All credit to Ray for this illuminating link from the archives of THEORY-LYOTARD-BADIOU-EVENT, Tuesday 23 August 2005:
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 15:09:17 +0100
Reply-To: "Discussion of J-F-Lyotard, Alain Badiou,the Event"
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Sender: "Discussion of J-F-Lyotard, Alain Badiou,the Event"
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From: Steve Devos <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: human and anti-human
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Richard/all
Is the spectre of humanism badly raised or not...? I think my implied but unclear suggestion that Richard is merely repeating the errors of humanist critiques, with the implication that the human-condition is central needs some further clarification... so....
I think that we could understand it through interesting philosophical perspectives on humanism and antihumanism, which is not to forget to mention the casual and frequently confused use of terms such as rights, anthropocentrism, humanitarianism and so on. These guarantee confusion about the status of the human and the non-human relative to other discourses and disciplines. For example how contemporary humanism relate to the various sciences ? Is science merely what modern and post-modern humans do, or is it instead a demonstration of difference which shows how unimportant humanity is at the level of the cosmos ? What might be it’s status in relation to the political ? We obviously can still speak of progressive emancipation in politics just as we can talk of the reverse, but at the same time this is haunted by the ludicrous neo-religious belief in an anthropocentric destiny?
It’s difficult to produce a clear separation of contemporary humanisms and antihumanisms but it’s feasible to suggest some important moments of contemporary humanism:
• a universalist commitment to human rights, whereby each individual is endowed with certain negative and positive freedoms.
• an existentialist proposition about human choice, that is often falsely presented as being a unique human possession.
• a scientific commitment to the capacities of technology and scientific research to provide benefits for humans but also to non-humans.
Antihumanism can be thought of as containing the following key concepts and results:
• Attempts to differentiate the human from the non-human are a sign of religious remnants that conrinue to haunt our understanding of the human, and which usually fail to point out that there is very little that differentiates one species from another (assuming you accept that species exist as meaningful concepts and differences)- genetically and pragmatically from other non-human-animals. (Key differences that have failed include: tool-use, war, sexual difference, sociality, politics, morality, aggression, symbolic communication, laughing, crying, language...)
• Any human thinking that poses the centrality of human needs and concerns is either a speciesism or it attempts to ignore the contingency of the human as a species. Most importantly it trys to ignore the glorious indifference that nature and the cosmos shows towards the human.
• The concept that links the idea of history and progress implies that human subjects or humanity is in some way the subject of history which does no provide an adequate account for the arbitrary nature of natural disasters and human-made events.
How is it possible to awaken from the nightmare of history when to be awake is proposed as to be merely human ?
steve
> Richard/all
>
> The implication of this humanist understanding of 'history' is that only
> human subjects can be understood historically. (humanist because it
> refuses the idea that the concept of history can be seperated from the
> individualhuman siubjects...) Superfically this idea seems to make
> sense because as Richard. Hugh and Eric have pointed out human history
> is the predominant means through which we understand how we arrived in
> this extraordinary situation...
>
> and yet...
>
> The focus on 'individuals', on individual human subjects, excludes the
> very work which is most useful in our attempts to understand the present
> - from Thompson's 'The History of the English Working Class ' (hardly
> possible to understand as an address of the history of individual human
> subjects ) to Lorraine Daston's 'The biography of scientific objects'
> --- These differing historical methods and understandings cannot be
> understood as history within the perspectives proposed.
>
> The side effect of emphasizing individuals is to exclude the non-human
> actors from history - or do you believe that the non-human is always
> already passive ? and that institutions are nothing but a grouping of
> individuals rather than this plus the inhuman nature of the institution
> itself ? I refer you precisely to Lyotard's essay's in The Inhuman'
> where he describes 'development' as acting inhumanly on human subjects....
>
> regards
> steve
>
>
>
>> The nightmare of history is entirely tied to the idea that "history"
>>lies in some separate dimension from individuals. The contemporary idea
>> of
>>the "subject" (as opposed to the idea of the individual) suggests this
>> idea
>>of something "up above" us, beyond human existence (the "Great Other") to
>>which everyone is obligated to submit.
>>
>>
>
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