[P]osthumanism can be defined quite specifically as the necessity for any discourse or critical procedure to take account of the constitutive (and constitutively paradoxical) nature of its own distinctions, forms, and procedures - and take account of them in ways that may be distinguished from the reflection and introspection associated with the critical subject of humanism. The "post-" of posthumanism thus marks the space in which the one using those distinctions and forms is not the one who can reflect on their latencies and blind spots while at the same time deploying them. That can only be done, as we have already seen, by another observer, using a different set of distinctions - and that observer, within the general economy of autopoesis and iterability, need not be human (indeed, from this vantage, never was "human"). It is only on the basis (which is not, strictly speaking, a "basis" at all, but a nonplace, a form of difference) that a first-order observer (the "subject" in humanist parlance) is opened, and unavoidably so, to the alterity of the other: not by "taking thought" or be benevolent reflection but by the very conditions of cognition and communication, conditions that, in their constitutive "blindness," generate the necessity of the other.
