Michel Serres: Universal Humanism

Michel Serres seeks to elaborate an account of the human that accommodates both determinate qualities (like Badiou and Meillassoux) and de-differentiation (like Malabou). His aim is to marry singularity and determinacy with genericity and plurality, yielding neither an undifferentiated and abstract notion of humanity nor a diversity of individuals with nothing in common. Humanity is best understood, for Serres, as part of the ‘Great Story’ (Grand Récit) of the universe, a story not only about, but also told by, the natural world. The combination of Serres’s Great Story and his introduction of the two figures of multi-coloured Harlequin and all-white Pierrot gives him a multi-modal account of humanity (capacities plus narrative), and this makes the figure of the human that emerges from his work richer, as well as more situated in its landscape and its history, than the one we find in the accounts considered in chapters 1-4. There is, however, a danger that Serres’s Great Story becomes a ‘host story’ for his account of the human, forcing all humans into a single narrative mould in the same way that a host capacity or a host substance routes all discourse about the human through one single characteristic or quality.

Alain Badiou: Formalised Inhumanism

This chapter probes the limits of Badiou’s “formalised inhumanism”, arguing that it is wrong to characterise the figure of the human that emerges in Badiou’s thought as radically new. For both Badiou and his antagonists the human is irreducibly composite: it cannot be what it is without a constitutive relation to an instance of inhumanity or non-humanity outside itself. Badiou’s split anthropology of the “human animal” and the “immortal” faces a major structural and ethical problem, arising from the way in which he seeks to understand the relation between the animal and immortal: he makes fidelity to a truth, and therefore humanity in its full sense, contingent upon an individual’s possession of the capacity for affirmative thought. Such thought functions for Badiou as a ‘host capacity’, a boundary marker of the uniqueness of humanity among animal, organic and non-organic entities. Despite exploring several creative ways to overcome the problems caused by this ‘host capacity’ account of humanity, the chapter concludes that it casts a shadow over his claim that “several times in its brief existence, every human animal is granted the chance to incorporate itself into the subjective present of a truth”.

Introduction

French philosophy today is laying fresh claim to the human. This is not to be mistaken for an exercise in winding back the clock, nor is it a return to previous ideas of the human, much less a coordinated ‘human turn’. It is a series of fundamentally independent and yet strikingly simultaneous initiatives arising across the diverse landscape of French thought to transform and rework the figure of the human. Whereas the latter decades of the twentieth century adopted a decidedly critical and cautious approach to the question of ‘the human’, imprisoning it within the iron bars of scare quotes and burying it under caveats warning against its false universalism and dangerous totalitarianism, now we find ourselves entering a new moment of constructive transformation in which fresh and ambitious figures of the human are forged and discussed, and in which humanism itself is being reinvented and reclaimed in multiple ways. These new figures of the human take diverse and sometimes mutually antagonistic forms, but what unites them all is that they cannot be plotted on the spectrum running between twentieth-century humanism and antihumanism. Each in its own way rejects the assumptions that humanism and antihumanism share. By tracing these varied transformations of the human we can discern one of the most widespread, most surprising and potentially most transformative trends in contemporary French thought....

Conclusion

Any attempt to draw links between and comparatively evaluate such a diverse range of thinkers as those I have discussed in this volume must necessarily be partial, both in the sense of incomplete and also in the sense of motivated by particular commitments and ideas at the expense of others. The analysis in this book has indeed been partial, although in its defence the main target of its critique has been partiality. The foregoing analysis has sought to expose and remedy the partiality of those accounts of the human which rest, in the final analysis, on a determinate host capacity or host substance. It has been argued that they are too restricted and fail to be able to account adequately for the human, and also fail to address difficult questions which arise in relation to (by these theories’ own lights) liminal humans who lack the requisite host property....

