“Non-Humanism” and the Critique of Humanist Imagery
François Laruelle
In Théorie des étrangers: science des hommes, démocratie, non-psychanalyse (Paris: Kimé, 1995), 105-110
“Humanism” is the set of philosophical images of man, rather than the rigorous knowledge of man. Humanism is a form of speculative imagery, the product of an undoubtedly transcendental imagination, understood in a very general sense as an operation of synthesis of contraries or as the One-of-the-Dyad. We call image in the philosophical sense the product of the reciprocal speculation of contraries, the image always being the double or divided reflection, to which we will oppose a transcendental science as the simple, uni-lateral, or non-specular image (of) the real. Doing so does not injure or denigrate philosophy than it is to say that philosophy lacks spirituality and a sense of the “internal”; philosophy is an operation of projection of pure images, that in particular that it knows man not but only knows representations of man. Humanism claims therefore to engross man with such images. Humanism completes man with transcendent and unsuitable models (transcendence in general is made for Cosmos, Physis, Ousia, Duty, etc. … but not for man). Humanism associates man by dint of speculative representations that man has no need of. This Principle of Sufficient Humanism (sufficient…for man) commands in submitting man to a capital of philosophical decisions, a capital of meaning, truths and values destined to assure the transformation of the essence of man in accordance with Being, Reason, Spirit, Revolution, etc. A human science retrieves rather the power of man to transform philosophy, and the human transformation of philosophy is another thing than the inverse of the humanist exploitation of man.
“Ordinary man” or the Stranger is the object of a double operation for the philosopher: they are divided by the philosopher who is the excellent or universal man, and therefore is sub-humanized; then they are doubled by him, they become both singular and universal, common and philosophizing man. This operation is the absolute condition of any humanism: to any man is associated or connected a philosopher as the excellent and universal form of man. Humanism is what the philosopher thinks of man, not what man thinks (of) themselves. The famous critical keyword “think for yourself by putting yourself in the other’s shoes” [penser par soi-même en se mettant à la place de l’autre] has a very precise real meaning: double the other by putting yourself in their shoes and for them; and, inversely: let me be doubled by him who thinks in my shoes. This reciprocity is the real phenomenal content of “communication,” the recognition of the reciprocal mastery and slavery of men.
Without opposing itself to it, what denudes this operative and technological humanism and throws it back at the Transcendental Illusion is what we call “vision-in-man,” the transcendental and not aprioritic fact that man thinks, acts or prescribes from the grounds of themselves, with their own thought rather than the help of (another) Thing (Reason, Law, etc.) or from an Other (thing) (the Other-person, the Unconscious, etc.), which are only occasional causes. Vision-in-man is the affirmation that man has no need to resort to predicates to be what they are; man has no need of a predicate like Reason or else this new predicate (after Language, Power, Writing, etc.), Communication. Man does not think from outside of themselves, with the prisms of Reason or the crutch of an assumed universal Communication but which is not one (at any rate compared with the universal space of unified theory) or which is so as only general/total, divided anew. Man thinks from their own grounds which is their intrinsic finitude: sufficient human finitude which is no longer a pathological affection of Reason but an absolute immanent given, lived as such by man and what we still call here as the “Ego.” Man holds from this intrinsic finite ground their power of using Reason and Communication rather as simple occasions, not as tools: this would be a misunderstanding on the essence of man, man’s technological normalization. Finite – and therefore uni-versal – pragmatics is scientific: it is not of the technological and transcendent order. Man defines, through the sufficiency of their finitude, a sphere of absolute ante-communicational reality that is more radical than any “ante-predicative.”
Man is the only being (rather than a god or a demon) who contributes to the World, from the prior of the World: from the reality or identity of philosophy and science. Man alone opposes to philosophical divisions the transcendental immanence of a lived experience that is non-decisional and non-donational (of) indivision. What we call “unified theory” and (let’s say with precaution) the “spontaneous philosophy” of real man is what man thinks (from) themselves, by themselves before their philosophical images or representations, though not independently from them. This reality certainly does not mean that we have deducted the transcendent man of philosophy and his humanoid images a trait that is judged remarkable (Reason, Language, Communication or any other predicate) to then give man a function of the total unification of experience. This “realism” is transcendent as much as transcendental, one philosophical position among others and the fully designated adversary of Transcendental Idealism. Man themselves indifferenciates [indifférencie] these philosophical positions through the duality of their essence – the Universal Humanity of Strangers – and their effective existence.
