an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 16, Winter 2018/2019, ISSN 1552-5112
Beyond the Death of Man: Foucault, Derrida and Philosophical
Anthropology[1]
The death and re-birth of man:
Foucault, Derrida, and Philosophical Anthropology
If
one, today, professes an interest in the human, in anthropology, perhaps even
in pursuing a certain ‘humanism’, one is immediately confronted with an almost
spontaneous objection, one that would foreclose the entire affair: have we not
gone beyond ‘Man’?
[2]
Has the human not been surpassed either by its own creations or simply by an
ontological univocity or ‘immanence’ that would refuse to posit man or anything
like it as the pinnacle of creation or in any way unique? Humanism would be
little more than the flipside of theism, as Nietzsche had it, since to imagine
a human who would somehow stand before and thus outside the object of its
representation or transcendental construction would be to reinstall a
transcendence, to bestow a super-natural character on an entity who was after
all just as much a product and a part of nature as anything else. It would be
to forget — somewhat disingenuously — that God is dead, and it would rather
affirm that beings as a whole did indeed form a kind
of totality, or, as Alain Badiou would say, a ‘One’.[3]
Nevertheless, some, perhaps more
numerous than we might imagine, have continued to speak of ‘man’, in a way that
we should presume is not without reason. Therefore, it will be just if we stage
a debate between post-humanism and humanism, in a certain form, the principal
actors of which will comprise Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and the
Philosophical Anthropologists, Arnold Gehlen
prominent among them. In preparing for such a discussion, the first question to
be raised is the following: why, after post-humanism,
might we still want to talk about the human? Can we do so? Should we?
A prehistory of the question
We
shall respond to this question by looking at the work of Michel Foucault, and
in particular The Order of Things (Les mots et les
choses), subtitled ‘An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences’ — the ‘human sciences’ which also means
the knowledge of the human being, and the emergence of the latter as an object which can be known. Not
incidentally, this text is the one in which Foucault gets as close as he ever
will to Martin Heidegger: indeed, one might risk the hypothesis that Foucault
is here asking after something like the historical conditions for the possibility of man’s own ability to put himself
in question. This for Heidegger was the defining feature of man or ‘Dasein’.
The question allowed man alone to exceed the terrain of entities and hover in an uncertainty as to their Being. In this suspense, standing apart
from beings in their totality and their stable presence, Dasein would be allowed to ponder the very meaning of
this Being, in all its potentiality.
The privilege of man, for Heidegger,
is that it is the only entity capable of asking itself questions, and in
particular the question ‘what am I?’
and thus ‘what ought I to be?’, ‘what
have I the possibility of being?’ —
Humans are both afflicted and blessed with an indeterminacy as to their
essence, which frees them from any determinate generic model or pre-given
potentiality which they are simply to realise, in the
automatic way in which an animal is said to, as it matures. At the same time,
this potentiality, thus untrammeled, allows human beings to ask not just the
ontic question of ‘who or what am I?’
but the ontological question of ‘what does it mean simply to be (any kind of thing at all)?’ Because
they innately constitute a question for
themselves, human beings are capable of ontology,
which is to say, philosophy.
There are three levels, at least, to
this questioning ability, which broadly align with the Aristotelian taxonomy of
individual, species, and genus (tode ti, eidos, genos): what am I (as an individual) to be?
What is it to be human? and What is that Being to which we in our questioning
ability have unique access? Each of these questions is intimately related to
the others, and together they form a knot which defines the human being, and
precisely as an entity for whom individuality is of the essence, an
individuation more extreme than that of any animal, and for whom this relation
to their own individuality is inextricable from the possibility of accessing
Being as such, which is after all, one might suggest, the potential singularity
of all things within our experience,
in light of our dawning finitude.
