In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Antihumanism of the Young Deleuze:Sartre, Catholicism, and the Perspective of the Inhuman, 1945–48Giuseppe BiancoGilles Deleuze, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and to a lesser extent Jean-François Lyotard, is considered an avatar of post-structuralism, and often associated with the critique of the concepts of identity and subjectivity. In this essay, I seek to identify the early sources of Deleuze's rejection of the notions of ego and person. (...) In the decade following 1944, one buzzword linked these two notions: humanism. Inspired by the evidential paradigm,1 and by using archival documents and little-known writings, I suggest why Deleuze's position, and the context in which it developed, can illuminate his mature work, especially his use of the concepts of immanence and univocity.Deleuze's engagement with anti-humanism—or, to be precise, with "inhumanism" and "impersonalism," the expressions Deleuze and his friends [End Page 795] used during the 1940s—is rooted in his radicalization of Jean-Paul Sartre's atheistic philosophy, which he read and discussed between 1943 and 1948. During this period, Deleuze was involved in gatherings organized by Catholic historians of medieval philosophy, including his mentor Maurice de Gandillac and Marie-Madeleine Davy. Gandillac, Davy, and their circles were interested in the existentialist and phenomenological movements, which they occasionally read within a theological framework. By radicalizing the positions detailed in works such as Being and Nothingness (1943) and "Transcendence of the Ego" (1936), Deleuze and his friend Michel Tournier confronted the mutation of Sartre's philosophy that began with his lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism" (given in 1945 and published as a book the following year). They considered this turn to be incoherent with the core of his philosophy and to have conservative political consequences. This radical stance distinguished them from an older generation of scholars.Stefanos Geroulanos has shown that opposition to humanism, broadly conceived, emerged in French thought during the 1930s.2 To him, the idea that humanism had to be rejected and especially that anthropological questions had to be overcome began in the middle of that decade and reemerged in the later 1940s, with atheist and secular rejections of liberal humanism shadowing Catholic and, to a lesser degree, communist ones. However, I would argue that this ideological transformation in fact slowed somewhat in the decade following 1944. During this period, as Edward Baring has also claimed, most French intellectuals utilized "humanism" to oppose totalitarian and "anti-human" ideologies and to promote doctrines underlining the uniqueness of man as compared to other beings, the centrality of freedom, and the importance of defending human rights.3 Critiques of humanism took a final turn during the 1950s, after the publication of Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" (1947).4 From the late 1950s, and even [End Page 796] more so during the 1960s, the question of Being and the analysis of unconscious structures became common among scholars born during the interwar years as ways to overcome humanism and its limitations. During the 1960s, far more than during the 1930s, opposition to humanism and to the centrality of the notion of human subjectivity became radical and explicit; in this period, the term "anti-humanism" took hold, whereas, prior to the 1960s, it was rare and used as a pejorative. Deleuze used "inhumanism" far earlier than other authors of his cohort, already in 1945–48: by comparison, in the early 1950s, both Foucault and Derrida were still relying on different forms of humanism—in the case of the former, Marxist/existentialist; in the case of the latter, existential/spiritualist.5 Their turn toward anti-humanism during the mid-1950s was the result of the influence of Heidegger, Jean Hyppolite, Jules Vuillemin, and linguistic structuralism, through Lévi-Strauss.6 Not only did Deleuze reach antihumanist positions earlier, before even some of his professors, but he got there along a different way. Sartre's works were a defining theoretical influence at the beginning of Deleuze's intellectual trajectory, and they gave it a peculiar theoretical direction. During the 1940s, authors such as Bergson, Spinoza, and Nietzsche were not yet dear to Deleuze, and they did not occupy the important role that they... (shrink)

Sartre et ses interventions politiques et philosophiques ont été associés mécaniquement à l'humanisme universaliste. Au contraire, l'exploration de ses textes nous fournit des éléments pour quitter une culture universaliste obsolète et éviter toute dérive identitaire et nationaliste. En se débarrassant de toute forme d'essentialisme, la pensée de Sartre montre son actualité (de la déconstruction de l'individu au postcolonialisme) et nous fait réfléchir d'une manière critique dans un monde traversé par des obscurantismes de toute sorte.

Have the critiques of humanism of the 1960s and 1970s buried this idea once and for all? Or is there a way that humanism can absorb some of this antihumanist thinking and thereby renew itself? Drawing on writings of Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger in order to illuminate artworks by Robert Smithson and Hans Holbein, René Arcilla argues for a revised idea of the human that is rooted not in some authentic, essential identity of ours, but (...) in an unruly language in which we all participate. He suggests that educatively cultivating a society that appreciates the Human language could be the aim of humanism in our time. (shrink)

The author argues thatJean-François Lyotard’s later antihumanism may be plausibly read as aradicalization of Heidegger’s, on the grounds that a) the philosophy of Beingas Event or Ereignis forms theontological basis of Lyotard’s antihumanism, and b) Lyotard reconfigures theplace of the human being vis-à-vis the revelation of Being – specifically,denying that humankind is the clearing in which Being reveals itself, andtherefore a privileged zone of dispensation. Rather, Being as Ereignis – linguistically cashed out forLyotard, as phrases – structures the (...) human being completely, denying humanmastery of language and thereby decentring human beings as subjects of ethics. (shrink)