Catherine Malabou: The Plastic Human

The transition from Badiou and Meillassoux to Malabou leads us away from thinking the human in terms of a ‘host capacity’ and proposes instead a ‘host substance’: the brain. The first half of this chapter argues that Malabou manages to avoid a host capacity account of the human by developing a notion of plasticity not as a uniquely human trait but as the possible transformation of all traits. This position harbours an irreducible ambiguity, however, between an escape from the host capacity approach and its hyperbolisation, and so what Malabou offers us can be construed as nothing less than a host meta-capacity. The second half of the chapter explores Malabou’s determination to initiate a new plastic encounter between philosophy and neuroscience, eschewing both the ‘cognitivism’ of neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux and the ‘Continental’ resistance to neuroscience of Paul Ricœur in order to elaborate her own ‘neuronal materialism’ in terms of ‘destructive plasticity’. In an attempt to develop this neuronal materialism in a way that avoids plasticity becoming one more defunct metaphor of the human, the chapter concludes by offering a reading of ‘the self’ in Malabou not as a metaphor but as a movement or tension of metaphoricity.

Quentin Meillassoux: Supreme Human Value Meets Anti-anthropocentrism

This chapter continues exploring the contemporary permutations of the ‘host capacity’ account of humanity through a close reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s transformation of the human. The place of the human in Meillassoux’s thought is complex. On the one hand, he maintains a strong and consistent rhetoric of anti-anthropocentrism, and his fundamental philosophical project can be summarised as an attempt to break free from what he sees as the anthropocentric straitjacket of Kantian and post- Kantian ‘correlationist’ thought. On the other hand, however, Meillassoux can evince a very high view of the human indeed, not hesitating to call his philosophy a ‘humanism’ and asserting the value of the human as ultimate. The first part of the chapter argues that Meillassoux’s humanism is less humanist than he thinks and the second part shows that his attempt to disengage from anthropocentrism is more anthropocentric than he thinks. As in the case of Badiou, it is Meillassoux’s insistence on tethering the value of humanity to its capacity for thought that lies at the root of many of the problems of his anthropology.

Bruno Latour: Translating the Human

Chapter 6 considers the figure of the human that emerges in Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence and his ‘Facing Gaia’ lectures. Latour neither repeats nor discards previous notions of humanity but translates them in a gesture that can be traced all the way back to his doctoral work on the theologian of demythologisation Rudolf Bultmann. In his attempts to elaborate a figure of the human that follows neither the emancipation narrative nor the structure of modernity, Latour (like Serres) develops a multi-modal approach. The human is an amalgam of multiple modes of existence and cannot be isolated within any single mode. Latour also avoids the problems inherent in a host capacity approach by distributing both capacities and substance across human and nonhuman actors in unatomisable collectivities. Whereas the host capacity and host substance approaches seek to understand the human by looking within, Latour insists that the human only becomes comprehensible when we look outside and around. His 2013 Gifford Lectures both develop and challenge themes from the Modes of Existence project, reasserting the centrality of the human now in terms of a non-modern anthropos defined by its limits and its multiple attachments to the world.

Catherine Malabou: The Epigenetic Human

Chapter 4 turns to the question of human identity over time in Malabou. After setting out the stakes of her recent work on epigenesis in Before Tomorrow, the chapter points out some shortcomings of her previous accounts of identity over time, particularly in relation to the famous case of Phineas Gage and her experience of her own grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease. Malabou’s account of epigenesis provides us with a powerful way to re-read this earlier work. Prior to Before Tomorrow, Malabou is trapped in a paradigm which forces her to regard cerebral matter as the ‘host substance’ of human identity and personhood: just as rational thought acted as a gatekeeper of humanity for Badiou and Meillassoux, personal memory as it is encoded in the individual’s brain is the gatekeeper of personhood and identity for Malabou. However, in her recent work she elaborates what she calls an ‘epigenesis of the real’ according to which epigenesis and hermeneutics are extensions of each other, breaking down the division between nature and culture. I draw out the implications of this new position, using Paul Ricœur’s account of narrative identity as a sounding board for what I call Malabou’s eco-synaptic selfhood.