It is worth noting at the outset
that to remain at the level of either or both of the first two questions is to
confine oneself to the realm of anthropology, and, for Heidegger, such a
gesture is incomplete and inadequate on its own: without the acknowledgement of
man’s ability to think ontologically, without,
in other words, considering Dasein’s inherent relation to Being (Sein) that comprises the highest dignity
of the human being, one has not done justice to the essence of man, or one has
remained halfway. This is where one would be left if one did not risk the leap
to the third question: we shall not have exhausted the revelatory power of
death if we consider it solely as that which most fully individuates the human
being; we should move beyond that existentialist moment and realise
that death as the eternally non-actual possibility that is always impending is
a model according to which we might rethink Being
itself as a pure potentiality not
destined to and hence not modelled upon actuality. One should not remain simply at the level of anthropology,
then, as Heidegger considered Jean-Paul Sartre to have done. But that said, as
the ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ demonstrates, things are not so simple: for
philosophy, the practice of ontology, is precisely that moment at which the
human being comes into its own for the very first time, and therefore there is
never a moment in Heidegger’s thought at which anthropology may be left behind
altogether.
In any case, it is in the question that ontology begins to happen,
for here one first gains thoughtful access to possibility as such (in the
suspension of actuality), and this interrogative capacity is considered by
Heidegger without any exception to be a unique trait of the human being. Indeed
he seems to make this assertion in a rather straightforwardly transcendental way,
in the sense that it is ahistorical, invariant across all human beings, or more
precisely, it avers that one becomes fully human only when one, ontogenetically
and phylogenetically, becomes capable of asking this kind of question.
Foucault, on the other hand, does
not think that such transcendental structures — the human itself and its
capacities or ‘faculties’ — are without a history, or a pre-history, and that
implies in turn an uncertain future. Hence the possibility of speaking quite
seriously of a potentially impending ‘end of man’ (fin de l’homme). Thus, with this
Heideggerian background of Foucault’s Order
of Things in mind, let us see precisely how Foucault takes and modifies the
Heideggerian transcendental position and historicises
it in a way that comes close to leading it beyond the human. Having done this,
we shall then turn to Jacques Derrida and his response to Foucault’s idea of an
end of man, since this will allow us to demonstrate that a surpassing of man,
or even of the transcendental subject, in the name of the historicity of the
systematic structures within which structuralism affirms the subject to be
always already enmeshed, may not be so straightforward.
Having shown a certain persistence
of man even after the posthuman turn, despite man’s ‘death’, we shall be able
to conclude with a brief hypothesis on the discipline known as ‘Philosophical
Anthropology’, with regard to the form that it took in the first part of the
20th century, and in particular in the guise of such sadly neglected thinkers
as Arnold Gehlen. This will allow us to close by
suggesting that Derrida’s intervention, which puts in doubt the very
possibility of an unambiguous cessation of humanity, can in fact be read as
opening the way once again for precisely such a philosophical anthropology, but
a philosophical anthropology that Derrida himself does not pursue. And we can
wonder why.
Foucault’s Order of Things
It
is worth recounting Foucault’s supposedly well-known story of the invention and
the disappearance of man, not least because it is essentially difficult to read. A text that has come to be
considered self-evident is not likely to be yielding its truth or the most
philosophically significant of its elements. Therefore, let us once again open
the Order of Things at the fold in
which the Classical age is tipping over into the Modern, the era which is our
own — or at least it was in the 1960’s, when Foucault was writing.
The Modern age is the age of man,
the only age in which something like ‘Man’ (as opposed to ‘human beings’) was
possible — man as the object of a specific knowledge and a specific set of
sciences. Thus, Foucault writes a prehistory of the human sciences which he finds still to be flourishing in the
1960’s, albeit on the brink of a possible collapse, as the centrality of man to
the significant structures he inhabits is subjected to serious interrogation.
Demonstrating that man has a date of
birth destines him immediately to a subsequent death. For delaying such a
death, Foucault derides any form of anthropology or anthropologistic
thinking. Such anthropocentric thought flourishes in a very particular way not
just from the modern age onwards, when the representation of the world comes to
be centred around the subject, with Descartes among
others, but in a very particular way from the time of Kant onwards, as
epistemology and ontology take a transcendental turn, and allow man to be
placed not just in a position that opposes it to objects as the subject that
represents these objects to itself, but in the form of that entity which
constructs the object in the very first place, that entity without which the
entirety of the experience of nature, beings as a whole, would be impossible.