Christopher Lasch's True and Only Heaven and Michael Sandel 's Democracy's Discontent are similarly motivated criticisms of consumer society. However, Lasch identifies the ideals animating American consumer society as stemming from a broader humanist impulse, the roots of which he explores and criticizes. This strategy allows Lasch to place his critique of consumerism alongside criticisms of a full range of humanist ideals. Sandel, who articulates a more narrowly focused criticism of consumer society, never links its underlying imperatives to a broader (...) humanism, thus failing to recognize how his alternative, civic republicanism, might share some of the same problems. (shrink)

This work represents Murray Bookchin's riposte to the antihumanism, mysticism and antirationalism which are influencing many people's attitudes to environmental problems. Bookchin offers a critique of, among others, social Darwinists, deep ecologists, new agers, technophobes, Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard.

There is no science that does not rest on a metaphysics, though typically it remains concealed. It is the responsibility of the philosopher to uncover this metaphysics, and then to subject it to criticism. What I have tried to show is that cybernetics, far from being the apotheosis of Cartesian humanism, as Heidegger supposed, actually represented a crucial moment in its demystification, and indeed in its deconstruction.

Martin Heidegger's impact on contemporary thought is important and controversial. However in France, the influence of this German philosopher is such that contemporary French thought cannot be properly understood without reference to Heidegger and his extraordinary influence. Tom Rockmore examines the reception of Heidegger's thought in France. He argues that in the period after the Second World War, due to the peculiar nature of the humanist French Philosophical tradition, Heidegger became the master thinker of French philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, he (...) contends that this reception - first as philosophical anthropology and later as postmetaphysical humanism - is systematically mistaken. (shrink)

An Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought examines the advent of antihumanism as a cultural figure out of a network of intellectual crises in interwar and postwar France and ties this advent to the more general consequences of secularization in the modern age. Bracketing political judgments, and eschewing dialectical methods, Stefanos Geroulanos shows how the critique of humanism that emerged from disparate quarters of French intellectual life resulted in a series of negative positions that rendered the (...) human void of any conceptual content and thereby unsuitable as a basis for future political action or philosophical investigation. In addition to basing his analysis on two rigorously sketched concepts of his own design, "antifoundational realism" and "negative anthropology," Geroulanos deploys a striking use of conceptual irony to show how the critical efforts of his protagonists often led to theoretical cul-de-sacs and a heightened measure of existential despondency. The treatment of the emergence of antihumanism as a local phenomenon among a segment of French intellectuals nevertheless encounters problems when it abandons the terrain of historical argument for an engagement with broader metaphysical concerns. By participating in the discourse of its subjects, An Atheism that is Not Humanist finds its way into cul-de-sacs of its own, in which, for example, the ostensibly political bearing of efforts to transcend mere politics for broader considerations of the "theo-political crisis of modernity" remains unclear. Finally, by accepting the terms of the phenomenological diagnosis of metaphysical crisis in the interwar years, the book compromises certain of its genealogical aspirations, especially with regard to the legacy of Third Republic idealism and the specific qualities of post-phenomenological structuralism. (shrink)

Starting from the consideration that today Michel Foucault's thought is “fashionable” in the more diverse fields of knowledge, the essay invites to rethink the work of the French philosophy. Focusing on a less known part of his writings, Romitelli explores the initial period of Foucault's production, in which History of Madness in the Classical Age of '61 is the main text, together with others among which there is The Order of Things of '66. This phase can be defined as a (...) structuralist and antihumanist one. Addressing, then, the later works, Romitelli analyzes the relationship between thought and politics in Foucault, starting from the concept of «onthology of oneself». Finally, the author sees in this political Foucault the occasion for a politics centred on the present and turned towards renovation. (shrink)

This article focuses on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s thought in the 1960s. Though the discourse of the ‘death of man’ was regnant among French avant-garde intellectuals, this article argues that Derrida himself has to be described as a humanist at this stage in his career, even if a reluctant one. The case is made through close textual analysis of three of Derrida’s early and seminal works: ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ (1963), ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the (...) Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’ (1964) and ‘The Ends of Man’ (1968). In these texts, Derrida grapples with issues of the subject and the other. They collectively reveal that the Derrida of the 1960s held fast to the view that philosophical thought could neither dispense with the subject nor escape the horizon of humanism. However, Derrida reconceived the human subject with reference to his core concepts of différance and arche-writing, making for an aporetic humanism that deconstructs the binary of humanism–antihumanism. (shrink)

This article compares the two approaches to Spinoza by French philosophers Louis Althusser and François Zourabichvili. In spite of substantial differences between these approaches, they also display significant areas of convergence. This convergence is seen first in the antihumanist reading of Spinoza operated by both philosophers, that is, the refusal to posit a subject, both master and source of its thoughts and actions, as a primal concept to forge a normative essence of man. There is also convergence between the two (...) philosophers in their conception of psychic life that is specifically Spinozist or perhaps that goes beyond Spinozism. French philosophy –Canguilhem after Politzer– has formulated a number of criticisms of psychology. But Spinoza gives, in an actualising method, critical tools against all forms of psychological precipitation. At the same time, it shows within philosophy a way that makes possible a delimitation of psychic life within its own movement. It is therefore not a form of reductionism: psychic phenomena have a specific existence, a substance that allows them to resist too hasty a subordination to the jurisdiction of an external and heterogeneous cause. Zourabichvili and Althusser therefore reinvest, each in his own way, the Spinozist articulation between criticism of the prerogatives of the modern subject and identification of an irreducible psychological domain. (shrink)

