Humanism encore

Humanism [Part 2 of 3]

Agamben

In a chapter entitled Mysterium disiunctionis in The Open, Agamben posits that ‘[f]or anyone taking a genealogical study of the concept of “life” in our culture, one of the first and most instructive observations to be made is that the concept never gets defined as such’. We should avoid the immediate conceptual conflation of ‘man’ and ‘life’, but, nevertheless, Agamben’s conception of ‘bare life’ will owe a lot to his complex analyses of the way in which ‘life’ and ‘man’ traverse and intersect in the modern ‘machines’ of humanism and inhumanism. Agamben’s extension and critique of Foucault’s work on biopolitics attempts to introduce an Aristotelian dimension to the genealogical analyses of Foucault: namely, to begin with an entirely polysemic and philosophical (and thus not strictly biological) notion of ‘life’:

It is through life that what has soul in it [l’animale] differs from what has not [l’inanimato]. Now this term “to live” has more than one sense, and provided any one alone of these is found in a thing we say that the thing is living – viz. thinking, sensation, local movement and rest, or movement in the sense of nutrition, decay and growth (Aristotle, De anima, quoted in The Open).

What is ‘animated’, is always already ‘animal’ – ‘life’ is a category not specific to humanity. Indeed, in the Aristotelian conception of thought, it is clear that ‘thought’ is not privileged in the way that it categorically must be for any clear separation of man and animal to hold. The French translation - la vie générique (generic life) - of the German Gattungswesen, as we find it in the work of Feuerbach and Marx, is doubly superior to the usual English translation of ‘species-being’, as it preserves both the Aristotelian and Hegelian resonances in the concept, as we shall see.

In order to think through the shift in tone between the rationalist tradition and Feuerbach/Marx’s early writings, where the question of man’s generic status is discussed, we should note that Thought was already understood generically for Hegel. In the Encyclopaedia Logic, for example, he makes the following claim:

..in using the term thought we must not forget the difference between finite or discursive thinking and the thinking which is infinite and rational….it is…the very essence of thought to be infinite.

However, whilst Feuerbach maintains, for the most part, this conception of thought as infinite (and the reclamation of this capacity to think the infinite is at the heart of his project to reclaim transcendence in the name of Man), the notion of Gattungswesen becomes somewhat more complex in the movement of Marx’s thought between the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology. If the term is best rendered as ‘generic life’ in translation, this is precisely because the concept remains divided between thought and practice; it is no longer a purely idealist conception. This is why Marx’s use of the term is ultimately located between Hegel and Aristotle. Agamben points to exactly this theoretical division:

It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organise the complex – and not always edifying – economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within man … if this is true, if the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man, then it is the very question of man - and of “humanism” that must be posed in a new way… We must learn instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation. What is man, if he is always the place – and, at the same time, the result – of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? (The Open).

This ‘mysterious disjunction’ of course traverses disciplines as distinctive as philosophy, theology, politics, medicine and biology, and at the same time, forms the object of their discourse: ‘That is to say, everything happens as if, in our culture, life were what cannot be defined, yet, precisely for this reason, must be ceaselessly articulated and defined’.

This is a crucial point. Whilst no longer Marxist for the most part, the contemporary resurgence of debates surrounding humanism/antihumanism takes up an Aristotelian opposition between life/nonlife, and its understanding of politics is either biological or a legal relation to biology (human rights, biopower, biopolitics, cf. also John Gray’s cosmic ecological misanthropology). This necessarily reflects on the concomitant discussions of politics (state decisions, discuss of victimism etc.).

There is currently a large literature on humanism and its opposing discourses. Many of these positions do not, however, move beyond a simple inversion of forms of religiosity (nor do the attacks on humanism extend much beyond the common attack that humanism never overcomes its theological overcoding). To take a symptomatic example, Richard Norman, as advocate of a certain kind of contemporary humanism, argues the following: ‘My objection to religious belief is not that it is universally harmful but, simply, that it is false. If that is so, however, then we had better look for some alternative set of beliefs to live by, and that is the project of secular humanism’ (from On Humanism).

We do not need to go back to the discussions of post-Hegelian thinkers from the 1840s to see why coming up with ‘an alternative set of beliefs’ in the wake of the falsification of God’s existence is not an adequate philosophical (or political) position. However, what this current discourse on humanism does indicate is, as Agamben puts it, that ‘the humanist discovery of man is the discovery that he lacks himself, the discovery of his irremediable lack of dignitas’ (The Open). The attempt to posit a positive, content-ful ‘secular humanism’ is nothing other than the admission that we do not know what this content is. Viewed historico-politically, this is the major problem with Marx’s early conception of alienation (as ‘borrowed’ from Feuerbach): what is this ‘essence’ that has been alienated in capitalism? What content does or can it have?

Admitting this does not, however, entail the letting go of the question of man (or the animal, the human, the inhuman or the antihuman). On the contrary, we must understand the way in which these questions are asked, for only then will we be able to move beyond them. As Agamben so strikingly puts it:

…faced with [the] extreme figure of the human and the inhuman, it is not so much a matter of asking which of the two machines (or of the two variants of the same machine) is better or more effective – or rather, less lethal and bloody – as it is of understanding how they work so that we might, eventually, be able to stop them (The Open).

Whilst we obviously can see the Heideggerian inflection in Agamben’s claim, he clearly understands (as Balibar also does, but Heidegger himself does not) that the ‘anthropological machines’ have an immediately political status. Even if we approach this question purely historically, the largely French explosion of questions regarding humanism and antihumanism in the late 1950s and 1960s, was spurred, for a large part, by the German claims regarding philosophical anthropology (particularly, as Balibar claims, the influence of Cassirer, Scheler, Heidegger, and the successors of Dilthey):

This articulation between the structuralist adventure and the problem of philosophical anthropology – that is, not only the question of whether philosophy as such is a “thought of humanity” or of humanities that distribute human existence by assigning it a variety of norms, or still yet of the differential of humanity and inhumanity that “creates” man – explains why the occasionally violent conflict between structuralism and its designated adversaries crystallized around the question of humanism and antihumanism.

If the problematic of the subject (or rather, the problem of the subject) has at least a methodological priority, it is not because we are trapped in the limitations of self-reflective transcendental philosophy, it is because we understand how the political problematic of the human has always been a part of this supposedly ‘pure’ thought (as Marx demonstrates in his early work). Just as we cannot discuss the animality of the human without engaging in polemics regarding the humanity of the animal (or the human/animal divide at work already within the human), we simultaneously cannot quickly dispense with the anthropological elements of philosophy - precisely those elements that the resolutely ‘philosophical’ (though sometimes strategically anti-philosophical) series of attacks that comprises structuralism were attempting to draw out.

Comments

[ibid.]

[edited for lack of its relation to previous now deleted comment]. But thanks ibid + for your previous Lacan comment.

[pencil]

so it's not satire then?

[infinite thought]

a satire of what?