In Kant’s critical thought, the
subject’s representations are understood to be the conditions for the possibility of entities — this is what
it means to speak of the subject as transcendental. Thus, Kant takes the
mediaeval and classical notion of the transcendental, and rids it of its
transcendence with respect to the totality of entities by transposing it into
the human being and its subjective mental faculties: so
all possible entities find their transcendental conditions of possibility
within the human being. All entities are conditional upon the existence of the
transcendental subject, which is instantiated by the human being, and for this
reason the transcendental conditions for the possibility of knowledge,
experience, and thus the object of experience or ‘nature’, are to be found in
man. But the human being is at the same time not just a subject but also an
object — it does not transcend the field of objectivity altogether, even if it
remains in part distinguished by its subjectivity, its capacity for experience
and construction: human beings also appear
to themselves, in both their inner and outer sense. We are in that respect just
one object among others, and yet a privileged object which is also somehow the
bearer of a subjectivity that makes every object possible, as if one element
within a field held the key to that entire realm and indeed constituted the
keystone of the entire edifice, without which the structure of that field could
not remain standing.
Man is both transcendental with
respect to the empirical field and yet also in certain respects empirical
himself. Thus, even though the transcendental and the empirical are to be kept
rigorously distinct, in the case of man they overlap:
man folds back upon himself, doubling over.
We are perhaps beginning to get some
sense of what it might mean for Foucault to speak of the ‘invention of man’ at
the turn of the 18th and 19th Centuries, which he considers to be the most
crucial event in the prehistory of our time, unearthed by the archaeology he is
conducting, for it marks the beginning of an era, our own, which in Foucault’s
day appeared to be drawing to a close.
Foucault’s retrospective
archaeology and his Heideggerianism
There
is always a retrospective character to Foucault’s histories, which is one
reason why he describes them as genealogies or, earlier on, and at this stage,
in the mid-1960’s in particular, as archaeologies. The
primary reason for an investigation of the Classical age would be to understand
the Modern, and the particular perspective taken upon
the past — from the standpoint of a certain analysis of the present — will
explain why this past is characterised in the precise
way that it is. So to approach a more exact and progressive understanding of
the Modern age, the age of Man, the epoch
of the transcendental subject of Kantianism, we should briefly recall
Foucault’s understanding of the Classical age, for such
a geological investigation of the strata upon which our age is built will help
to reveal certain possibilities concealed within that present, potentials which
testify to a certain future that, without the archaeological investigation,
might not have been suspected.
According to Foucault, the Classical epoch extended from
the end of the Renaissance in the mid-17th century to the turn of the 19th
century, and here the notion of man as we have conceived it up to the 1960’s,
in the so-called Modern age, had no place. Indeed, it is partly this very
absence that allows the chronological delimitation itself, so frequently
misunderstood by professional Historians. We should remember
that Foucault is, in the Order of Things,
carrying out an archaeology of knowledge,
and that is to say, a study of the historical
preconditions which made certain sciences
possible, and in particular the sciences of linguistics, biology, and political
economy. The objects of these sciences were language, life, and labour, three features which had long been recognised as defining properties of the human being. In
these features, and also as their very condition of possibility, man as a
finite mortal entity could see himself reflected, and thus come to know himself
— they amounted to an objectification of his nature. Thus these sciences would
come to be understood as ‘human sciences’, knowledge with respect to objects in
some way external to man but in which he could nevertheless gaze in order to
see his own reflection staring back. If these objects had become the topic of
rigorous and accepted science, then so could the human. And at one level, what
Foucault is recounting is precisely a history of the way in which the
discourses upon these objects assumed the character of a science — he is writing a chronicle of their gathering
scienticity.
At this point it is particularly important
to recall that Foucault’s text is looking retrospectively at the Classical age
from the standpoint of the Modern. In the Modern age, three features of the
human had achieved prominence, and around them the new sciences of linguistics,
biology and political economy, were developed: these were language, life and labour. These are clearly identifiable as features of man,
and cast a retrospective shadow which allows Foucault to distinguish and
identify the three strands which may be said to constitute their prehistory.
These features arose in the particular form of the objects of the three modern
sciences of linguistics, biology, and political economy, which were constituted
in that particular form only in the Modern age. Among these features, language was to play an especially
crucial role.
