{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023337222870478413, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.514469453376206, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
After Narrative: A Response to Birgit M. Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele

Responding to Kaiser and Thiele’s ‘What is Species Memory?’ requires responding to a response, and commenting on a commentary. That is the way of questions these days: to think is to think with others, already embedded in an archive of memories and erasures. Their question of species memory not only draws on the work of Sylvia Wynter (who in turn draws upon Fanon and others) but also stages the problem of memory after humanism as a task of reconfiguring a semantic and narrative terrain. Let us say that they accept a post-lifeworld notion of problems: one always asks a question from within a world, and one always sees the urgency of a problem and its possible solutions from within a horizon of expectations and potentials. The mode of Kaiser and Thiele’s work – exploring a problem through a writer who has demanded and initiated a retelling of what counts as human – demonstrates the extent to which memory is not a faculty that ‘Man’ may or may not possess; memory is not a capacity that we humans use now and again. Memory is constitutive of our very being, and yet the ‘ownness’ of memory or the ‘we’ through which we live our being is violently racialized. It is the range and intensity of this racialization that I want to explore in response to Kaiser, Thiele and Wynter. Is it possible that the very conception of lifeworld, narrative and self-forging memory are still group specific? Is it possible that humans might think of themselves not as a species that varies and identifies by way of narratives and worlds? In short, rather than think of humans after humanism, perhaps one might think of humans after the end of the world.