is a quite recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years ago: but he has grown old so quickly that it has been only too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he would finally be known.

“Man,” on this picture, is not only a new idea, a new creation, but also a fleeting one: his time is past. He’s quickly grown old and is already fading away, like the grass. “Strangely enough,” Foucault mused, “man—the study of whom is supposed by the naïve to be the oldest investigation since Socrates—is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things.” He is “only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge” who “will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.”

Foucault’s flippant requiem for “man” reflects a midcentury antihumanism in European thought, which, in the wake of two World Wars in the heart of Europe, had become suspicious of the “anthropotheism” of humanism wherein “Man” replaced the God who had died. And it is this story that is told so brilliantly by Stefanos Geroulanos in An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. For these antihumanists, humanistic atheism had never really gotten over its theological tendencies; so the result of the death of God was the divinization of Man. But having witnessed the atrocities committed in the name of such anthropocentrism, midcentury theorists sought to displace humanism. Antihumanism, in a strange sense, was out to protect humanity. (See, for example, Geroulanos’s discussion of Emmanuel Levinas, pp. 194-205.) But the effect was to downplay or even diminish the role and agency of “the subject,” emphasizing the impersonal systems, forces, and structures that conditioned human behavior. Thus, structuralism can be seen as “the single most influential inheritor of this early antihumanism,” later influencing a more naturalistic understanding of the human species and pressing a certain “biologization” of human action as understood in the social sciences.

I have greatly profited from Geroulanos’s careful account, though my work focuses on the later developments in French thought broached in his conclusion (can we hope for a sequel?). I can now see behind Foucault and Derrida a background milieu that I had previously failed to appreciate. Indeed, it’s striking how differently Geroulanos’s frame illuminates French thought into the ’60s and ’70s—like casting black light over a previously familiar room, disclosing all sorts of hitherto invisible features. While Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” is an essential part of the canon in twentieth-century continental philosophy, Geroulanos’s historical work makes me think we’ve underestimated how central these concerns are for understanding later twentieth-century debates.

But as a philosophical theologian with a deep interest in philosophical anthropology, I found myself struck by another theme: what might seem a surprising camaraderie between this atheism and a stream of Christian theology. Indeed, one could argue that both this atheism and a strain of twentieth-century theology share the same antihumanism. Such an antihumanism, of sorts, can already be heard in Barth’s fulminations against liberal Protestantism in his early commentary on Romans. In this respect, there might be room for a little more nuance in Geroulanos’s discussion of “Catholic humanism.” While it’s certainly true, for instance, that Henri de Lubac (in an odd echo of Sartre) claimed that “Christianity is a humanism,” I do wonder whether Geroulanos too quickly elides de Lubac to the project of Jacques Maritain—whose Catholic humanism did tend toward a conception of the human that generated an emphasis on human rights. But in this respect, one should note that Maritain accorded much greater weight and autonomy to “the natural”—and hence to “the human”—than de Lubac. In other words, I think the mid-century debates in Catholic theology about the relation and distinction between the so-called “natural” and “supernatural” are directly relevant to the status of “the human” in humanism. And given that there were important differences between de Lubac and Maritain on these matters, we should be careful not to assume that there is one “Catholic humanism.”

Here again, I think there is a trajectory of a kind of antihumanist theism—or better, Christian theology—which runs from Barth, through Hans Urs von Balthasar, up to the Catholic thinker Jean-Luc Marion, and which shares many concerns with the atheism that Geroulanos documents. Appropriating the critique of ontotheology for theological reasons, Marion’s Idol and Distance (published in French in 1977) celebrated the Nietzschean death of god as an idol well lost. This sensibility was further developed in God Without Being (1982), which articulated a theological critique of theism, drawing explicitly on the later Heidegger, including the important “Letter on Humanism,” which plays such a crucial role in Geroulanos’ account. But I think one can also find a correlate critique of what we might call (rather clunkily) “ontoanthropology” in Marion’s work on “the subject,” particularly in his essay “The Final Appeal of the Subject” (though one can find similar themes developed in Being Given). In a way not unlike the “negative anthropology” discussed by Geroulanos, Marion is critical of the “autarchy” of the subject and sketches a philosophical anthropology, in the spirit of Levinas, that decenters the human—as one who is claimed rather than makes claims. The human is marked by a dispossession that cannot be reified.