L'Althusser antihumaniste, ou de la coupure: Le problème de la "philosophie de Marx" -- Du côté de Staline -- Les thèses de l'antihumanisme -- Spinoza l'antihumaniste -- Louis Althusser entre déterminisme et liberté -- Althusser de la lecture: Le détour par Spinoza -- Le Traité théologico-politique, une politique du discours -- Lire Le Capital avec Spinoza -- Althusser de la structure: Du "marxisme structuraliste" à l'immanentisme spinoziste : un parcours philosophique -- Déterminisme et coupures -- Coupure et lecture symptômale -- (...) Althusser, de la conjoncture au retour du sujet: Penser la conjoncture -- Le détour par Machiavel -- Spinoza Machiavellianus -- Interpellation et constitution du sujet -- Est-il simple d'être spinoziste en philosophie? -- Althusser et l'aléatoire: -- Entre la nécessité et l'aléatoire -- La crise du marxisme -- Les "manifestes" du matérialisme aléatoire -- À quoi s'oppose le matérialisme aléatoire? -- Une conjoncture sans politique. (shrink)

Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications (...) in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, _Downcast Eyes_ will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians. (shrink)

This article challenges conventional readings of Michel Foucault by examining his fascination with neoliberalism in the late 1970s. Foucault did not critique neoliberalism during this period; rather, he strategically endorsed it. The necessary cause for this approval lies in the broader rehabilitation of economic liberalism in France during the 1970s. The sufficient cause lies in Foucault's own intellectual development: drawing on his long-standing critique of the state as a model for conceptualizing power, Foucault concluded, during the 1970s, that economic liberalism, (...) rather than “discipline,” was modernity's paradigmatic power form. Moreover, this article seeks to clarify the relationship between Foucault's philosophical antihumanism and his assessment of liberalism. Rather than arguing that Foucault's antihumanism precluded a positive appraisal of liberalism, or that the apparent reorientation of his politics in a more liberal direction in the late 1970s entailed a partial retreat from antihumanism, this article contends that Foucault's brief, strategic, and contingent endorsement of liberalism was possible precisely because he saw no incompatibility between antihumanism and liberalism—but only liberalism of the economic variety. Economic liberalism alone, and not its political iteration, was compatible with the philosophical antihumanism that is the hallmark of Foucault's thought. (shrink)

A natural heir of the Renaissance and once tightly conjoined to its study, continental philosophy broke from Renaissance studies around the time of World War II. In _The Other Renaissance_, Rocco Rubini achieves what many have attempted to do since: bring them back together. Telling the story of modern Italian philosophy through the lens of Renaissance scholarship, he recovers a strand of philosophic history that sought to reactivate the humanist ideals of the Renaissance, even as philosophy elsewhere progressed toward decidedly (...) antihumanist sentiments. Bookended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci, this strand of Renaissance-influenced philosophy rose in reaction to the major revolutions of the time in Italy, such as national unity, fascism, and democracy. Exploring the ways its thinkers critically assimilated the thought of their northern counterparts, Rubini uncovers new possibilities in our intellectual history: that antihumanism could have been forestalled, and that our postmodern condition could have been entirely different. In doing so, he offers an important new way of thinking about the origins of modernity, one that renews a trust in human dignity and the Western legacy as a whole. (shrink)

In the domain of the Ukrainian history of philosophy one can clearly observe symptoms of eclecticism, contamination, and corruption. Such situation is rooted in continuous insufficiency of the methodological framework of Ukrainian philosophy, split by the demise of Soviet ideological structures. Critical condition of humanitarian epistemology is aggravated by the urgent need to overtake foreign studies in the corresponding field, which constantly increase in number and evolve in character. All of the aforementioned symptoms are indicative for historical and philosophical reception (...) of Martin Heidegger's legacy by the Ukrainian academy. Heidegger studies have already formed a separate trend in the world philosophical discourse. We focus on critical assessment of certain reflexes, i.e. definite interpretative strategies providing different transcriptions of the same referents, i.e. definite philosophical forms, texts, or problems. In the general contour of Heidegger studies I differentiate the following reflexes: reflex of immanent hermeneutics, reflex of reductive interpretation, reflex of genetic historiography, and reflex of ideological historiography. In this paper I continue to identify transcriptions of "Heidegger's controversy" (the referent of historico-philosophical thought), provided by the reflex of ideological historiography. As I have recently identified the transcription of political implications of Heidegger's philosophy in the terms of sociology of knowledge, so now it comes to biographical transcription of Heidegger's political engagement, elaborated by Hugo Ott and Victor Farias. Critical assessment of their methodological approach revealed imposition of biographical objectivity on philosophy discourse, simplification of the complexity of philosophical form, and the pathos of elementary humanism as the ideological criterion of their research. (shrink)

