Toward a Non-humanist Humanism

William V. Spanos

Description

In his book The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, William V. Spanos critiqued the traditional Western concept of humanism, arguing that its origins are to be found not in ancient Greece's love of truth and wisdom, but in the Roman imperial era, when those Greek values were adapted in the service of imperialism on a deeply rooted, metaphysical level. Returning to that question of humanism in the context of the United States' war on terror in the post-9/11 era, Toward a Non-humanist Humanism points out the dehumanizing dynamics of Western modernity in which the rule of law is increasingly made flexible to defend against threats both real and potential. Spanos considers and assesses the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek as humanistic reformers and concludes with an effort to imagine a different kind of humanism—a non-humanist humanism—in which the old binary of friend versus foe gives way to a coming community without ethnic, cultural, or sexual divisions.
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Posthumanism in the Age of Globalization: Rethinking The End of Education

2. Speaking the Lie of the Truth to Power: A Meditation on the Truth of Modernity by an Incorrigible Caviler

3. American Exceptionalism and the State of Exception: A Genealogy of the Contemporary Security State

4. The Human in Modernity: A Genealogy of Bare Life

5. Revoking the Vocational Imperative: Post-poststructuralist Theory and the Interrogation of the Interpellative Call

6. Edward W. Said and World Literature: Thinking the Worldly Imperatives of the Interregnum

Notes
Index

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• History of philosophy
• Literary theory
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 31 juillet 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438465982
• Langue: English