So, one could identify a theological strain that, precisely for theological reasons, is antihumanist while also embracing the critique of ontotheology. In other words, this is not just a reversion to a pre-humanistic theism, a retreat from Man back to God. This is a strain of theological thought marked by both a negative theology and a negative anthropology. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that such a theological sensibility is also critical of “rights talk” in just the way the French antihumanist atheists were. (We’ve had some discussion about this at the Immanent Frame before.) Thus, it should be no surprise, also, that both this antihumanist atheism and the theological sensibility I’ve noted share a critique of liberalism.

I don’t pretend to have made a case here; nor do I mean to oversimplify and ignore the obvious differences between an antihumanist atheism and an antihumanist theology.  These are just notes toward a more proper argument and analysis—sparks sent up while reading Geroulanos’s comprehensive, careful, and provocative history, which got me thinking about an atheism that even a (certain kind of) theologian could love.

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I want to thank Martin Kavka, Sam Moyn, Judith Surkis, and Gil Anidjar for taking the time to read and address my book with the very encouraging care that each of them has taken. In what follows, I want to take into account a number of issues that they have raised, not so much to respond as to elaborate, in relation to their stances, some of the positions I have adopted in the book and in my introduction to this discussion. I thus frame this post as an attempt to tend first and foremost to methodological questions and critiques that have been raised directly or indirectly.

Part of the reasoning involved in the argument that follows emerges from the posts offered so far, and the way that they have handled both the usefulness, however limited, and the fragility of the tripartite definition that I have sought to offer for “antihumanism.” For purposes of clarity, let me quickly recall that definition: “antihumanism” is best thought of as a rather fluid weave of three parallel and intertwined discourses, namely, the critiques of humanism, which predate and postdate the period I discuss (1925-1955, for the most part); the emergence of a philosophical anthropology that sees man as a question and refuses a number of classic and positive answers to it; and a shift in the understanding of atheism, whereby the latter would be detached from secular humanism.

To continue working from this perspective, I would prefer to now weave together a number of the different issues that have been raised. Anidjar begins his text with a commentary on naming things, and the dangers we run in doing so; while I doubt that defining and redefining terms that are in wide use qualifies as a form of nominalistic engagement, the question that Anidjar subsequently raises is worth taking into account. He asks: “Judging the book by its cover, that name clearly is atheism. But why?  Why atheism, before and after all? […] Why not follow the approvingly described completion, radicalization, and codification of antihumanism by proposing a similar indifference, not only to man and to antihumanism, but also to God and to religion?” I do not think I am putting atheism forward as a name for antihumanism, but I certainly see it as a crucial element of antihumanism’s history. So I would rephrase the question as follows: what is the value of atheism as a philosophical concept and system of ideas, particularly in the historical frame I work in? Anidjar seems to me to decline this question already in his opening declaration of atheism as “poor,” and more insistently in his final paragraph. So (concesso non dato) I need to address the sufficiency of atheism as a rubric and, more importantly, as an object of study. Moyn indirectly asks a similar question of the limits of antihumanism: “in the end, the same charge that brought humanism low applies to antihumanism itself. It is either diversionary, or unnecessary.” Moyn furthers this point by suggesting that the “antihumanists” I study often end up in quagmires not dissimilar to those of humanism. While I agree that this early generation of antihumanist thinkers does end up with the many of the same problems as those whom they doggedly critiqued, there are additional shifts that are worth attending to here.

Moyn asks about a linked issue, which deserves to be foregrounded separately. What does a negative anthropology “leave resplendently on the throne,” insofar as the “widespread ‘negative’ campaign […] against blasphemous humanisms […] is unsatisfactory if its outcome remains negative alone.” The question of this “negative” is one that matters to my argument where atheism and negative anthropology are concerned, and it seems to matter to other contributors as well: Anidjar applauds the neither/nor effect of mid-century antihumanism, while Kavka negotiates the critiques of humanism as denials of both a religious resolution and a secular one. As Surkis notes, moreover, the negative answers often came to reappear as positive, whether explicitly or despite themselves:

Precisely because these philosophies do not always have the same target at the same moment, Man’s imminent effacement is invoked repeatedly, rather than once and for all. What might be understood as a negative anthropology in one context—for example, Kojève’s 1930s account of man’s negation with the end of history—is radically revised and reinterpreted as a Marxist anthropology in the postwar era.

I am foregrounding, then, two major problems: the adequacy of antihumanism and atheism as objects, and the frame and limits of a historical shift internal to them. As Surkis notes, in a question that articulates my main interest and that I would rather keep as a question, and will only address in part: “how can one write the history of something so mercurial?”

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As intellectual-historical problems and objects go, both atheism and antihumanism are elusive, tricky. To declare them to be such objects, and not merely topics, requires at least:

(a)   a sense of internal consistency, a logic that is largely immanent to them, rather than merely passing (and hence reducible); and

(b)   a sense that something is “under way” in this relatively consistent conception—that some transformation is occurring that demonstrates both the course and limits of the object, as well as the self-sufficiency thanks to which it merits being named an object.

