Everybody knows that the question of the essence has become suspect. The possibility of responding to What is X? seems inseparable from a capacity to assign it, once it’s known, to a place it is predestined to occupy. In many ways, the emphatic insistence that the human being has no essence wanted to express that there is no overarching order that it could be integrated in. While the biological beings could be placed within a structure that would not only reveal what they are, but also define the way they relate to each other, the human being would profit from an exceptional status. Answering the question What is X? would therefore amount to answering the question Where is X in relation to Y, Z, etc.?, where each essence becomes visible as the reflection of all the essences that surround and situate it.
This would mean that whenever a human being strays away from its assigned place, whenever it resists integration, it can either be forced to find its way back, or be excluded from humanity, from human consideration. While this possibility of deviation might suggest that any such essential questioning of human existence is vain, there is another possibility still: namely that it is the connection of the What to the Where that is misguided. When we look at the repressive forces that try to keep human beings where they are supposed to be, as much as they pretend to do so in the name of some presumably given essence, this violent gesture reveals its own hypocrisy: if the human forms needs to be pressed and repressed, it can only be done by seizing it as a malleable mass that can be made to correspond to whatever it is that human beings are supposed to be. Such assignation necessarily comes from the outside, while an essence, should it be essence, waits for no-one to be shaped or named. Whatever the essence of any X is, it is clear that it must come along with an effortlessness of being whatever it is in the first place. Maintaining order, where every part is kept wherever it belongs, where every X stands in a correct relation to every Y, turns out to be a profoundly anti-essentialist attitude. On the other hand, those resisting these efforts in the name of dignity, of a humane life, do so in the name of what human beings effortlessly are wherever they are not forcefully seized.
In an important way, then, asking Where is X?, does not aim at understanding the What, but rather avoids to question it as it is: it shapes and situates instead of waiting for a response. The What, on the other hand, is what it is wherever it is. It waits for no order or system to receive it. Anti-essentialist positions, in trying to open up the space for the human being to decide what it wants to be, only delivered it to forces that are much better suited at molding formless masses into something definable. The negation of the essence amounts to availability and adaptability, which, in as far as they are relational, make the human being depend on the position it is assigned to. A firm understanding of the Who that the human being is, on the other hand, might carry greater critical force, as it aims not at the situating structure, but at the conditions that allow human beings to live as human beings, whatever that might mean. The question of Where is thereby itself put in its place; it is not a question of abstract assignation, but the concrete question of: where do you stand wherever human beings lay claim to living as humans?