Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 06:36:10 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: AUT: humanism and anti-humanism



The thing about humanism and anti-humanism is that it all depends on the configuration of the concepts and what they are used against.

 

In my view, the classic statement of “anti-humanism” would still be Max Stirner – the human as category subordinates actual people because “man” is constructed to the exclusion of another aspect, the “un-man”.  Thus, people are under pressure to be “human” at the expense of what they really are, which is far more diverse and unique than this concept allows.  Thus, the lovers of humanity come to be haters of actual humans, trying to force people always to conform to the category of the human.  Absolutely accurate, of course, as a description of a certain kind of humanism – for instance, the Christian-religious type.

 

This is also, I think, what’s going on with the versions of anti-humanism which attack it along the lines of the distinction between marked and unmarked terms (e.g. in postcolonial theory) – the “human”, to have meaning, must be specific and be constructed in relation to an excluded other; furthermore, its specificity is derived from its association with an unmarked category of humans, while other types of humans are marked as inhuman, or at least as being not quite as human.  See for instance Spivak’s critique of Kant in the first chapter of “Critique of Dialectical Reason”.

 

I think everything hinges on how the concept of the “human” is used.  In other words, the type of “human” attacked by Stirner, Spivak etc. is very much a molar conception, in which the “human” is used as an overarching organic category which subsumes and striates smaller units (either individuals in Stirner, or lower levels of groups in Spivak), which are required to subordinate themselves as parts in this whole.  But can the concept of the “human” also be used in a “molecular” way, which breaks down overarching systems and categories?  Can it be a moment in lines of flight?  It strikes me that maybe it has such a role in Marxist-humanism and in some varieties of anarchism, and also whenever civil and/or human rights are posited against the social system, although I’m not entirely sure because there are always resurgences of the molar conception in these discourses.  If it’s possible, it would have to be done via an “open” redefinition of the human, which defines it so as to exclude
 a “shared” human essence or human nature.

 

There are a lot of naïve anti-humanists out there, and it quite often becomes a fetish – the same way I criticised anti-transcendentalism before.  Diego is quite right that contemporary capitalism is tendentially anti-humanist because it tends to construct forms of biopower which invade the self in a manner incompatible with humanism.  Zizek, for instance, in his article “Bring Me My Phillips Mental Jacket” (in London Review of Books), openly endorses and praises such tendencies in capitalism, precisely because he fetishises anti-humanism as a goal in itself.

 

Of course, the same problems come up with all concepts – they can be used in molar or molecular ways.  “Class”, for instance, causes the same problems: if it is treated as a molar totality subordinating specific “elements”, it is a figure of molecular fascism and not of emancipation (hence the way in which “The Sun” newspaper and their ilk appeal to their working-class readers against the out-groups of the “anti-social” and against the “middle-class liberals” who believe in civil rights).  Marxian class categories escape this danger only to the extent that in Marx, class is already inscribed as an affirmation of flight and becoming-other, and because the working class is not an element in an overarching system but a force which disrupts and may overthrow the class system as a whole.

 

 


		
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