I would avoid generalizing about “atheism”; their differences apart, the writers I address do seem to understand atheism in a particular way, to grant it a broad conceptual structure and an immanent logic. This is what renders atheism an object for intellectual-historical study and allows us both to address the huge differences between these writers and the sense of a conceptual and cultural transformation of “atheism itself.” In other words: To call this “all together, now and again” is misleading, for, whatever atheism may mean, what is rather clear is that in the 1930s and 1940s, for these and other writers, it came to mean something rather precise and significantly different from what it had meant before. Rather than denote a secularism that simply declared religion dead, atheism engaged with religion, and Christian anthropology in particular, much more explicitly and much less negatively than secularist atheisms had, acknowledging a continuing and substantive debt, rather than a mere surpassing. And, furthermore, it thoroughly rejected the claim, which seems paramount to today’s cheerleaders of atheism, among whom somewhat surprisingly Anidjar places “my” thinkers and at times myself as well, that atheism offers a solution, a voie royale, a superior form of redemption or society. Quite to the contrary, non-humanist atheism entailed a kind of skepticism toward political projects and solutions, as well as toward epistemological and moral certainty based on a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought (Kantianism and positivism most significantly); I have named this last practice antifoundational realism.

These three points—that atheism was fundamentally theological, that it denied itself a secular redemptive project, and that it involved itself in a deep epistemological and frequently existential skepticism—are decisive for expressions of atheism during the period. These points appear in different guises in Kojève, Levinas, Bataille, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others during the 1930s and late 1940s, despite their rival projects, arguments, and preferred solutions. Some of them (notably Kojève, Bataille, and Sartre) time and again pointed out that their projects mattered in a world after the “death of God.” Others, like Hyppolite and Levinas, understood classical humanism as specifically secular, i.e., as specifically tied to an immanence that refuses “vertical” transcendence. In other words, these three points are suggested by and help explain the dismantling of transcendence in the 1930s and the admission of a post-Christian anthropology deprived of Christian theology that Kojève argues for, and the obsession with the inescapable metaphysical grounding of western modernity (a diagnosis that both Koyré and the young Heidegger aided), and the neither/nor attitude toward religion and atheism, as in Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” as well as Hyppolite’s late-1940s essays and his Logic and Existence. It is because atheism came to be identified with them, and through them with existentialism, and later with structuralism, that it deserves central billing in the story of humanism’s demise.

These same three points grounding atheism’s internal logic are, finally, very much at stake in the contemporary critiques of various humanisms, insofar as these involve rejections of vastly different projects with well-defined, if often utopian, goals. Anidjar suggests that the rejection of humanism should instead be seen to take priority, with Catholic critiques of humanism adding to the non-Catholic ones. I think this account is a bit teleological and follows the perspective established from the 1960s on, a perspective toward which I point, but which I avoid in my argument. Moreover, it seems to me that Catholic critiques led the way insofar as secular humanism itself was at stake, and that they are not quite equivalent to critiques not committed to religious resolutions and affirmations, which, as Moyn argues, end up in a far worse-defined space. (In this context, I very much appreciate Kavka’s effort to see antihumanism as a refusal of a strict religion/secularism/atheism divide.) The idea, which atheist thinkers proposed, that one should avoid both God and Man as solutions seems to be much more decidedly new than Catholic criticisms of humanism, which dated at least to de Maistre and came with Counter-Enlightenment baggage that non-Catholics as well as some Catholics wanted to steer clear of. In any case, Catholic critiques of humanism gave an opening for something that was taken up by others who refused the positive resolutions of community and personalism—and even, as Simon During notes in a comment to my first post, Maurrassianism. To those who refused these solutions belongs what I have tried to see as an atheism in the process of changing. The emergence and course of antihumanism is, to me, impossible to conceive outside of this broader shift.

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In addition to suggesting that philosophical atheism had a kind of internal logic to it (as did the other two main lines of my argument), I have also suggested that these changes are revealed by and thanks to the transformation that atheism underwent in this particular historical moment. In other words, definitive is not only the internal logic but specifically the internal logic in the process of its assertion and transformation. Though atheism obviously means and has meant other things as well, what marks its force in the 1930s and the postwar decade is precisely the loss of conviction, by many thinkers who attached themselves to it, in the secular projects it had been—and, to a degree, often continued to be—most closely attached to.

