Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 10:24:26 +1000
Subject: Re: AUT: humanism and anti-humanism (clarification)
From: Thiago Oppermann <thiago_oppermann-AT-bigpond.com>


On 29/4/2004 7:34 AM, "Lowe Laclau" <lowelaclau-AT-hotmail.com> wrote:

> Thiago, I don' believe we're discussing the same concept any longer.
> 
> The point of "anti-humanism" was to direct a category of differentiation
> vis-a-vis the continual reconstructions of "humanism" not to get caught up in
> the semantic tangle of completely rejectly something that one presupposes as
> term of reference, no? The anti-humanist movement arises in the specific
> context of attempting to stop trying to find Man at the center of the
> universe. The point is to shift our attention away from ourselves, from the
> theological roots of our self-conception. The mind and soul are not divine:
> they are produced... and produced here on earth in intermingling realms of
> practices, machines and power-relations. Anti-humanism is simply a bad, stupid
> term. 
> 
> There would thus be no need or no rationality behind constructing a "coherent
> anti-humanist project". its project is not in opposition to Humans, but the
> particular practice which kept subjectivity continually black-boxed in both
> philosophy and science for the history of Modernity essentially.

Well, I didn't bring up the metaphor of language, oppositions, etc... I just
pointed out that the results of this as a 'clarification' of the
antihumanist project aren't separable from certain presumptions about
language... 

The problem that I see is that the rejection of the humanist project as you
construe it is undertaken precisely in the spirit of humanism. I have this
feeling that antihumanism is always rejecting something that is not quite
humanism. Here you are rejecting 'the theological roots of our
self-conception', which, I submit to you, are perfectly evident 'here on
earth'. Previously we had the rejection of particular categorizations of
humans. Previous to that we had, within humanism proper, the rejection of
the idea of a bio-ontological difference between races, before that, between
serfs and nobles. 'Human' is a flag that once raised, can't be torn down so
easily.

We also have a disagreement about what humanism is. I think you have
yourself a nice straw man in this notion of an attempt to find 'Man' at the
centre of the universe. It's nowhere that simple. For one thing, humanism,
for the last one hundred years at least, has been an ideology of resistance.
Its explicit project has been to understand the human in relation to the
inhuman, to create a space for 'Man' in a world retold in terms of physics,
biology, chemistry, sociology, psychology... It has been a defence of the
rights of the human against the overwhelming encroachment of the inhuman and
nonhuman. It isn't for nothing that the boom in humanist law followed,
rather than preceded, the Holocaust. The idea of black-boxing subjectivity
comes into this as a particular variety of humanism, and one that I should
say I have a great deal of sympathy for, which is motivated by the fear that
if subjectivity isn't black boxed, it will be colonized by the forms of
power we are so familiar with. But this kind of obscurantism isn't by any
means a necessary component of humanism, any more than theo-ontology is the
differentia specifica between humanism and the project you outlined. It is
entirely possible to construct a materialist humanist project, one that is
disenchanted. It doesn't stop being humanism because it stops being stupid.

Thiago 

















 



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