immensely speeds up the progress of “civilization” neither takes him/her out of humanity (posthuman) nor takes civilization out of civility (postmodern); on the contrary, the more relentless the human becomes in his/her civil cause, the more “human, all too human” (Nietzsche) (s)he becomes [2]; however, if (s)he can truly become aware that (s)he has always been running away from something (from real equality in pursuit of imaginary equality) the human will have stepped out of the ordinary humaneness.

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] Similarly, idealizing the woman amounts to her humiliation, see “The Religion of Phallic Woman: Penis or Child or Success or Identity”

[2] See “Fütursuz Çağa Karşı Sütur”