[T]he problem of human ontology—What is the nature of human beingness in the absence of a deistic explanation?—is answered in the aftermath of Enlightenment by suppressing the contradiction between positing sovereign, distinct individuality and establishing the general properties of humanity. Kant’s anthropological writings especially register the taxonomic production of racial difference as organized by geography and especially biology. Such “biocentricity,” Wynter has shown, narrowly casts the definition of the human as primarily biological rather than social, with the effect of consolidating the ascription of fundamental differences among capacities to the seemingly irreducible register of the natural. Considerable uncertainty as to the grounds and boundaries of human subjectivity characterized the Western European eighteenth century, and the scientific racism of the era reflects a drive to order captured in the taxonomic imperative. In broad strokes, we may observe that post-Enlightenment, such uncertainty is managed by an appeal to universal humanity in the form of identity, buttressed by the co-extensive emergence of the nation-state as the dominant geopolitical form of modernity. The philosophical subordination of difference to identity that ensues inaugurates representational and identity politics. Backed by the policing authority of the nation-state, the liberal citizen-subject acts as the formal category of such a politics, which effaces and abstracts the very material conditions of its emergence, namely, those of empire and capitalism. Corporealized into sub- or unhuman bodies by the materializing processes of capital, empire, and the imposition of the nation-state as the naturalized and dominant geopolitical formation, the incapacity for proper aesthetic judgment signaled the difference between those who would and would not realize human potential by achieving full self-consciousness.
Kandice Chuh, from The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (2019)