This is what seems to me to be one angle of Surkis’s point on history as critique: the immanent logic of a concept or a constellation of concepts is also a historical one; it is immanent because it is historical. If, in other words, the history of atheism is mercurial, if its value as an object of study is to be found in its opacity and elusiveness, then only thanks to the development of particular affiliations and arguments amidst this elusiveness did it come to provide the stakes for antihumanism’s conceptual history. Hence the overall weave of the three discourses, or angles, of my study that I have offered: by addressing what is at stake in the critiques of humanism, or in the theorizations of man, it becomes possible to ask whether something is also happening for those thinkers who proclaim the end of transcendence or the death of God. And vice versa. These are objects in relation to one another; their histories emerge in their parallel constitution as objects of study. Other angles would be possible: to emphasize the question of the “normal” man (from Halbwachs and Bataille on), or the postwar epistemological angle (in Lacan and Canguilhem most significantly, and then Foucault), or the devastating question that Surkis poses in her last sentence—the question of woman, a question I have avoided, both through respect for it and through argumentative failure. But, mutatis mutandis, it seems to me that those angles “receive” much more from the emergence of antihumanism than they “contribute” to it.

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That atheism, critiques of humanism, and negative anthropology may suffice as objects, particularly in their interlocking, does not mean that they moved in the same direction. In the book, I am perhaps too brief on this: the critiques of humanisms per se continue well into the 1970s, when they seem to be displaced, at least in part, by a new trust in human rights “after” Solzhenitsyn. Atheism, central to the developments I discuss, recedes from view (though not in substance) in the 1960s, and in some cases is affected by adjusted understandings of the divine (Levinas seems to me the major case for this) and perhaps by the “indifference” Anidjar speaks of. Whereas negative anthropology is decidedly taken up, institutionalized, and radicalized by thinkers usually placed under the rubric of “structuralism,” I would insist that from the mid-1960s onward, its assumption becomes a foundation for a number of “schools” of French philosophy and even beyond it. While the tripartite definition I have offered for antihumanism would have to be adjusted for the post-1963 period, its fundamental force, particularly its negative force, is largely in place and complete by then. If I insist on ending my account before the anti-subjectivism of the 1960s comes front and center, this is precisely because the shifts that did the most damage to an entire worldview had been established by the mid-1950s.

Thus, Moyn is right to emphasize that what sits on the throne at the endpoint of my story is unclear. If language, being, structures, the other, human rights, etc. could occupy or dismantle that throne, one reason for this may well be that the answers offered by the end of the 1950s are hardly definitive or sufficient, and perhaps the critical reactions building on their impulse in the 1950s and 1960s are directed precisely at this lack of a new figure.

This is to say that if no figure is definitively enthroned, this is also because antihumanism seems to become more of an exigency and less of a single philosophical movement. The “hatred of humanism” becomes a denial that does not deny all possibilities of humanism, nor all possible anthropologies. If, as Moyn argues, the same problems reemerge, this is because the ground shifts, and not because humanism is de-legitimized in toto. If “humanism” needed to be laid low, this also allowed new mini-humanisms to emerge—humanisms that would not suffer the critique of old European male, colonial, etc. anthropocentrism. In my account, what facilitates this is the emergence of negative anthropology. In keeping with Derrida’s “The Ends of Man,” I have argued that antihumanism remains “on the same shore,” that it allows for, and perhaps even engenders, new and much more minimal humanisms. When Levinas argued for an humanisme de l’autre homme, when human rights were declared essential, regardless of their possible insufficiencies (and I look forward to reading Moyn’s forthcoming The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, which will probably force me to add subtlety if not adjust this point)—are these not positions to which antihumanism contributed, precisely through its anti-anthropocentric drive, and its re-theorization of the conceptual place of “the human?” Could not much the same be argued of positions that saw this developing antihumanism as nowhere near sufficient? The throne that is usurped, but by no one in particular, and the refusal of affirmative solutions and anthropologies are, to my understanding, indices of the force of the suspicion and rejection of a humanist narrative routinely seen as dominant in the rise of the modern West.