Extrait

toward a non-humanist humanism
toward a non-humanist humanism
THEORY AFTER 9/11
william v. spanos
On the cover: A photograph by Geof Gould, “Native Child Behind a Barbed Wire Fence: Hoping for a Home.” Courtesy of Geof Gould.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
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Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Spanos, William V., author.
Title: Toward a non-humanist humanism : theory after 9/11 / by William V. Spanos.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039675 (print) | LCCN 2017010140 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438465975 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438465968 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438465982 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Humanism—21st century. | Civilization, Modern—21st century.
Classification: LCC B821 .S73 2017 (print) | LCC B821 (ebook) | DDC 144—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039675
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To all those uncountable humans who died during the Allied firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, which, for me, became a neighborhood of zero, in the hope that these untimely meditations might contribute to a coming non-humanist humanity.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Posthumanism in the Age of Globalization: Rethinking The End of Education
Chapter 2. Speaking the Lie of the Truth to Power: A Meditation on the Truth of Modernity by an Incorrigible Caviler
Chapter 3. American Exceptionalism and the State of Exception: A Genealogy of the Contemporary Security State
Chapter 4. The Human in Modernity: A Genealogy of Bare Life
Chapter 5. Revoking the Vocational Imperative: Post-poststructuralist Theory and the Interrogation of the Interpellative Call
Chapter 6. Edward W. Said and World Literature: Thinking the Worldly Imperatives of the Interregnum
Notes
Index
Preface
T he following meditation attempting to articulate a coming non-humanist humanism was completed shortly before the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. They thus might be read as academic exercises remote from the ominous realities of the present fraught political occasion. But on reading the final proofs during the election period in November 2016, I was struck by the uncanny anticipation of the disturbing advent of the Trump phenomenon—the latest and perhaps final—liminal—manifestation of the dehumanizing binary logic of the exceptionalist American nation-state—in each one of these chapters. Particularly pertinent in this respect are the pervasive themes, on the one hand, of American exceptionalism and the state of exception intrinsic to it, and, on the other, of the dehumanizing degradation of language—the “banality of evil” Hannah Arendt attributed to Adolph Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem—and the intrinsically related theme, articulated by Giorgio Agamben, of “bare life,” life that can be killed without the killing being called murder. Listening to Donald Trump’s glib pronouncements during the Republican debates and his debates with Hillary Clinton, I was struck by the uncanny similarity between Trump’s dehumanized and dehumanizing discourse and that ominous banality of modernity identified by my main intellectual witnesses—Edward Said, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and Judith Butler, among others—as that which threatens the very humanity of human life in the post-9/11 era. I hope the reader will keep this implicit relationship between my diagnosis of the contemporary American political scene and the banality of Trump’s vision, in the name of making “America great again,” of the United States’ future under his leadership in mind as he or she reads the following errant meditations on the interregnum in which we precariously dwell.
Acknowledgments
T he difficult question of what it means to be human has been an urgent obsession of mine ever since my mind-shattering experience as a young prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, in World War II, when, to appropriate an indispensable recent vocabulary, I lived five excruciatingly long and agonizing empty months of my adolescence in the limbo of bare life: life utterly bereft of the potential that makes human life worth living, and thus life that was disposable. At first, I was enabled by my American heritage to maintain that saving sense of human potential by attributing my dehumanized condition to the monstrous Nazi totalitarian aberration. But in the wake of the horrific Allied firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, which indiscriminately killed over a hundred thousand children, women, and men in one long night-and-day terrorist incendiary air raid, the Nazi prop failed as a sustaining rationale. From that epiphanic occasion, which bereaved me of any reason to be, to the very present moment of this writing, I have relentlessly and increasingly tried in my capacity as teacher, scholar, and editor to fathom what it is in the “benign” apparatuses of our (Western) civilization—so celebratory of its redemptive accomplishments in the name of humanity—that could reduce human life to bare life, and to rethink the question of the human in such a way as to avoid that relentlessly advancing dehumanizing banal fate. The following indissolubly related essays—I deliberately call them “variations on a theme” to contrast them with the now outmoded concept of the book—constitute the culmination of this long, sustained, and arduous untimely endeavor inaugurated in the abyssal midst of the smoldering ashes of the “Florence of the Elbe.” In acknowledgment of their clamoring silent voices, I dedicate these meditations on the human to that multitude of human singularities who, having been reduced to ungrievable bare life in the name of the traditional humanism of the “free world,” were killed with thoughtless impunity. For me, on that revelatory occasion of my youth, these dead and mutilated bodies became a “neighborhood of zero,” that, in its unspeakable horror, called a future humanity—a non-human humanist humanity—to redeem their banalized wasted lives.
More immediately, I wish to acknowledge my debt to a number of friends and colleagues who, through the years of my abiding concern with the question of the human, engaged me in loving dialogical strife. These include the late Edward W. Said, whose criticism of my ontological focus enabled me to perceive the idea of the human as an indissoluble relationship between the ontological and the worldly or political sites on the continuum of being; and some members of the boundary 2 editorial collective—Paul Bové, Ronald Judy, Aamir Mufti, Stathis Gourgouris, Marcia Landy, Michael Hays, and the late Kathryn Lindberg—whose resistance to the radically profane direction my critique of the traditional humanist ethos was taking always compelled me to rethink—but never to abandon—my perspective. Above all, I want to thank Daniel T. O’Hara and Donald E. Pease, who, despite their differing interpretation of the ineffable human condition, unfailingly, through the years, have encouraged my obsessive effort to think the humanness of the stinking bare life I threw into the horse-drawn wagons that blithely trotted their cargoes off to mass burial at the outskirts of the devastated city of Dresden.
I also wish to thank a number of my students both from the distant past—Aliki Bakopoulou Halls, R. Radhakrishnan, Jeanette McVicker, Giovanna Covi, Michael Clark, David Randall, Patrick McHugh, Philip Armstrong, Madeleine Sorapure, Deborah Reiter, and Robert Marzec—and the near present: Ayse Deniz, Christina Battista, Guy Risko, Jennifer Sweeney, Robert Wilson, Shawn Jasinski, Molly Goldblatt, Robert Ryan, James Fitzgerald, Marcus Heiligenthal, and, not least, my present research assistant, Mahmoud Zidan. All these, to me, young people have constituted contrapuntal voices that compelled my thinking to remain errantly open-ended in defiance of the cultural pressures that demand the acquiescence—the closure—of old age. The inquiring voices of these young students enabled me in my “old age” to write this testament of resistance in behalf of a coming non-humanist humanism. They, at least, will hear what I mean.
On a more personal register, I want to express my gratitude to my beloved brother, Charles, and sister-in-law, Joy, whose abiding love and wisdom—and their introduction to me of the “Martini moment” of the day—have sustained me, even at a distance, all through the late years of life; to my brilliant and caring former Greek student, Asimina Karavanta, for reasons having to do with in illo tempore that only she will understand, but I would be remiss not to mention; and to my former wife and present colleague, Susan Strehle, and our amazing son, Adam, without whose abiding support—both physical and intellectual, I want to emphasize—this errant project could not have been completed. Whatever is awry in the pages that follow is strictly the result of my doing in the caviling late style I so admired in Edward Said’s late writing.
Chapter 1, “ Posthumanism in the Age of Globalization: Rethinking The End of Educat