This essay argues that in overlooking the assault on the autonomy, unity, and tenacity of the classical world underway in Europe after 1880, historians have failed to appreciate an important element of historiographical reorientation at the fin de siècle. This second "revolution" in humanistic scholarship challenged the conviction of the educated elite that European culture was rooted exclusively in classical antiquity in part by introducing as evidence non-textual forms of evidence; the testimony of artifacts allowed writers to reach beyond romantic-nationalist (...) histories toward the identification of cultural areas, defined by morphological similarities, and to disrupt the traditional categories of the civilized and the barbaric. The essay focuses on a relatively obscure Austrian art historian, Josef Strzygowski, whose insistence upon Europe's dependence on Oriental forms and upon the superior historical value of material, over textual, evidence provided critics of philologically-based humanism with two important argumentative avenues. Strzygowski also represents a para-academic type, whose rise to power and prestige contributed to the so-called "decline of the German mandarins." In sketching his career, the essay attempts to show how this "decline" is bound up with the waning institutional and popular status of Renaissance humanism--and a corresponding rise of biologistic Germanophilia--in the two intellectual milieux Strzygowski inhabited . A final section suggests that this antihumanist crusade contributed not only to the articulation of racist historiography, but also to the eventual transference of politico-moral legitimacy to a non-elitist, anthropological definition of culture. (shrink)

Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject? With these questions, the pioneering biophilosopher Jakob von Uexküll embarks on a remarkable exploration of the unique social and physical environments that individual animal species, as well as individuals within species, build and inhabit. This concept of the umwelt has become enormously important within posthumanist philosophy, influencing such figures as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, and, most recently, Giorgio Agamben, who has called Uexküll (...) "a high point of modern antihumanism." A key document in the genealogy of posthumanist thought, _A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans_ advances Uexküll's revolutionary belief that nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for in any biology worth its name; it also contains his arguments against natural selection as an adequate explanation for the present orientation of a species' morphology and behavior. _A Theory of Meaning_ extends his thinking on the _umwelt_, while also identifying an overarching and perceptible unity in nature. Those coming to Uexküll's work for the first time will find that his concept of the _umwelt_ holds out new possibilities for the terms of animality, life, and the whole framework of biopolitics itself. (shrink)

Philosophical Posthumanism is a recent area of scholarship which Francesca Ferrando has introduced in her eponymous book. The author situates the subject as one closely related to Critical Posthumanism and Cultural Posthumanism. She also discusses its close relatives such as Transhumanism and its forebears such as Antihumanism and Poststructuralism. The present article is a discussion of Ferrando’s text, tracing its lineages and relating it to the ideas of thinkers such as Frederich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Sri Aurobindo.

This article reconsiders Sartre's seminal 1945 talk, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” and the stakes of the humanism debate in France by looking at the immediate political context that has been overlooked in previous discussions of the text. It analyses the political discussion of the term “humanism” during the French national elections of 1945 and the rumbling debate over Sartre's philosophy that culminated in his presentation to the Club Maintenant, just one week after France went to the polls. A consideration of (...) this context helps explain both the rise, and later the decline, of existentialism in France, when, in the changing political climate, humanism lost its centrality, setting the stage for new antihumanist criticisms of Sartre's work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Judith Butler’s “New Humanism”A Thing or Not a Thing, and So What?Sina KramerA few thinkers in the last few years, such as Stefan Dolgert and Miriam Leonard, but especially political theorist Bonnie Honig, have argued that Judith Butler’s most recent work (Antigone’s Claim, 2000; Undoing Gender, 2004; Precarious Life, 2005; Frames of War, 2009) institutes a new form of humanism, based on the universality of grief, mourning, vulnerability, and (...) precariousness that Butler describes in these texts. These critiques call into question an incipient foundationalism in the feminist political theory Butler produces in these texts, one seemingly at odds with her previous antifoundationalist commitments. In this article I will argue that, while these critiques oversimplify the relationship between politics and ethics or politics and ontology in their critique of Butler’s new mortalist humanism, the problem of the relation of politics to ethics or ontology—or, more exactly, the problem of the relation of politics to its outside, or to its conditions—remains nevertheless a real problem in Butler’s work. This is because, without a clear account of a method of rendering foundations contingent, or of rendering ontologies provisional, we tend to repeat the political move to establish an apolitical ground on which we can found a politic. This foundationalist move thus shields that ground from political critique and transformation—a move that Butler herself has done so much work to expose and displace.In this article, I ask whether feminist theory must repeat a recourse to foundations by examining the charge that Butler does so her in most recent work. The article will proceed as follows: in the first section, I examine the [End Page 25] charge that Butler is instituting a new humanism. In the second section, I look at some of Butler’s discussion of humanism, and look more closely at the relation between ethics and politics the question of humanism opens up in her work. In the third, I explore whether or not the charge that Butler is instituting a new humanism is correct. And in the fourth, I question what is at stake in this charge. Essentially, the article asks of this new humanist charge: Is this a thing or not a thing, and so what? I argue that, while the charge is somewhat overdetermined, it does point to a larger problem in Butler’s work, and that is the recourse to foundations, or to gesturing to an outside of or beyond of politics as the condition for altering political conditions. I will conclude by arguing that a greater attention to method can help to avoid the reification of the distinction between politics and its conditions that leads to the recourse of foundations.Butler’s New Mortalist HumanismIn her 2010 article “Antigone’s Two Laws: Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism”—as well as in her 2013 book Antigone, Interrupted—Bonnie Honig argues that Butler’s ethical turn institutes a new mortalist humanism, predicated on the “ontological fact of mortality, not the capacity to reason but the vulnerability to suffering” (Honig 2010, 1). She differentiates this new mortalist humanism, which she also diagnoses in the work of Nicole Loraux and Stephen White, from earlier rationalist forms of humanism that are based on the universal principle of human rationality, and from forms of antihumanism based on the “signs of a monstrous, dehumanizing animality” (Honig 2010, 3). Either form is problematic, Honig argues, insofar as they both seek to settle essentially political questions by recourse to a position beyond politics: through a stable and recognizably human figure who either secures its belonging to the polity by means of its rationality, or an exclusion rendered through the dehumanization of otherwise ostensibly human figures.This new mortalist humanism Honig diagnoses in Butler’s recent work falls into the same problem: in this version, Butler settles political questions by recourse to a principle of mortality, or the universal experience of mourning. This would seem to be contrary to Butler’s earlier commitments to a radical critique of foundationalism, especially in her famous critique of the naturalization of sex as the grounds for a political understanding of gender. This is... (shrink)