Foucault’s archaeology is concerned
not simply to identify the manner in which a discourse comes to be identified
as a genuine ‘science’, but also to identify the conditions which make the
appearance of certain objects possible
at certain points in history and within certain discourses — objects which
might then be able to become the topic of a strict science. In other words, Foucault tries to isolate the historical a priori of a certain discipline, or discourse: he asks,
what conditions must be in place in order to bring about a certain knowledge, and eventually, perhaps, a
true science, of certain entities (‘positivities’), like life, labour,
and language, in particular, and that involves precisely the formation
of a scientific — or knowable — object of
those sciences.
Thus, the historical a priori
amounts to the transcendental conditions for the possibility of manifestation,
the coming to light of entities which can be objects of a certain science.
These conditions so closely resemble Heidegger’s understanding of ‘Being’, in
all its historicity (which he began to call in the 1930’s the Seinsgeschichte),
as to be barely distinguishable from it. Together with its focus on man and his
reflexivity (which for Heidegger, at least, takes the form of the question),
this constitutes one of the many reasons for suggesting that The Order
of Things is indeed Foucault’s most Heideggerian text.
The sovereignty of language
Foucault
demonstrates that, in the Classical age, language,
and more precisely its diachronic form, discourse,
were dominant among the conditions of manifestation that he is identifying. The
order of things, the classification of Being
into a set of identifiable entities,
was predominantly filtered through language and the linguistic representation
of objects. Speaking or naming translates the undifferentiated and chaotic
continuity of Being into a spatially distributed grid or table — this is
how Being is transformed into beings, in Heidegger’s terms, how potentiality is
actualised. Language, wielded by man, it is true,
sorts the continuity of Being into a
discontinuous divided table of entities.
Foucault tells us that words ‘provide[d] a spontaneous
grid for the knowledge of things’ (Order
of Things, 304).
Thus, language in the Classical age
took priority among the conditions that allowed entities to become manifest, to
take upon themselves an individual identity — the event of being, at this
precise point, became identical with the event of language. In a locution that
should be closely followed as it discreetly weaves itself into the fabric of
this part of the text, Foucault describes language in the Classical age as sovereign: ‘in
the Classical age, discourse is that translucent necessity through which
representation and beings must pass, as beings are represented to the mind’s
eye, and as representation renders beings visible in their truth. The
possibility of knowing things and their order passes, in the Classical
experience, through the sovereignty of
words’ (Order of Things, 311,
emphases added).
The primary or ‘sovereign’
transcendental condition in the Classical epoch is language, and not the human being; the human being
does have a role in the Classical episteme (épistémè[4]),
but this is confined to effecting the discontinuous articulation of the
continuity of beings precisely by means of naming:
‘the great, endless, continuous surface is printed with distinct characters, in
more or less general features, in marks of identification — and, consequently,
in words’ (Order of Things, 310, cf.
ibid., 309). Human nature, with its ability to speak and name, allows a
tabulated space to be created. Representations, in the great ‘chain of being’,
are thus ‘immobilised in the form of a general table
of all that exists’ (ibid., 309). And man’s role is simply that of a
functionary of discourse, or language, a discourse that stands in the place
that man is yet to occupy: that of the ‘King’ or sovereign.
But what are we to understand by
this strange sovereignty of language? In this Classical context, ‘sovereign’
means whatever occupies the supreme and autocratic position of Being, that which enables manifestation;
but at the same time, it implies transcendence. So,
language is a transcendental
condition of revelation which is also transcendent.
Another crucial feature of this
sovereign discourse is that it is reflexive: it has ‘the power to represent
its representation’ (Order of Things, 309, emphases added). Language
is sovereign, transcending the order of the things that it creates, but it is
also capable of ‘flexing’ back upon itself and representing its own being.
Still in the Classical context, Foucault describes this ability not simply as
if language were autonomous in this gesture, but as if this linguistic reflex were
a part of ‘human nature’ (la nature humaine): ‘human nature [is…] like the folding [pli] of
representation back upon itself’ (ibid. 309/320). This is said in the context
of a certain spatialising characteristic of Classical thought and
indeed of language: speaking or naming transforms a linear temporal flow of thought — or the undifferentiated flux of Being —
into a stable spatial or spatially representable table of beings.
