Documentos y otras extensiones protésicas, o como apuntalar la “identidad”

Abstract

This article faces the consideration of what does count as “human” from a posthumanist perspective. By discarding the founder or pre-given condition of “human”, it seeks which requirements and articulations of elements –both human and non-human– habilitate the properly “human” as such. Therefore, it highlights how the “body” has become a privileged site for “the human”. Further, it analyses the relations between “human-body”, “subject-body”, “citizen-body”, stressing the complex configuration of those positions, to inquire on the singular forms in which a “non-human” element such as an ID configures the properly “human”. An ID becomes then, an “immutable mobile” (Latour y Hermant, 1999) which allows for a guarantée of the continuity of a “citizen-body-subject” on the stabilization of certain parameters that become the “truth” keepers of the “body-subject” they identify. The article analyses the items included in an ID and, finally, follows some socio-political and artistic interventions that have employed identity documents to question, short-circuit, and/or dismantle the invisibilised and taken for granted continuities that articulate the relationship between a particular “citizen-body-subject” and its documents. That relation by which an ID becomes the “subject” and the “subject” is its ID.