This volume is the first of a trilogy which investigates, from a broadly realist perspective, the place, and challenges, of the human in contemporary social orders. The authors, all members of the Centre for Social Ontology, ask what is specific about humanity's nature and worth, and what are their main challenges in contemporary societies? Examining the ways in which recent advances in technology threaten to blur and displace the boundaries constitutive of our shared humanity, Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex (...) Machina explores the philosophical and ethical questions raised by these developments, and discusses the dangers posed by the combination of transhumanism with post-humanist social theories and antihumanist practices, institutions and ideologies. (shrink)

Somewhere between use and mere whim there is a place for the expressivity of affect as a concept. This paper raises the question of how the concept of affect might be mobilized without reducing its expressions to the logic of work. We suggest that the very attempt to put affect to work in order to solve pressing problems may be symptomatic of an anxiety to master the events of the world. With this in mind, we make a case for the (...) importance of Georges Bataille's critique of an instrumentalist form of thinking, which reduces events to objects of human sensemaking. Bataille's “general economy” opens onto all that the restricted economy of use negates; namely, that which exceeds our efforts as humans to make sense of, and thus appropriate, events. Ultimately, Bataille's antihumanist thought limits the potential of the gift economy, by rendering it the negative of the social order. We argue that a more posthumanist thought can realize the immanent potential of affect and apprehend its gift to thinking. (shrink)

Résumé Juste avant sa mort précoce il y a près de vingt ans, Edward Saïd nous a légué en signe de testament l’un de ses derniers ouvrages Humanisme et démocratie dans lequel il a étalé sa vision du monde futur et montré l’impact que doit avoir l’humanisme sur la conception démocratique de la praxis politique. Son projet consiste en effet à réhabiliter l’humanisme pris déjà pour cible par le courant structuraliste antihumaniste au milieu du vingtième siècle et à le réintégrer (...) dans le processus démocratique de l’action politique et sociale. Il s’agit en effet, comme il l’exprime, « d’une méditation approfondie sur les possibilités concrètes de l’humanisme comme pratique durable et non comme propriété, sur ce qu’une activité humaniste implique, plutôt qu’une énumération des qualités souhaitables chez un humaniste ». Tout en se référant aux événements politiques des dernières décennies et à ses expériences propres dans ce domaine, particulièrement son engagement pour la cause palestinienne, Edward Saïd considère que l’humanisme présente une base solide pour bâtir une société et une culture séculaires ouvertes au monde dominé actuellement par l’impérialisme et la mondialisation. Ce qui lui importe au fond le plus, « c’est l’humanisme en tant que praxis utile aux intellectuels qui veulent comprendre ce qu’ils font, à quoi rime leur engagement en tant que chercheurs, et qui veulent également relier ces principes au monde dans lequel ils vivent comme citoyens ». Ce n’est pas en vérité une recette toute prête à résoudre les crises ou les problèmes politiques actuels mais, à la lueur de la synthèse théorique et pratique qu’il opère dans cette œuvre, Saïd nous permet aujourd’hui de relire et comprendre les événements des révolutions arabes et d’en tirer les conséquences critiques, car son projet offre la possibilité de se pencher de manière critique sur le rôle public que doit jouer l’intellectuel dans la consolidation du processus démocratique. Il indique également comment on peut participer à l’élaboration d’une culture humaniste de coexistence et de partage à la place d’une culture d’exclusion, de terreur et de guerre telle qu’on est en train de vivre actuellement dans plusieurs pays du monde. Notre feuille de travail tend à rappeler le trajet qu’a suivi Edward Saïd dans son cursus théorique et pratique depuis la parution de son écrit l’Orientalisme tout en passant par Culture et impérialisme jusqu’à Humanisme et Démocratie, et de mettre en exergue les idées fortes de cette œuvre et leurs répercussions sur les études post-orientalistes et postcoloniales. (shrink)

D’Ors and Ortega carried out an anthropological-cultural and historical-social transformation of the pragmatic notion of belief. In so doing, both philosophers were expanding certain suggestions of Unamuno and Ganivet, for confronting the antihumanist crisis of European science originally denounced by phenomenology, but in a distinctive way.

