Frankenstein on Language and Becoming (Post)Human

The “monster” in Shelley’s Frankenstein is a body forced to become human by itself, without any help from other human beings. This process necessarily fails, because there is no humanity without sociality. The case of the “monster” is confronted with two similar cases: Condillac’s statue in Traité des sensations and Wittgenstein’s “private language” in Philosophical Investigations. What the “monster” lacks is an external social and linguistic mirror where it could recognize itself as a human being. But the “creature” is still too human to endure its new post- human condition. The main theoretical consequences of such a hybrid state are analyzed here. In particular, the paper ends with the proposal of a tentative concept of “post human community.”