French Philosophy Today
After the humanism/anti-humanism debates of the 1940s and ’50s, and after the ‘death of man’ in the linguistic philosophy of the late twentieth-century, French philosophy today is laying fresh claim to the human. This is not to be mistaken for a return to previous ideas of the human, nor is it posthumanism, strictly speaking. It is a series of fundamentally independent and yet strikingly simultaneous initiatives arising in the writing of diverse French thinkers to transform and rework the figure of the human. This book brings together these new figures of the human for the first time, offering the a critique of this contemporary trend in terms of the three categories: the human as ‘capacity’ (Badiou and Meillassoux), as ‘substance’ (Malabou) and as ‘relation’ (Serres and Latour). Tracing these varied transformations of the human makes visible for the first time one of the most widespread, surprising and potentially transformative trends in contemporary French thought. This book draws out both the promises and perils inherent in today’s attempts to rethink humanity’s relation to “nature” and “culture”, to the objects that surround us, to the possibility of social and political change, to ecology and to our own brains, arguing that the stakes of this project are high for our technologically advanced but socially atomised and ecologically vulnerable world.