Humanism, the dominant underpinning theory of modem philosophy, has gone through significant challenges from the antihumanist critiques coming from thinkers such as Heidegger, Lacan, and Foucault. While humanism is certainly not dead, the pre-critical humanisms of thinkers such as Locke and Rawls are no longer sufficient ways to theorize the human after the anti-humanist critique. The anti-humanist critique has been sufficiently successful that we now stand in a philosophical landscape that is best understood as “posthumanist.” This does not mean that (...) the desire to theorize the human from the human perspective, a la Husserl, is altogether dead. Rather, it is to suggest that any successful attempts at theorizing the human must take the anti-humanist critique into account. Theories that do so are best labeled “post-humanisms.” If, as Foucault suggested, Sartre and Lacan once stood as “alternate contemporaries” in the humanist/antihumanist landscape of the 1950s, then now, in this post-humanist landscape of contemporary philosophy, it is Lacan and Levinas, antihumanist and post-humanist, who stand as alternate contemporaries. Lacan’s anti-humanism is a powerful and attractive critique of the excesses of earlier humanisms that relied too heavily on transparent self-knowledge and freedom, instead placing the unconscious as the forefront of the human experience and encouraging us to dissolve “the subject who is supposed to know.“ Levinas’s post-humanism is a powerful and attractive way of attempting to rescue humanity from the totalizing forces of earlier humanisms while taking seriously the antihumanist critique, placing an an-archic responsibility to the other person at the forefront of the human experience. New possibilities await the philosopher in this new landscape, new ways of theorzing the human without falling into the pre-critical naivete of earlier humanisms. As we move philosophy deliberately into this post-humanist landscape, exciting new work has begun emerging, and will continue to emerge. (shrink)

This article discusses two twentieth-century examples of humanist controversies in order to demonstrate some rhetorical paths of thought involved in developing and securing rhetorical humanism within philosophy and rhetorical studies. The article begins with Martin Heidegger's antihumanist provocation and examines Ernesto Grassi's response in his revisionist interpretation of a nonmetaphysical Renaissance humanism. Next it takes up the post-Heideggerian moment of late twentieth-century postmodern critiques, including attacks on humanist foundationalism and essentialist notions of agency, and compares Grassi's defense of rhetorical humanism (...) within Continental philosophy to Michael Leff's reinterpretation of Ciceronian humanism within communication studies. Both Grassi and Leff propose a rhetorical humanist alternative to Heidegger's and postmodernism's philosophical antihumanism. These two rhetoricians demonstrate an interpretive power and a rhetorical creativity that not only revitalize rhetorical humanism in the present age but also provide valuable resources for its extension into the future. (shrink)

In "Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction", William Spanos examines the controversy, both in Europe and the United States, surrounding Heidegger and recent disclosures about his Nazi past. Not intended as a defense or apology for Heidegger's thought, Spanos instead affirms the importance of Heidegger's "antihumanist" interrogation of the modern age, its globalization of technology, and its neo-imperialist politics. The attack on Heidegger's "antihumanistic" discourse (by "liberal humanists" who have imported the European debate into the United States) (...) aligns ideologically with the ongoing policing operations of William Bennett, Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D'Souza, and others in the spheres of higher education and cultural production. Throughout his arguments, Spanos focuses not so much on Heidegger the historical subject, as on the transformative cultural and political discourses and practices, implicit in and enabled by Heidegger's interrogations of Being and Time, that have led to the contemporary emergence of the multiplicity of resistant "Others" colonized by hegemonic discursive formations. All the while he reminds us that Heidegger's philosophic interrogations eventually generate a diverse body of transgressive writing and an oppositional intellectual climate in the West. Spanos is author of "Repetitions: the Postmodern Occasion in Literature and Culture" (1987) and "The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism" (Minnesota, 1992), and the editor of "Martin Heidegger and the Question in Literature" (1980) and the co-editor of "The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism" (1982). This book is intended for those in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, political theory. (shrink)

