The subject-object of commodity fetishism, biopolitics, immortality, sacrifice and bioracism

As the editors of the present volume state in their introduction, the what" in their title aims at preventing the latent anthropomorphism entailed in the question "Who comes after the subject?" Both questions share the assumption that the advent of postmodernism amounts to the death of the subject as had been gradually conceived since early modernity up until and including modernism. Yet the editors' shift from "who" to "what" is instrumental in reflecting the fact that, whatever it is that recent theories may propose as the postmodern successor of the subject, they unanimously conceive it as transcending human-centered models and their entailed dichotomies, such as subject-object, individual-collective, human-animal, or human-machine. This is why that which "comes after the subject" is often also referred to as the posthuman. Here I am embarking on a double project. On the one hand, I shall argue that the subject of all secular capitalist modernity, since roughly the seventeenth century, has essentially always already come after itself"”that is, it has always been posthuman"”even as it is first the postmodern discourse that becomes acutely aware of the posthuman character of subjectivity and advances it as what is increasingly becoming a point of no contention, at least among certain theoretical circles. As I shall show, the fact that the subject of secular capitalist modernity has always been the posthuman subject-object is due to the two central, and concomitant, processes that define modernity: the development of the capitalist mode of production and the secularization of thought. As for the belated self-consciousness of the posthuman character of humanity in the postmodern era of advanced global capitalism, this owes to the general tardiness of consciousness, which can grasp the structures and logic of its own conditions"”in this case, capitalism and secularization"”only once the latter's potential approximates, if it has not reached, its fullest actualization. On the other hand, I shall turn to another postmodern concept, biopolitics, to redefine it according to the posthuman character of subjectivity. Both lines of thought will eventually lead us to examine the biopolitical reappropriation of certain Judeo-Christian, which is also to say strictly speaking premodern, concepts, specifically: eternity, immortality, Jubilee, and sacrifice. I shall conclude by briefly hinting to the consequences of this reappropriation of religious categories for understanding contemporary racism.