CR: The New Centennial Review

CR: The New Centennial Review 1.2 (2001) 201-289

Kant's Aliens
The Anthropology and Its Others

David L. Clark
McMaster University

for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Things to Come:
The Alien Supplement

My title is inspired by a tellingly reflexive turn that Kant takes in the final pages of the last book that he saw published, his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View [Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht] (1798). Kant's concluding argument, entitled "On the Character of the Species," opens by frankly conceding the impossibility of completing the project to which he has by this late point already devoted considerable time and energy. "In order to sketch the character of a certain creature's species," he begins, "it is necessary that the species be compared with and referred to in terms of other species already known to us." ¹ As a generality about the empirical method and object of taxonomic analyses, Kant's observation seems harmless enough. But the particular Wesen called "man" presents a unique [End Page 201] epistemological and classificatory problem, since "he" is—as yet—without compare in the order of things:

The highest concept of species may be that of a terrestrial rational being [eines irdischen vernünftigen], but we will not be able to describe its characteristics because we do not know of a nonterrestrial rational being [nicht-irdischen Wesen] which would enable us to refer to its properties and consequently classify that terrestrial being as rational. It seems, therefore, that the problem of giving an account of the character of the human species is quite insoluble [sie schlechterdings unauflöslich], because the problem could only be solved by comparing two species of rational beings on the basis of experience, but experience has not offered us a comparison between two species of rational beings ( AP, 237-238; VIII, 215).

Much could be said about this remarkable passage, the first of two allusions to alien others haunting the end of the Anthropology, and the last instance of an off-world interest going back to Kant's first major work, the 1755 cosmological treatise entitled Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens [Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels], a text to which I will return. Each of these allusions calls for a slow reading, and that will be my task and my method in this essay, parsing the body (and bodies) of Kant's texts both for the cultural contexts that determine and over-determine his evocations of nonterrestrial rational life, and for the different and overlapping political unconsciousnesses that they offer up for thought. These allusions form an optic through which to discern what I will argue is the violently "pragmatic" intersection of knowledge and power at which the Anthropology is situated and by which it is animated: for Kant, the task of determining "what man makes of himself" (AP,2) is indistinguishable from what the anthropologist reiteratively—and, sometimes, with palpable anxiety—makes of others, especially those others who are deemed to be more or less nonterrestrial, more or less not the true inhabitants of an imagined, cosmopolitan Earth. Kant half-heartedly dismisses the instrumentalization of "man" by "man" as mere "shrewdness," the "techno-practical use of reason" [technisch-praktischen Vernunft] (AP, 179; VIII, 162), yet his own text is quickened [End Page 202] through and through by that inclination and by that productivity. The craving or striving after the power to have "influence over others" is, as Kant admits, fundamental to the ambitious makeup of humanity (AP,179). Certainly it is fundamental to the smooth functioning of the emerging Prussian Bürgertum whose interests the Anthropology serves and for whose prejudices it operates as an alibi. What interests me here, then, is the array of rational beings that Kant presses into service to speak on behalf of "man." Dreaming of nonterrestrial life so as to name and to know humanity, Kant spectacularly confirms Derrida's suspicion...