Contrary to many attempts to place Heidegger‘s thought back in the tradition of antihumanism, the author points out with particular reference to the Letter on Humanism that Heidegger, by passing through the classical concepts of humanism, hinted at a new and more profound understanding of humanism. In spite of having been subjected to a lot of critical questioning and criticism, the additional lure of Heidegger‘s thought-path – shown herein with reference to the indicated outstanding points – with its philosophical (...) diction lies in the fact that it opened the space for thought beyond the dichotomies of theory and practice, cognition and action, logic and ethics, thought and experience, which is becoming increasingly relevant for the present time, but which primarily because of the normatively induced and/or descriptively established thought style in most cases misses the dimension opened by Heidegger. The question still remains as to whether by way of Heidegger‘s thought‘s attempt one can arrive at a “conversation between worlds”, which is about the future of human encounter and consequently about the “interculturally anchored humanism”. Heidegger must have arrived at the boundaries of east-Asian thought, but he did not believe that a “fruitful interface” between west-European and Asian thought – one that would not entail only an understanding of “fundamental words” but primarily of “fundamental experiences” – was possible yet.Entgegen so manchem Versuch, Heideggers Denken in die Tradition eines Antihumanismus’ zurückzustellen, möchte ich unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seines Humanismusbriefes darlegen, dass Heidegger im Durchgang durch die klassischen Humanismuskonzepte ein neues und vertieftes Verständnis von „Humanismus“ entworfen hat. Der hier diesbezüglich an markanten Punkten nachgezeichnete Denkweg Heideggers besticht – trotz mancher kritischer Anfragen und Einwände – in seiner philosophischen Diktion nach wie vor auch dadurch, dass er einen Denkraum jenseits der Dichotomien von Theorie und Praxis, Erkennen und Handeln, Logik und Ethik, Denken und Erfahrung eröffnet hat, der heute zwar zunehmend wieder an Aktualität gewinnt, der aber aufgrund eines vornehmlich normativ induzierten und/oder deskriptiv angelegten Denkstils die von Heidegger eröffnete Dimension zumeist verfehlt. Gleichwohl bleibt kritisch zu fragen, ob man mit Heideggers Denkansatz bis zu einem „Gespräch zwischen den Welten“ gelangen kann, in dem es um die Zukunft menschlicher Begegnung, mithin einem „interkulturell verankerten Humanismus“ gehen wird. Gewiss ist Heidegger bis an die Grenzen etwa ostasiatischen Denkens gestoßen, allein eine auf Augenhöhe geführte „fruchtbare Auseinandersetzung“ zwischen westlich-europäischem und asiatischem Denken, wozu nicht nur das Erfassen der „Grundworte“, sondern dem voraus der Grunderfahrungen“ gehörte, schien ihm noch keine Möglichkeit zu sein.Nasuprot mnogim pokušajima da se Heideggerovo mišljenje vrati u tradiciju antihumanizma, želio bih u poglavitom osvrtu na njegovo Pismo o humanizmu izložiti da je Heidegger, prolazeći klasične koncepte humanizma, nabacio jedno novo i produbljenije razumijevanje humanizma. Heideggerov misaoni put, ovdje ocrtan u dotičnim markantnim točkama, – usprkos mnogim kritičkim propitivanjima i prigovorima – svojom filozofijskom dikcijom kao i uvijek zavodi također i time što je otvorio misaoni prostor s onu stranu dihotomija teorije i prakse, spoznaje i djelovanja, logike i etike, mišljenja i iskustva, koji danas istina rastuće dobiva na aktualnosti, ali zbog prvenstveno normativno inducirana i/ili deskriptivno postavljena stila mišljenja ponajčešće promašuje dimenziju koju je otvorio Heidegger. Pa ipak ostaje za pitati može li se s Heideggerovim misaonim pokušajem dospjeti do jednog “razgovora između svjetova”, u kojem se radi o budućnosti ljudskoga susreta, a time o “interkulturalno usidrenu humanizmu”. Zacijelo je Heidegger naišao na granice istočnoazijskoga mišljenja, no činilo mu se da još nije moguće “plodno sučeljavanje” između zapadno-europskog i azijskog mišljenja, kojemu ne bi pripadalo samo shvaćanje “temeljnih riječi, nego prije toga shvaćanje “temeljnih iskustava”. (shrink)

One need not know much history of semiotics in order to recognize the background of my title. It is of course an allusion to Umberto Eco’s classic Struttura assente from 1968, which turned out to be a major touchstone in the history of European semiotics. At that time, everything about semiotics had become “structural”. But why, for Eco, was structure “absent”? This notion of absence reveals something essential in both the history of structuralism and in the reasoning to which most (...) semiotics has remained faithful – namely, that “true” reality is not that which can be seen, heard or felt, but the structure behind and causing any manifest phenomenon. As Greimas put it, any surface reality was only an “effet du sens”, a meaning-effect. In a word, manifest reality is only Schein – appearance, illusion – a notion that may be found as early as in the teachings of Schiller and Kant. Getting at the structure involves the kind of reductionism described by Mireille Marc-Lipiansky: réductionnisme qui cherche à ramener le supérieur à l’inférieur. Under the category of “antihumanism”, she distinguished among four different phases of reductionism: the reduction of the individual to the collective; the reduction of the conscious to unconscious categories; the reduction of consciousness to an unconscious regulative agglomeration or “combinatory”, which eliminates the creative activity of a subject and of history; and finally, the reduction of freedom to necessity. One cannot think of a better summary of the issue, and to judge from the world around us, this world-view has certainly won out. (shrink)

Twentieth-century ideologies, from liberalism to fascism, are rooted in humanism—the faith in the sovereignty of human reason and potential that grew out of Renaissance thought and discovery. This special issue asks if it is true that all vestiges of humanism have been dismantled, or whether humanism has taken on new forms. Have new versions of historical analysis and cultural studies reanimated humanist themes? What is posthumanism? These essays examine relationships among structuralism, poststructuralism, and the subject; explore the challenge of anticolonialist (...) critique to the coherence of antihumanism; reconsider the canon of antihumanists such as Heidegger and Foucault, and broach the intractable problems posed by efforts to comprehend the Holocaust, the camps, and ethnic cleansing. _Contributors_. Athena Athanasiou, Etienne Balibar, Mara de Gennaro, Carolyn J. Dean, Brady Thomas Heiner, Lynne Joyrich, Jacques Lezra. (shrink)