From this perspective, the being-given of man particularly invalidates several antithetical philosophical positions. On the one hand, a phenomenological humanism which would still relate the “non-positional (of) oneself” to an ontology of transcendence and an intentionality dooming humanism in becoming what it is: a by-product of ontology. On the other hand, the deconstruction of this humanism and some others: man is not the Other (of) man, the Real is not the impossible delimiting ontology and phenomenology, man is vision-in-man, “in-One.” More than an Undeconstructible, man is who indifferenciates and renders contingent the undecidable decision of deconstruction: man is the first of the non-philosophizables. Finally, juridical rationalism (Fichte’s for example), a solution which is worth a few words. Being still restrictive, this juridical rationalism submits man to humanism and projects a particular content – “rational” – in the I [Moi] and the I’s opening, forcing one to confound them amphibologically. Fichte only eliminates the “general logic” from the Ego but in no way what still remains of it essentially under the form of the logos, transcendence or the decision – the heart of all philosophical logic – and founders once and for all within the Transcendental Illusion that he had nevertheless denounced but in which he had made a very narrow concept of. The ensemble of Fichte’s philosophy is then developed like [comme] a logic of philosophy instead of solely being an inductive science as much as axiomatic science of philosophy as meta-human. Once and for all, juridical humanism is completed in the identification of the being-of-man with an ecstatic-horizontal opening which is still (measured to Humanity or the Stranger which accompanies the radical being-immanent of the Ego and considered within its intimate structure) a particular and re-folded space: an enclosure. Every philosophy of man cannot but “return” to Fichte; a science will only return to Fichte as a symptom and reserve of meta-human indications, rather than as to this very science. Fichte represents the maximum of what one philosophy can critique of Being and program the future in favour of man. Otherwise, Fichte does not sufficiently radicalize the non-decisional and precisely non-positional essence of the Ego, nor does he give to the Transcendental Illusion the whole of its extent beyond “dogmatic” metaphysics alone, even if Humanity as a second region accompanies the Ego still remains gifted [munie] by a philosophical decision contracted within a fold and restrained by the particularity of transcendent contents like Moral Law, the Time of the project and Rational Faith. A newly anonymous Humanity, made by projective structures and in progress of being formed, is not yet recognized as identical to the Stranger.
Only a “non-Fichtean” thought that is really uni-versal (where Fichteanism would no longer be but a particular case or a material, a sort of necessary metalanguage but without autonomy) can recognize the real undivided [l’individu réel] within man and save the immanent human phenomenon from transcendent philosophical apparatuses that afterwards transforms into the simple a priori of experience. While Fichte brings the philosophical decision to the limits of what it can do without breaking the last restrictions of humanist imagery, while Fichte thinks man within the limits of reason, the problem of a science of men is wholly different: to conceive science and humanity within the limits of the Ego (of) the Stranger, for these limits of the science of man are not at all that of Reason. The unified theory is not rational in the philosophical sense of the word, which is perhaps the only one. It is first real, which is perhaps the best way of saying that it is not irrational. “Reason” is a mixture whose limits are both internal and external, immanent and transcendent; but the unified theory is the intrinsic finitude of knowledge which contains and maintains not only the Ego but the Stranger themselves within their positive limits, ceasing from making of the Stranger a being of projection [un être de projet] and what renders possible a Uni-versal Humanity (undoubtedly contingent in relation to the intimately finite being of the Ego) but which “destroys” the divided/refolded pro-jection, the closed opening doomed to the infinite perfectibility to which philosophy reduced man.
Critical humanism and philosophy in general (even the deconstructions), postulate the human and lived reality of the infinite and attribute to man the onto-theo-logical vicissitudes of God, while the Stranger, as a unilateral duality, completely de-finalizes the projection of any metaphysical or onto-theo-logical dimension. Humanism remains a transcendent or imposed theory, man is only subjugated by it. As always in the Copernican Revolution – which is not a science of the subject but a “theory” of objectivation by the subject and of the subject – man is not the authentic “subject,” i.e., the cause (of) science or the Stranger.
One will object that this “opposition” (it is not one, but a unilateral duality of man as Stranger and philosophy) is a half-Rousseauian, half-Stirnerian residue, at any rate an impossible thesis as long as the analysis would be lead up to the ultimate conditions of the philosophical – up to the ultimate forms of “transcendence.” Specifically, an analysis of the invariant structures of the Philosophical Decision and what is not stopped on the path, that is, towards transcendence, can alone give notice that the immanent, non-decisional phenomenon of the Ego is regularly presupposed by transcendence and not elucidated by it; that the Ego is required to render philosophy real rather than simply possible, but without ever being described in its intimate constitution. The non-Copernican Ego which transcendentally and in-the-last-instance precedes the philosophical decision has nothing in common with its anarchist avatar which is a mode issued from the decomposition of this decision. Only a misunderstanding from a metaphysical origin on the Ego and on science, on their identity-of-the-last-instance, can make believe that the vision-in-man is the “Transcendental Unity” of philosophies, or else its empirical complementary and double. The man to which every philosophy (even humanist criticism) thinks is ontologically a mixture, while the man of the vision-in-man is this Transcendental Idiot of an ante-decisional simplicity.
The set of these new perspectives on man constitutes (rather than an anti-humanism) a sort of “non-humanism,” a science of man more universal than any philosophy and capable of integrating philosophy as a simple metalanguage without authority and then, pragmatically, as an a priori of any experience. Critical and juridical humanism (to reprise this example) is henceforth one decision among others (proximal to being subject to its particularly actual symptom-function), a representation which demands being “rectified” and inserted within a knowledge destined to describe in-the-last-instance the vision-in-man itself. The non-humanism which then results is the ensemble of rigorous knowledges relating themselves to the Ego and the Stranger and is not the negation of humanism – we will explain some of them in the following chapters. Humanism is a restrictive thought of man which we know that man is subtended by a unitary postulate that one science alone can suspend which is formulated thus: to man is associated necessarily once and each time only one humanist thesis, once and each time only one decision. A science of men is grounded on the suspension of this postulate which is not necessary for the being of man, and we substitute this postulate with another one: to man who is only man does not correspond any particular humanist decision; or again what corresponds to man but as contingent is an infinity of decisions in which some can be called wholly particularly “humanist.”
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