So, in the
Classical period, the reflexive function devolves upon language — wielded
by the human certainly, in the name of making knowledge of nature possible —
and thus the most fundamental instance of reflexivity, the crucial moment of
‘self-consciousness’, if one could speak of such a thing at this stage, does
not belong primarily to human beings. This leads Foucault to say, as to the Classical age, ‘man [l’homme], as a primary reality with his own density
[réalité épaisse et
première], as the difficult object and sovereign subject of all possible
knowledge [connaissance],
has no place in it’ (Order of Things, 310/321).
In the Classical age, the sovereign
condition of knowledge was language.
Now for the crucial move: in the
Modern age, the role of the sovereign will be assumed by man.
Meninas on the threshold
Foucault
clarifies the nature of the threshold between these two ages, rather famously, by considering Velázquez’s much earlier painting, Las Meninas, the ‘Ladies in Waiting’
(Museo del Prado, Madrid, 1656). This painting, in the way it represents, and
represents in particular the human being that is the king, foreshadows the
transition from the Classical to the Modern age, and hence the invention of
man, in the very particular place that he becomes capable of occupying in the
Modern age — with Kant.
In
Classical thought, the subject and object of representation never coincide in
the same space: one is always transcendent to the other:
language remains on a different, ‘meta-’ level with respect to that which it
represents, even when it represents itself, in which case it will only be able
to objectify itself, precisely in the form of the ‘object-language’, we may
presume. As Foucault puts it, ‘he who ties together all
the interlacing threads of the “representation in the form of a picture or
table” — he is never to be found in that table himself’ (Order of Things, 308). The namer is not itself named. This is the sovereign transcendence
of language in the Classical age, or of the language user.
In Las Meninas, the subject and object of representation, the one
representing and the one represented, almost
coincide. But not quite. The spectator of the actual painting has to adopt the
point of view of the king who is being
painted, who is the object of the painting and whom we see
reflected back to us in the mirror (along with his wife, we may presume) at the
centre of the work in the background. In effect,
though, given the tiny space of the actual king in the picture and the
invisibility of the canvas upon which the painter is daubing what is perhaps
this very painting but perhaps in another form, in which the king is of a more
appropriate size, one cannot say the painting is strictly about that sovereign dignitary. The title alone, referring to at
least some of the young ladies in the foreground, suggests as much in terms of
the painting’s content; rather, at
the level of form, the picture
concerns the act of representing
itself, as gestured towards by the huge size of the canvas that the painted
painter (painting) is working on, as he examines us (or at least the King and
Queen), larger by as much again as the meninas
themselves. Representation here becomes reflexive within a painting, and,
also, the representation becomes immanent to
that which is being represented.
The painting presents us with a near
coincidence between the subject and the object of the painting — the viewer,
us, the subject, in the place of the king, the object being represented — (and
the painting, let it be noted, is a non-linguistic
medium of representation). The transcendental and the empirical are being
folded over onto each other. We are witnessing a
transition in the nature of sovereignty: from transcendent to immanent, and at
the same time the usurpation of language by man. For Foucault, this is the
birth of man as he is understood today, and as he is presupposed by the human
sciences, as a condition for the possibility of their being sciences.
In the
Classical age, the condition for the possibility of appearance, language, was
transcendent to that which it represented, but in the Modern age the condition
of possibility becomes immanent to the field of appearance, and it becomes man,
who thus occupies the place of the transcendental conditions for the
possibility of an object’s becoming empirically available, and stands as a part
of that empirical field itself: man assumes a position at once transcendental
and empirical — a transcendental that is
no longer transcendent but rather immanent and empirical. Thus, the
sovereign power, if it is indeed any longer sovereign, is no longer to be
identified with transcendence.[5]
Man enters the frame, transcendental
subject of knowledge and object of knowledge in the form of his empirical life,
labour, and language. Thus, he comes to exist in the
form of something that can be both the subject and the object of its own
interrogation, such that a question
can arise within beings as a whole, a question directed at man’s very being.