With the publication of French Philosophy of the Sixties, Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry in 1985 launched their famous critique against canonical figures such as Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, bringing under rigorous scrutiny the entire post-structuralist project that had dominated Western intellectual life for over two decades. Their goal was to defend the accomplishments of liberal democracy, particularly in terms of basic human rights, and to trace the reigning philosophers' distrust of liberalism to an "antihumanism" inherited mainly from Heidegger. (...) In The Era of the Individual, widely hailed as Renaut's magnum opus, the author explores the most salient feature of post-structuralism: the elimination of the human subject. At the root of this thinking lies the belief that humans cannot know or control their basic natures, a premise that led to Heidegger's distrust of an individualistic, capitalist modern society and that allied him briefly with Hitler's National Socialist Party. While acknowledging some of Heidegger's misgivings toward modernity as legitimate, Renaut argues that it is nevertheless wrong to equate modernity with the triumph of individualism. Here he distinguishes between individualism and subjectivity and, by offering a history of the two, powerfully redirects the course of current thinking away from potentially dangerous, reductionist views of humanity. Renaut argues that modern philosophy contains within itself two opposed ways of conceiving the human person. The first, which has its roots in Descartes and Kant, views human beings as subjects capable of arriving at universal moral judgments. The second, stemming from Leibniz, Hegel, and Nietzsche, presents human beings as independent individuals sharing nothing with others. In a careful recounting of this philosophical tradition, Renaut shows the resonances of these traditions in more recent philosophers such as Heidegger and in the social anthropology of Louis Dumont. Renaut's distinction between individualism and subjectivity has become an important issue for young thinkers dissatisfied with the intellectual tradition originating in Nietzsche and Heidegger. Moreover, his proclivity toward the Kantian tradition, combined with his insights into the shortcomings of modernity, will interest anyone concerned about today's shifting cultural attitudes toward liberalism. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Is ecology in the process of becoming the object of our contemporary passions, in the same way that Fascism was in the 30s, or Communism under Stalin? In The New Ecological Order, Luc Ferry offers a penetrating critique of the ideological root of the "Deep Ecology" movement spreading throughout the United States, Germany, and France. Traditional ecological movements, or "democratic ecology," seek to protect the environment of human societies; they are pragmatic and reformist. But another movement has become the refuge (...) both of nostalgic counterrevolutionaries and of leftist illusions. This is "deep ecology." Its followers go beyond practical critique of human greed and waste: they call into question the very possibility of human coexistence with nature. Ferry launches his critique by examining early European legal cases concerning the status and rights of animals, including a few notorious cases where animals were brought to trial, found guilty, and publicly hanged. He then demonstrates that German Romanticism embraced certain key ideas of the deep ecology movement concerning the protection of animals and the environment. Later adopted by the Nazis, many of these ideas point to a profoundly antihumanistic component of deep ecology that is compatible with totalitarianism. Ferry shows how deep ecology casts aside all the gains of human autonomy since the Enlightenment. Far from denying our "duty in relation to nature," The New Ecological Order offers a bracing caution - against the dangers of environmental claims and, more important, against the threat to democracy contained in the deep ecology doctrine when pushed to its extreme. (shrink)

In this article, I will try to elucidate the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari’s approaches in the philosophy of education, along the lines of the Deleuzean pedagogy of ‘do with me’ and the absence of pre-established rules for learning or methodological anarchism. To do so, I will consider three important milestones in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought: (i) antihumanism as the matrix of a pedagogy of generosity, (ii) the primacy of functioning over meaning as a vindication of practical learning versus (...) rote learning, (iii) the concepts of ‘deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation’ as the unlearning required by all true learning. (shrink)

In her paper “Creative Evolution and the Creation of Man,” one of the arguments Colebrook puts forth is that as a means of challenging the mechanistic and teleological conception of Darwinian evolution, creative evolution takes an antihumanist position by positing that there is an absence of end, thus “man” is able to create his own end. But in taking this position, Colebrook points out that creative evolution re-establishes the humanistic discourse on the human that it was attempting to challenge. To (...) elucidate Colebrook's argument, this paper draws on the work of Derrida to “play” with the notion of style in order to reflect on the ways in which philosophical deductive argumentation and reasoning constitute and perpetuate humanist and metaphysical discourses on the human, and the ends of “man.”. (shrink)

This book analyzes the identity crisis found in nineteenth-century post-Romantic literature. By mirroring several Antihumanist theories through the Jungian theory of the shadow, the author argues that this literature anticipates our contemporary “internal conflict.”.

Atension exists in Foucault’s writings concerning his alleged antihumanism. While his early archaeological period is taken to sediment his post-structuralist, anti-humanist methodology, Foucault still lets humanism creep into his writing, particularly in his later work. In the spirit of charity, I consider two ways of reading Foucault to overcome this tension: either emphasize his post-structuralism over his humanist leanings or take his humanism seriously and minimize his post-structuralism. After analysis, neither reading is adequate. I conclude that Foucault’s oeuvre is (...) best understood simply as incongruent, contrary to his own remarks to unify his writings and methodologies. (shrink)