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As I have suggested, this does not mean that this empty throne is not also the mark of a failure or limitation—and Moyn has a very real point when he writes that “there is no denying how hard it must have been to undermine humanism—which, of course, is alive and well, some days almost as if the developments Geroulanos […] chronicles had never occurred.” And even if I may disagree with Anidjar that what he calls the “poverty of atheism” deprives it of historical value or internal consistency, I understand his suggestion that atheism contributes to a disregard for others, with its implication that non-humanist atheism may go a step further in that direction. Anidjar seems to suggest further that non-humanist atheism is a sort of ruse of Western Christendom, which, having already absolved itself of explicitly religious imperialisms, can now abscond from their secular variants as well. I prefer to think of antihumanism as an expression of European thought’s self-consciousness of its own finitude. The skepticism involved in non-humanist atheism and negative anthropology was perhaps a matter of hatred, as Moyn writes, but perhaps more a matter of fear—no doubt mixed with contempt—that humanism was too ideologically successful and self-congratulatory to be able, after two world wars, to understand that it was also harmful in ways conceptual as well as everyday. Of course, one may and should negotiate and debate this. However insufficient it may be, ultimately, this skepticism and its signatures during this phase are too significant to be left to dissipate.

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In the beginning of this essay, I asked how one may go about weaving and articulating for atheism and antihumanism an adequate intellectual-historical approach that may facilitate our understanding of specific texts, concepts, and systems of thought. Obviously an essay as short as the present one cannot answer this question in full. Yet I do hope that in the process of explaining myself before the generous essays and critiques of Surkis, Anidjar, Kavka, and Moyn, I have offered a sense of how I approach these methodological, historical, and philosophical questions in the book, and in doing so I have perhaps given reason to either resolve or open to further debate a couple of their worries.

One of the things that intellectual historians show us, although often only implicitly, is the fluidity of the terms of debates that we take to be self-evident.  In An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, Stefanos Geroulanos shows us this fluidity by focusing on the French history of objections to (and reformulations of) humanist discourse from 1929 to 1952, a history that suggests that the rigidity of the categories of “religion” and “humanism” in Anglophone discourse is exceptional and unnecessary.  In Geroulanos’s history, the first chinks in post-Feuerbachean humanism in France appeared in the 1930s as a result of advances in quantum physics, particularly Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.  These made it impossible to see the mind as truly mirroring the world, and thereby made it impossible to construct a metaphysics of man that could open up a path of progress toward a telos of history in which truth would be made universally manifest.  One wonders how our culture wars would play out today if the philosophers who intervene in them were as trained in physics as they are in evolutionary biology.  Indeed, as Geroulanos notes in his concluding pages, the long shadow that the philosophy of physics has cast over Francophone philosophy of science means that contemporary French philosophers of biology such as Henri Atlan can affirm a non-theological and non-dogmatic, yet antihumanist, stance that is absent from the popular press in the UK and America.  (Geroulanos is co-editor of Henri Atlan: Selected Writings, to be published late this summer by Fordham University Press.)

This antihumanist turn can be a turn away from religion.  Indeed, in the customary story of philosophical antihumanism—I think of the compact and powerful narrative of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger’s antihumanism near the opening of Reiner Schürmann’s Heidegger on Being and Acting—antihumanism is part and parcel of a broader attack on foundational discourses, including theology.  The potential of a phrase such as “antihumanist atheist,” then, is that it could serve as a category that could offer arguments against the foundationalist narratives of religious authorities as well as of those who describe human animals in essentially computational terms.  Its articulation of what Geroulanos calls an “antifoundational realism” would cast a pox on the houses of both the buffered and the porous.

Nevertheless, such a phrase—if it were to be useful as an expression of skeptical voices in our contemporary discourses—would have to defend its own stance.  More specifically, it would have to show that atheism proceeds apace from antihumanism, that the attack on one foundational discourse (the metaphysics of man) entails an attack on all possible foundational discourses.

In this regard, the story that Geroulanos tells is less helpful, although no less fascinating a story for it.  His title comes from a description by Emmanuel Levinas (in an essay on Maurice Blanchot) of the Heideggerean and Sartrean intellectual scene: “contemporary thought holds the surprise for us of an atheism that is not humanist.”  This makes it seem as if antihumanism and atheism emerge in French thought together, but antihumanism emerges earlier, and more clearly, than atheism does.  The broad array of pre-WWII antihumanists whom Geroulanos treats in the first two-thirds of his book includes both secular and religious thinkers.  In addition to an account of Kojève’s atheist anthropotheism, Geroulanos also offers treatments of Catholic attacks on liberal humanism, such as those offered by Jacques Maritain and Henri de Lubac; of Alexandre Koyré (described by Henri Corbin as “a great mystical theosopher”); and of Emmanuel Levinas, whose criticism of essentialist accounts of humanity in the mid-1930s was paired with the claim that only Judaism, and specifically the temporality underlying its account of repentance, could redeem history from hyper-Hobbesian brutality.  It is in the last third of the book, where Geroulanos offers sketches of postwar thinkers, that atheism begins to emerge as the telos of Geroulanos’s story of French antihumanist claims.  Thus, in a 1946 essay by Maurice Blanchot on de Lubac and Nietzsche, “the negation of God” becomes a key element of an account of the human as the site of freedom.  What accounts for this atheist lag?