A new perspective on
Heidegger’s Dasein
All
of this opens a new perspective on Heidegger’s notion of Dasein. If Dasein is
that entity which we are and whose being is an issue for itself, a being
broached by means of a question that
it is capable of putting to itself — if, in other words, Dasein
is a mystery and a question for itself, Foucault provides a historical
genealogy of that very
questionability: a historical tale recounting the moment of that question’s
emergence, and the conditions which make that question possible, the
self-relation which that particular question involves, and that is to say an ontico-ontological relation: a relation between an
entity and its own being — and thus, indirectly, with Being itself. The event
of Being erupts no longer in language’s tabulation of the world, but in man’s
perplexed relation with himself. Foucault’s is, to use a phrase deployed much
later by Giorgio Agamben in a different sense, an archaeology of ontology itself.
There has been a change in epoch; the history of the a
priori has moved on, and the crown has passed from the symbolic order to its
owner, the animal that has language. That we might link the
invention of the human sciences on Foucault’s account directly with Heidegger’s
notion of Dasein is intimated by the following interesting statement from
Foucault himself: ‘as long as Classical discourse
lasted, no interrogation as to the mode of being implied by the cogito could be
articulated’ (Order of Things, 312).
This is precisely what Heidegger says of Descartes, and by extension Husserl,
in Being and Time and elsewhere. Just
a little before this, in the same passage, Foucault tells us: ‘it was not possible [before this point] for
human existence to be called in question’.
It had not yet ‘become mysterious to itself’ (ibid., 311, emphases added).
When Foucault describes modern Man as an ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’ (‘doublet’, this time: un étrange doublet empirico-transcendantal)
(Order of Things, 318/329), an
empirical entity from which we can read off that which ‘renders all knowledge
possible’ (ibid., 318), which is to
say the very meaning of Being, he is repeating the hermeneutic gesture of
Heidegger who suggests we treat Dasein as a text in which the meaning of Being
may be deciphered.[6]
After the birth, the death of
man: the return of language
If
we have described the birth of man, and if that birth will have ‘doomed’ (un visage qui doit
s’effacer) (Order of Things, 313/324) man to a
certain death, how does he disappear? Or rather, how is he threatening to
disappear in the twilight that presages the dawning of a posthuman age? This
for Foucault would be an epoch in the history of knowledge, a new historical a priori or episteme, re-ordering the
realm of knowledge such that man and his consciousness would be firmly confined
to one insignificant corner of the universe.
In a fascinating passage, Foucault
speaks of the return of language. This return is one of the
primary threats to man in his centrality, sovereignty, and occupation of the
reflexive empirico-transcendental position. The
disappearance of language as the transparent medium of our experience at the
waning of the Classical age was what first allowed man to appear, and its
reappearance heralds his demise.
As the crucial
20th century sciences of linguistics, ethnology, and psychoanalysis reveal,
language is a structure that far exceeds the control of the finite subject. And
as the structure of language — together with all analogous ‘symbolic orders’ —
swamps us once again with its infinite unconscious machinations, productive of
meanings which the conscious mind can no longer be said exclusively to
generate, man is threatened, in the sovereignty of his subjectivity, but even
in his consistency and individuation.
Foucault goes on to identify the
task imposed upon thought as the tide of language washes over man. We need to
learn to think together the being of man and the being of language: ‘Is
the task ahead of us to advance towards a mode of thought, unknown hitherto in
our culture, that will make it possible to reflect at the same time, without
discontinuity or contradiction, upon man’s being and the being of language’? (Order of Things, 338)
But he immediately goes on to say
that this thought — not far distant from the task which Heideggerian
phenomenology sets itself — is precisely what is impossible: ‘the right to conceive both of the being of language
and of the being of man may be forever excluded; there may be, as it were, an
inerasable hiatus at that point (precisely that hiatus in which we exist and
talk)’ (Order of Things, 339). And
interestingly, for our purposes, Foucault goes on to ‘dismiss as fantasy any
anthropology in which there was any question of the being of language’ (ibid.).
In the very introduction
to The Order of Things, Foucault had already taken to deriding
anthropologies, ‘understood as a universal reflection on man, half-empirical,
half-philosophical’ with their ‘facile solutions’ (xxiii). As to engaging
with them, naturally Foucault wishes to do so only at the archaeological level,
which is to say not at the level of their truth, but in terms of the conditions
which made their emergence as a recognised science
possible, an engagement which he seems to consider these anthropologies
themselves constitutively incapable of.
