The human, as a category, has been subjected to a thorough battering. Various post-humanist, anti-humanist, trans-humanist, or anti-colonial analyses have positioned ‘the human’, conceived as the rational individual of the enlightenment, as at best a state to be exceeded, at worst a mere fictive tool of violent extraction. These critiques have been made with good reason, but they also often hesitate to fully disavow the concept of the human. If we accept many of the points of such x-humanist turns, (the exclusionary nature of such categories, their tendency towards the fixity of the individual against its incorporation in multi-agent networks, etc), it leaves little remaining but some strange kernel of loosely organised coherence. Indeed, much of what replaces ‘the human’ leans on such indeterminate coherence, be it assemblages or actor-networks. But is this empty coherence of the category ‘human’ simply a dead metaphor, or might something remain for us in the human? 

To this question, I return to Immanuel Kant’s later work – especially his Critique of Judgement and Opus Postumum – finding that these later works offer useful answers in terms of judgement and purposiveness. Reading the already post-human currents latent within this work, I emphasise the theorisation of structured indeterminacy and (trans)individuation that opens Kant’s earlier, more rigid thought to ideas still not fully realised. Rational purposiveness and indeterminate judgement offer routes for thinking the kind of structural coherence without determination that seems to have occupied the ‘human’ following its evacuation. Drawing on the work of Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, and Yuk Hui in particular, I suggest how these ideas of judgement and purposiveness offer a path beyond the human, and indeed beyond the ‘organic’ as a means of organising thought about the human, or rational coherent agents in general.