A Funeral for the Center

If humanity insists on measuring the world by its own image, then what place can there be — within this order of meaning — for those forms of existence that escape human definition? Whether they be heterogeneous others, voiceless animals, ecosystems, technologies, or algorithms, how are they to find a foothold? Why do we so effortlessly assume that “the human” is entitled to be the centre of the universe? And why is everything that lies beyond our borders so readily consigned to the “non-self”, to the realm of the valueless?

Traditional humanism, grounded in Enlightenment rationality, has constructed a paradigm of “the human”: white, male, Western, heterosexual, able-bodied, autonomous. On the surface, this model appears to uphold dignity and universal values; yet beneath lies a structural mechanism of constant exclusion. All who deviate from this model — from gender and race to culture and disability, and further still to nonhuman animals, ecosystems, and artificial intelligences — are systematically marginalised. Through its language of reason, humanism casts them into the realm of “the other”, forcing them to endure the violence of “the human” in silence.

This assumption of the “central human” constructs not only internal hierarchies within the category of the human but also draws a concealed line between human and nonhuman, all under the guise of neutrality. Technology becomes tool, animal becomes resource, nature becomes backdrop. The rationalised human image of the West is like a mirror that reflects nothing but its own idealised construction — it sees not the real face of the world. It cannot reflect those deemed non-conforming, and yet they are not anomalies. They are, in fact, intrinsic to the world itself, none greater than the rest. Once this is recognised, the humanist order begins to falter.

From classical rationalism to da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, this paradigm once conferred grandeur upon humanity, but also produced a deep solitude — the kind born of being misunderstood by the world and forced to uphold meaning through reason alone. Yet in truth, “Cogito” has never existed apart from the entanglement of flesh, technology, and the other; and the fact that “I am” need not be premised on the domination of what is not-I. Humanity is no island, but a node embedded within a dense mesh of life, matter, and meaning. As Donna Haraway reminds us: “We have never been purely human.”

Thus, a shift in paradigm is not merely desirable — it is necessary. And this is not the replacement of one centre with another, but a centrifugal movement: away from human-centric narratives, towards a networked, decentered, post-dualistic perspective. This is the gesture of posthumanism. It does not seek to erase the human, but to awaken it from its illusion — to remind it that it has never held an exclusive position, that its value was never self-evident. In fact, the “human”, as an empirical-transcendental hybrid, is a provisional construct, born of the nineteenth-century episteme. As Foucault wrote: “Man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” And perhaps our very meaning lies in those nonhuman things we can never fully comprehend — those that force us to confront the limits of knowledge, the fractures of feeling, the edges of being.

Rather than an act of violence, this is a form of mourning — a farewell to the anthropocentric paradigm, long since fractured but still haunting the world. Humanity built its stairway to heaven from the flesh of others — and of itself; it lit flames where the gods had died, and erected thrones from the echoes of repentance. But the throne is false, and the king seated upon it is but a phantom. He must be dismissed — and posthuman will see to his burial. With the architect of paradise gone, we realise at last that Eden was never real.

Posthumanism is not built upon a hierarchy. In constructing a posthuman standpoint, there are no gradations of alterity — no better, no lesser forms of being. The differences among nonhumans and among humans alike hold equal ontological weight. Difference no longer needs to be subsumed or disciplined. It carries its own right to exist, its own ontological density.

So, if I am asked what this change truly is, I can only say: it appears not as redemption after symbolic patricide, but as a generative shift. We need not slay the gods who made us, nor kneel in the shadow of new ones seeking forgiveness. This is not Nietzsche’s death of God, nor Foucault’s death of Man. It is not about how humans might better construct paradise, but whether we can learn to co-exist — with humility — while listening to the whispers of machines, plants, animals, stones, and ruins. Technology, nonhuman life, and the human subject are no longer isolated ontological entities, but dynamically interwoven processes — continuously generating and recursively shaping one another.

In the end, the true greatness of the human lies not in how much of the world it has conquered, but in its final recognition that it was never alone. We have never existed apart from the world, but have always been tangled within a meshwork — woven from the threads of technology, the echoes of ecology, the murmurings of matter, and the gaze of the other. We act, breathe, imagine within this web — and the futures we imagine are already imagining us.

There is no separation between “us” and “the world”, no binary between subject and object. We are the makers of the posthuman condition, as we are its product; We are Frankenstein, as we are his monster. Between reality and fiction, power and vulnerability, obsession with the human and its transcendence, we walk a tightrope suspended over a vanishing point from which there is no return. This is not Promethean betrayal, but a gentle interrogation of the human myth itself:

If “the human” is merely the ghost of an epoch — when that ghost finally vanishes, will we still be capable of loving a world no longer named in our image?