And yet is this just? We shall
wonder whether perhaps one can imagine that an anthropology sufficiently
philosophical and with a different
attitude to the possibility or indeed desirability of the ‘end of man’ might
nevertheless be able to reflect upon the conditions of its own emergence in the
way that Foucault is attempting to. This would be to confront Foucault with
something he never seriously addresses — to our knowledge — and that is the actual Philosophical Anthropologies of Max Scheler, Arnold
Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner,
and particularly what in any case came, for the most part, too late for his
attention, and that is the relatively recent deployment by Italian philosopher
Paolo Virno of what he calls a ‘linguistic
anthropology’ (cf. Virno 2018 [2013]).
Indeed, the idea of a linguistic
anthropology is not at all unknown in Italian thought more generally: for
instance, Giorgio Agamben’s notion of an anthropogenesis that takes place at
the moment when language reflects upon itself and comes to speak of its own potential to signify, and thus to manifest
this potential, prior to any actual signification;
in this fold of language, the human being distinguishes itself from the animal,
which cannot deploy this potential as
such. Thus, the human comes into its own for the first time, in the lap of
language.[7]
Dogmatic anthropological
slumber
So
why does Foucault believe this linguistic anthropology to be impossible?
Here
it is worth recalling the prehistory of Foucault’s 1966 text in a work at least
five years younger, his Introduction to
Kant’s ‘Anthropology’. Kant, the great transcendental philosopher, intent
on keeping the transcendental and the empirical separate, was nevertheless the
one who brought the transcendental down from its transcendent location and thus
led the transcendental to fold over onto the empirical. What, then, did Kant
say of anthropology?
To the three questions defining
critical philosophy, Kant at a certain point adds a fourth: ‘what is man?’ and
according to Foucault, this question from then on never altogether leaves
thought, and ‘produces, surreptitiously and in advance, the confusion of the
empirical and the transcendental, even though Kant had demonstrated the
division between them’ (Order of Things, 341).
Empirical man, in terms of his life or his body, his labour,
and his language, is made to serve as the foundation of his own
(transcendental) finitude, the
finitude (of knowledge given the receptivity and hence non-creative,
non-intellectual character of (sensory) intuition) which the critical
philosophy finds it necessary to assert against the twin horns of the dilemma
between dogmatism and scepticism.
Foucault suggests that, as we have
seen with phenomenology, the contemporary inheritor of this confusion, but also
with that which, up to a point only seems to be its opposite, positivism and
eschatology (for example, Marxism) (Order
of Things, 321), philosophy falls into a ‘dogmatic slumber’, the ‘sleep […]
of Anthropology’ or the ‘Anthropological Sleep’ (ibid., 341). It seems that
this confusion of empirical and transcendental goes unnoticed or at least
unthought in this somnolent night, which an archaeological mole finds to be the
perfect time for digging.[8]
To think language and man together
would be to think life, labour, language and the
human in their empirical positivity (which contains an immanent principle of
intelligibility) as the very foundation of man’s own intelligibility. But the
only way to think this would be to produce a theory of scientific objects as
containing their own intelligibility immanently within them, but — and is this
Foucault’s point in this very difficult section?[9]
— this would leave man as an instance separate from these empirical instances,
even if not transcendent to them, without a role in the production of that
intelligibility. That would be the end of phenomenology, at least insofar as it
invokes consciousness as the transcendental source of meaning, and the end of
the Kantian transcendentalism from which it would inherit this however embodied
and hence empirically objectified subject.
Thus, a linguistic anthropology
(just as one which concerned itself with biology or political economy) would be
impossible precisely because it would still retain man in the ‘place of the
king’, in a sovereign position which has in truth been engulfed by the sea of
language, leaving an empty throne or a redundant and powerless monarch. Once
language, labour, and life become autonomously intelligible, they have no
need for the phenomenological or transcendental subject in order to acquire
meaning: they have, in other words, no need of man, and anthropology ceases to
be possible at this moment, which is to say precisely at the moment in which it
becomes a linguistic anthropology.
