EXCERPT We don’t know whether our ability to collectively represent ourselves—to say ‘we’—emerged only once in cultural prehistory, or whether it is the result of a multiple genesis, appearing independently in different collectives at different times, enabling their members to divide and unite themselves into groups as the need arose. We equally don’t know when this ability turned back upon itself, transcending any particular collective in the direction of an ideal, abstract community of we-sayers.1 What we do know is that out of these multifarious, anonymous beginnings has grown an increasingly refined capacity for cultural self-consciousness in which we have substituted names for this most abstract ‘we’—names which have progressively accrued descriptive and normative content as our need to understand and shape ourselves has grown. Whether we prefer ‘man’, ‘mankind’, or ‘humanity’, the history of these words is the history of our capacity for cultural self-consciousness, and the question of whether and how to replace or repurpose them is the question of the future of this self-consciousness, and the conceptions of agency, selfhood, and value that are bound up with it.…