Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 00:26:45 +1000
Subject: Re: AUT: humanism and anti-humanism
From: Thiago Oppermann <thiago_oppermann-AT-bigpond.com>


On 27/4/2004 11:36 PM, "andrew robinson" <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> 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”.


There is something horribly phoney about this stuff, in that it would take
all of five minutes to rewrite Stirner or Spivak in terms of high liberalist
humanism. An 'antihumanist' who opposes humanism because it does damage to
humanity is nothing of the sort. Perhaps that goes to show the extreme
difficulty involved in outlining a coherent antihumanism.

One problem is that there are really two somewhat disjoined planes of
writing here. There is writing about humans, the writing that acknowledges
the human as the locus of rights, and understands the human perhaps in terms
of legalities enshrined in certain rights. In other words, there is legal
anthropology. It is, I believe, possible for that to be a sophisticated
anthropology, even one that levels a substantive critique of 'man', but that
is usually pretty far from the reality. Then there is the writing about the
instruments and dispositiffs, of that legality, of the political effect,
usually the self-evidently benevolent political effect of, say, protecting
people from arbitrary murder. So few people are likely to disagree with the
proposition that murder is bad ­ and really very few will even say that
property should not be protected ­ that this level of discourse can unfold
quite independently of any examination of the underlying anthropology, it
becomes, in a sense, emancipated from the human. There is a certain amount
of irony in this. There is a whole technical discourse of human rights that
is entirely dissociated from humans. It is, in fact, completely colonized by
the antihumanist tendencies of government. It is, to mention only the most
obvious, entirely possible to manipulate the law so as to incarcerate people
indefinitely under the pretext human rights are being defended. That is the
standard line here in Australia ­ if the boat people were allowed out, that
would be a breach of due process and people who really require humanitarian
assistance would be unfairly disadvantaged. It is even conceivable that the
people who invented this monstrosity actually believe it, or think it is
clever enough that they ought better believe it.

What does it mean to be an anti-humanist in this context? I just don't know.
You can point out the hypocrisy of the doctrine of rights, and you can point
out that legal anthropology still lives in the age of Cesare Lombroso, if
not Rousseau. That's a pretty banal move, I think, and unlikely to be very
effective. For one thing, it is extraordinarily difficult to imagine under
what pretext one would criticise the insufficiency of legal anthropology and
the cynicism of government except by reference to another, more humanist
humanism.

Thiago











 










 



     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---