Beyond Human: Introduction to Special Issue ‘Re-Imagining Human’

This paper attempts to investigate the conceptual link between Nietzsche’s pronouncements about the “death of God” and Foucault’s heralding of the “death of man”. The paper tries to uncover this link not by comparing Foucault’s and Nietzsche’s thought but through reading Michel Foucault (d. 1984) via Immanuel Kant (d. 1804). The paper is based exclusively on the reading of Foucault’s The Order of Things, although no claim is being made as to the “authenticity” of this reading. As Foucault realised more than any one else, every interpretation involves a certain “violence” and that the main thing in interpretation is not what is being interpreted but who interprets: “. . . interpretation will be henceforth always interpretation by the ‘who’: one does not interpret what there is in the signified, but one interprets, fundamentally, who has posed the interpretation”. You are forewarned.

New Blackfriars , 2014

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2011

In the spirit of the stated topic, “Angel of the New,” this article addresses the question of the modern—in art, politics, and social thought—in terms deriving from Benjamin’s, and subsequently Adorno’s, experience of art in its fullest truth claims in the face of catastrophe. The article explores a certain contemporary questioning of the limits of representation and the truth-value of representations, above all art works. Making reference to Agamben and the notion of “bare life” as a key figure of modern bio-politics, it addresses several contemporary issues at the limits of aesthetic, conceptual, and political “representation” (though shying away from a full engagement with contemporary political theory proper and its concerns): death, the sublime, catastrophe. Beginning with modern changes in the understanding of death (and life) and the role of technology, instrumental rational control, and economic reason, in the formation of modern society, it discusses the catastrophic limit cases of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, arguing ultimately that a modernist commitment to art truth, even with respect to the most difficult human events, is necessary still today, despite a seeming movement beyond the modern in the reigning cultural dominant.

ARC: The Journal of The Faculty of Religious Studies, vol. 38, 2010

Contemporary Pragmatism 17 (2020) , 2020

This essay isolates and critically assesses the motivation behind the current backlash against the broadly culturalist and historicist paradigm that has structured research in the interpretative humanities since the 1980s. That motivation, it argues, has less to do with the noble desire to rescue the humanities from the alleged absurdities of the postmodernists than it has with a reluctance to face up fully to the secularism that many of the humanities’ contemporary critics (conservatives as well as progressives; insiders as well as outsiders) profess. If historicism and constructivism are under attack today, it is not merely because they offend certain entrenched epistemological or metaethical views. Rather, and more pointedly, it is because these secularist thought styles foreclose traditional sources of spiritual consolation, which many of us (perhaps all of us at certain moments in our lives) intimately rely upon. To make this case, the essay stages a confrontation between William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Sigmund Freud’s “On Transience” (1915), two texts that take a long hard look at the prospect of extinction and then diverge in their reactions.

Religion, 2018

In his opening chapter, Ronald E. Osborn states the central problem of this book: is it possible to have 'a rationally coherent, morally compelling, and historically sustainable discourse as well as practice of humanistic values and human rights without a "thick" metaphysical or religious framework such as the one provided in the Western tradition for some two millennia by Judeo-Christian sources?' (4). To put it another way, the question 'Can we be good without God' is a superficial one; more urgent, in Osborn's view, is the question, 'Will we still be good to the stranger in our midst […] once we have truly and utterly abandoned the idea that every person is made […] in "the image of God"?' (54). Although the underlying argument or theme is, as we shall see, an 'essentially Dostoevskian' one, those primarily responsible for removing that metaphysical or religious framework are, of course, Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. It is these figures, as well as those involved in the resulting three-cornered fight between (in Charles Taylor's words) secular or 'exclusive humanists,' postmodern or 'neo-Nietzschean' anti-humanists, and 'acknowledgers of transcendence,' on whom Humanism and the Death of God focuses. In the chapter entitled 'Dignity After Darwin,' Osborn traces how Darwin's theory of evolution undermines concepts of inherent human dignity and leads, not to moral individualism, but to moral nihilism. On this account, there is a clear link between the utilitarian outlook underpinning the theory of natural selection and 'a deeply unsettling dark side' to Darwin (34), expressed by the proponents of social Darwinism. Far from misconstruing Darwin, such thinkers as Herbert Spencer or William Greg had 'properly understood' Darwin's theory (39), Osborn suggests. In his Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Hume argued that to live as 'a sensible knave,' or as someone who behaves morally as 'a general rule' while secretly taking 'advantage of all the exceptions,' was foolish idea, since those who violate social norms for their own selfish gain tend to be 'betrayed by their own maxims' (44; Hume 2006, 267). In short, the best way to appear honest is to be honest, but does honesty require the support of the Platonic concept of the 'noble lie' put forward in the Republic? Yet in the 19th century, the challenge issued by Thrasymachus to Socrates, that 'injustice on a sufficiently large scale is a stronger, freer, and more masterful thing than justice,' and that 'it is the advantage of the stronger that is the just, while the unjust is what profits a man's self and is for his advantage' (Republic, 344c), now appeared as 'an irrefutable scientific truth' (56). For the problem with grounding human dignity in autonomous reason, as the Enlightenment in general and Kant in particular had done, was that freedom and a capacity for reason itself seemed inconceivable in an immanent, naturalist universe. Noting Conor Cunningham's penetrating critique of Richard Dawkins's notion of the 'selfish gene' and Denis Noble's tongue-in-cheek reversal of Dawkins's highly metaphorical language (59-60, n. 96), Osborn stakes his claim for 'a holistic, embodied, and integrative view'one that takes 'the interiority and subjectivity of human experience' as 'primary datum and departure points,' inseparable from yet not reducible to the laws of biophysics and the categories of Darwinian theory (66). As Alasdair MacIntyre argued in After Virtue (1984), the 18th and 19th centuries were not so much centuries of Enlightenment, but of 'a peculiar kind of darkness in which men so dazzled themselves that they could no longer see' (71; MacIntyre 1984,

European Journal of English Studies, 2014

History of European Ideas, 2019

Posthumanist and New Materialist thought attempts to undo the supremacy and distinction of the human being through accounting for the agential capacities of the animal and material world. New Materialism in particular constructs a vision of a vital natural world in order to turn us away from humanism and toward a more holistic understanding of nature, and political actants. In this article, I argue that there can be a humanist new materialist position that sees the vitalism of the natural world while maintaining the uniqueness of the human being. This position can be found in the natural science of the eighteenth century in the work of Georges-Louis LeClerc de Buffon and Charles Bonnet. Reminding ourselves of this alternative mode of thinking about a vital nature, and its vision of a self-regenerating human being in a vital and regenerative universe, is a path toward regenerating humanism itself in contemporary scholarship.