Part of the answer surely has to do with the complexities of the antihumanist project at this point in French intellectual history, but part of it may also have to do with a lack of clarity about the nature of atheism.  Let me elaborate, with apologies for brevity.  (My reflections here are inspired by Levinas’s 1968 essay “Humanism and An-archy.”)

What binds all of these antihumanisms together is the denial that self-consciousness can serve as a ground of meaning.  Nevertheless, the claim that self-consciousness is finite (determinate, negative) can be the basis of two apparently opposed claims.  On the one hand, it can lead to a claim that humans cannot definitively access any meaning that would allow them to plan the course of future history for the better; this would cover Jean Hyppolite’s articulation of the “unstable equilibrium” between the human subject and history that Geroulanos treats in his final chapter.  On the other hand, it can lead to the positing of meaning outside the boundaries of a philosophical system; this would cover Levinas’s phenomenology of sensibility and its groping toward a transcendence that can never be conceptualized (it belongs to the “prehistory” of the ego) as the ground of alterity.  Both of these moves are atheist insofar as they deny a place to the concept “God” in systematic thought.  Yet the latter is certainly religious, and somewhat more sanguine about the possibilities of skepticism to achieve short-term liberationist goals.

If the antihumanist atheist can be either “secular” or “religious,” then a fuller account of this position could perhaps lead to the formation of common ground between various persons in their opposition both to those who claim to speak on behalf of God and to those who think that one cannot refuse theology without also refusing religion.  (For this latter claim, see Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.)  But those who would find themselves on that common ground should be careful.  An antihumanist atheist might conclude of the Yeshiva University conversation that there is no good reason to say that divine commands have the determinate content that Orthodox religious authorities say they do.  Yet even if that statement is correct, such an expression of antifoundationalism will be rejected by others as expressing merely another dogmatism that polices culturally strange temperaments.  The ability of the skeptic to be undone by his or her opponents’ own skepticism serves as a reminder of the truth of antihumanism: humans can capture nothing beyond self-consciousness.  Selves are not just porous—they are leaky.

Contemporary thought holds the surprise for us of an atheism that is not humanist. The gods are dead or withdrawn from the world; concrete, even rational man does not contain the universe.

This atheism that is not humanist, the sense that certain strands of contemporary philosophy had abandoned secularism’s central ethical and political investment in humanism, poses the motivating question behind the book I am presenting for discussion here, An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. In twentieth-century French thought, particularly in the period from the end of World War I through the late 1950s, a new form of atheism, and with it, a new conception of man, emerged and crystallized. What historians and critics of French thought, literature, and intellectual culture have, since the 1960s, called “antihumanism,” I argue, can be best understood in terms of this development, which is at once theological, epistemological, and political. By way of introducing the exchanges, critiques, and discussion to follow (and I thank The Immanent Frame for making these possible), I would like to offer a quick overview of the book, a general treatment of its questions, leaving a clearer articulation of the consequences of this transformation for the next generation of thinkers for a later post.

Beginning from Levinas’s proclamation, I have sought to re-define and describe antihumanism in terms of three different and interconnected problems and their historical trajectories: 1) transformations in atheism; 2) the fragmentation of the humanist imagination amidst a series of rejections of particular competing humanisms; and 3) the development of what I call a negative philosophical anthropology—that is to say, a theorization of “the human” as a construct or category fundamentally dependent on others.

Some questions are worth posing immediately, and in describing my research, these are the ones I will try to address. What does this new “atheism” amount to—in political, philosophical, and even theological terms? How does one trace it? How does this transformation of atheism animate the mid-century political critiques of humanism? How does it reformulate religious attitudes? Lastly, how does it affect, and how is it shaped by, contemporary conceptions of “the human”?

But first, a quick note on my call for a new approach to “antihumanism.” The term “antihumanism” is usually linked to its supposed golden age, the 1960s; this linkage, itself largely a product of 1970s and 1980s “neo-humanist” trends in French thought, suggests that antihumanism is an appendix of “post-Heideggerian” or “structuralist” philosophies. This narrative, which is still occasionally evoked by critics today, often claims that antihumanism 1) can be traced to a continuation of the Counter-Enlightenment; 2) is committed to a confused mix of Marxisant and right-wing themes, and is the political position of former Marxists unwilling to turn toward liberalism; and/or 3) designates, above all, an illiberal mistrust of the promises of egalitarianism and human rights, a mistrust of forms of liberal humanism.

This kind of narrative replaces the philosophical, theological, and cultural complexity of the term and the problem with the simplistic and confusing label of “Nietzschean post-Marxism,” which, regardless of the importance and influence of Marx and Nietzsche, renders the aims and claims of “antihumanist” thinkers politically absurd and philosophically senseless. Something else also gets lost: the way in which what is usually referred to as “antihumanism” is not correlated to the great transformations of French intellectual culture that occurred after each of the two World Wars. Not only were people excited about certain elements of “antihumanism” already in the 1920s (André Malraux asked about the “death” of European Man already in his 1926 The Temptation of the West), but the politics of criticizing humanism was by no means simply a mixture of illiberalism and Marxism. Rather, such critiques were to be found almost everywhere on the intellectual spectrum of the 1930s.

If the refusal of some humanism could be seen across a rather wide array of positions at the time, this was largely because every political position in the period claimed to be, not only a humanism, but the only possible humanism. Breaking with their century-old refusal of the humanist language and tradition, Catholics now began to claim that humanism was misguided and tragic only insofar as it was not a “theocentric” and, in Jacques Maritain’s influential expression, integral humanism. Following Marx’s treatment of human rights in “On the Jewish Question,” as well as Andrei Zhdanov’s 1934 lead in the First Congress of Soviet Writers, communists responded that only “socialist humanism” afforded man the dignity he deserved. And already before these positions developed, so-called non-conformists like Thierry Maulnier had led searches for an “adequate” humanism. Their direct target was the liberal, secular humanism of the Third Republic, itself best expressed by academic philosophers of the Dreyfusard generation—a humanism which seemed to them to have, not only strongly Eurocentric, but even fantastic and imperial implications out of step with the realities of contemporary France. As Paul Nizan memorably put it, in his call for a socialist humanism, “On the one hand, we have the idealistic philosophers who promulgate truths concerning Man; and, on the other hand, we have a map showing the incidence of tuberculosis in Paris, a map which tells us how men are dying.” A further victim of these criticisms was the humanist imagination itself: fragmented and attached to political projects that did not shy from, and indeed legitimated, violence, it became more attached to the suspicion directed at it than to any of its own promises. After World War II, and even though the French resistance understood itself as taking the side of humanity against Nazi barbarism, these doubts were radicalized and, by 1947-48, became common currency among philosophers and many literary authors. And not only were such doubts radicalized, but they became attached to an array of different and even opposed political positions.

This breakdown of humanism (and with it, of notions of history as progress, nature as in the service of man, and suffering as eradicable) halted the great hope, once integral to European atheism, of a harmonious secular society, something that, though in some doubt since Nietzsche and Sorel, now entered a renewed period of crisis. Concomitant to this was a doubt regarding notions of human nature linked to secularism and, moreover, a general suspicion of unified notions of man, the positing of which now appeared as unfounded and over-assertive. In writing intellectual history today, the problem of antihumanism is of methodological interest because it involves a change in something that is not simply a political stance among intellectuals, nor a specific concept or philosophical movement, but a precondition of thought, a somewhat fluid matrix of ideas—a philosophical attitude, if you prefer. To restate the questions that interest me somewhat differently: How does one write about something as nebulous as that, keeping together the different strands—political, theological, and philosophical? As critiques of humanism point to changes in atheist thought, how can we think of their joint history? How do philosophical and theological concerns shape and get shaped by political problems?

The overall umbrella of answers that I propose suggests two further histories. The first is the transformation of atheism and the abandonment of its traditional identification with anthropotheism, humanist morality, and secular utopia. Nineteenth-century atheism had routinely posited Man as replacing God, or as having to transform himself in certain ways in order to do so adequately—in, for example, Comte, Feuerbach, Proudhon, Marx, Wagner, and Nietzsche. To make up for the absence of God in human affairs, philosophers linked atheism with a positive ethico-philosophical project that claimed to provide for man, as highest being, the modes of thought and action integral to a good life and proper society. Humanism, in this sense, was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries what reaches, reveals, and cultivates the proper humanity of man; it turned an improvement of human relations into the core of ethics, and man himself into the bearer and guarantor of his own dignity, equality, and freedom.

But certain strands of atheism seem to have accepted a much more limited stance after World War I, one that rejected this anthropotheism. The idea that the replacement of God by man suffices as a project, a mode of life, or an ethic begins to be rejected in French thought and literature from about 1930 on. A number of prominent philosophers and literary figures, including—to give just a few names—Jean Wahl, Alexandre Kojève, Georges Bataille, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, identified atheism, the “Death of God,” and the philosophical enterprise itself, not with secularism, but with the collapse of a unified and virtuous figure of man, and with man’s sense of entrapment in a hostile world of invidious ideologies and violence. This is a major, and largely sudden, shift, and within philosophy it clearly appears as a new generation’s response to the failure of older philosophers to “understand” World War I, as well as an epistemological-cum-existential response to new scientific movements.

The second parallel history that I trace specifically concerns this collapse of a unified figure of man and the new argument that man should not be seen as a basis for philosophy and a premise of ethics. It is a claim that there is no such thing as human “nature,” or that “human nature” is unknowable, unavailable, and, in any case, hardly benevolent or ethical. Because it seeks to talk about man in the negative, and in order to keep its proximity to negative theology in mind, I call this a “negative anthropology.” Negative anthropology rejects the idea that man is his own highest being or foundation. Enlightenment definitions of man as a being sovereign over the earth, in control of his destiny, and the force behind his own assured progress had worked in just this foundational direction. Kant saw man as his own highest being and highest end, and in his Logic of 1800 even placed the question “What is Man?” at the base of his entire critical project. Diderot’s short definition of man in the Encyclopédie reads as follows:

Man—masculine singular—is a sensing, reflecting, thinking being, which freely traverses the surface of the earth, which appears at the head of all other animals over which it reigns, which lives in society, which has invented the sciences and the arts, which has its own goodness and viciousness, which gives itself masters, which makes its own laws, etc.

What changes with the advent of negative anthropology is that this kind of definition becomes irrelevant. Man is no longer to be talked about as the basis of a philosopher’s thought, or in the masculine singular of a powerful, self-possessed I. He can no longer claim to be capable of scientifically understanding the entire world. To the extent that he may still be a sensing, reflecting, thinking being, these are not properties that are in interplay with the fact of his humanity—indeed, what is in question is this very humanity. At stake, then, is the conceptual dependence of human nature on structures of Being, language, thought, and culture.

More specifically, 1930s French thought undermined the idea that man, especially the scientist, is a privileged observer of the world around him. Thinkers such as Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève, Georges Bataille, and Jean-Paul Sartre, imported and adopted Husserlian and especially Heideggerian phenomenology, as well as new developments in scientific thought (notably quantum physics), in order to articulate a radical skepticism toward the positivistic belief in man’s ability to understand and fully know his “world.” Denying the purity or even possibility of transcendence became a way of seeing man as not only embedded but trapped in the world, Thus, the epistemological problem concerning scientific observation and truth is continuous with the existentialist anxiety about the weakness of man in the face of the world.

In the late 1940s, many of the same thinkers, together with some younger ones, furthered this position, dismissing the idea that one can simply speak of humanity on its own premises at all. For philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, even the Marxism whose success they worked for could not a priori define or guarantee humanity:

Even those of us today who are taking up the word “humanism” again no longer maintain the same shameless humanism our elders. What is perhaps proper to our time is to disassociate humanism from the idea of a humanity fully guaranteed by natural law and not only reconcile consciousness of human values and consciousness of the infrastructures which keep them in existence, but insist upon their inseparability.

Thus, even humanists were antihumanists first: at this point, history, language, the unconscious, being, and society came to definitively take priority over notions of human nature. Inhabiting such systems or structures, man does not grant meaning to reality, language, history, being, and society; he finds his own role and status produced and located by the way that they con­struct his interaction with the world and with other beings. These systems are not consequences of Man’s creative activity, desire, or will; they are not figures of his difference from an animal; they become the structures on the basis of which the human can be addressed, understood, discovered, and debated. This idea is most often associated with Heidegger’s “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” but it was also adopted in France by influential and well-positioned thinkers like Jean Hyppolite, who, working off of Hegel’s Logic, claims that “When man is reduced to him­self, he is lost… Man is an intersection,” and should be understood as suspended from History, Being, Language—not as their foundation. Merleau-Ponty similarly rejected earlier definitions in which “human nature had truth and justice for attributes, as other species have fins or wings”; so did contemporaries from Lacan through Canguilhem (who would later write that “the concept of man covers with a false appearance of specific identity individual organisms whose existence is thus deprived of different powers of resistance to aggression”). As is well known, in the 1960s, thinkers from Foucault to Derrida would radicalize this position; but so did others who continued to advocate for humanisms, though without grounding them in human nature, natural right, or law.

This, I would argue, constitutes the matrix of the epistèmè that came to be called “antihumanist”: an atheism that rejected many of the grounds of secular humanist conviction, and with them, the definitions of human nature that had supported and had claimed to guarantee humanism’s trust and thrust.