Linguistics, ethology, and psychoanalysis, from the beginning of the twentieth
century if not earlier, but certainly by the 1960’s should have awoken us once
and for all from this new slumber.[10]
Foucault is quite unambiguous: the very ‘task’ of contemporary thought is to awaken us
from the dogmatic slumber of anthropology, ‘the threshold beyond which
contemporary philosophy can begin thinking again’ (Order of Things, 342).[11] And it will have been
Nietzsche — at the end of the Kantian inheritance and in opposition to its
German Idealist development — whose call will first have roused us from this
unconsciousness: Nietzsche for whom the promise of the overman heralded the
imminent demise of man, the ‘death of man’, la
mort de l’homme (Order of Things, 342/353), to banish the last shades of God that
man had projected onto the wall of his cave, but precisely because there was a
fire behind him, and thus the shadows
were his own (Nietzsche, Gay Science
§108).
Derrida: The Ends of Man
With
Nietzsche’s clarion call still ringing in our ears, let us now turn to Derrida,
and to what is implicitly his response to Foucault’s text: ‘The Ends of Man’
given two years after The Order of Things,
in 1968.
It
was delivered at a conference in North America on Philosophy and Anthropology,
or as Derrida puts it, simply, ‘philosophical anthropology’. It in fact takes
place under the sign of an epigraph from Foucault’s Order of Things, after two others from Kant (on the treatment of
man as an end) and Sartre (on the turning of ontology towards human or
existentialist ends). The exergue is the only time Foucault is mentioned by
name in the entire text, but his presence is subtly all-pervasive. As becomes clear towards the end, the text
is a response to two readings of Nietzsche — one
Foucauldian and the other Heideggerian.
The
question Derrida raises for Foucault is whether man can ever have a simple
end. Can he simply be killed off without that death
being overcome in some kind of transfigured, perhaps spiritual, immortality, of
the kind which the Hegelian sublation
or Aufhebung gives to every concrete finite
entity, elevating it to the dignity of a purer, ideal essence?
Can man fail to survive his
own death?
In
‘The Ends of Man’, Derrida asks why French philosophy
has failed to return to the three H’s (Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger) after
the collapse of their misreading in a humanist vein in the ten years following
the war, under the sway of Alexander Kojève, in particular. His answer is that in each of these philosophers, there is a sublation — a relève
— of man within, that which was supposed to replace him: consciousness in
Hegel’s Phenomenology, the transcendental ego in Husserl, and Dasein in
Heidegger. The ‘end’ of man may thus be seen to have two senses: goal
and disappearance, completion and cessation; and this divergence or
ambiguity is perhaps impossible to overcome, the word ‘end’ being
‘undecidable’ between these two significations.
Thus,
Derrida explains why Foucault and his kin, who wish properly and unambiguously
to surpass man, do not explicitly identify their project with any of
these three ‘phenomenologists’, as if to explain why Foucault might so
strenuously have distanced himself from this school (and indeed have kept
silent for the most part with regard to his debt to Heidegger). This sublation of man, this endlessness, explains why Foucault
would not have had recourse to phenomenology as his method for overcoming man;
but is Derrida implying more than this?
Just
as man is unsurpassable in phenomenology, being rather sublated
there, as Foucault himself acknowledged in his assertion of the Kantian
heritage of this movement, Derrida suggests that the very idea of an
epistemological caesura between the Modern age of man and the overman is everywhere
and always impossible. And this posthuman future may well be impossible
because the Foucauldian-Nietzschean discourse is subject to the same logic of
the relève of man — a fact marked graphically
by the ambiguity of the word ‘end’ (fin), an ambivalence which, for
Derrida, is impossible to close, at least within a certain context, and that
context is metaphysics. Derrida tells us that this impossibility of avoiding a sublation of man in whatever is meant to supersede him holds
sway everywhere that ‘metaphysics […] maintains its authority’ (‘Ends of Man’,
121n15).
So,
does metaphysics still hold sway in Foucault?
Language
is metaphysics (and deconstruction)
What
is metaphysics? Derrida says something of metaphysics in the ‘Ends of Man’
which is remarkable for its directness: ‘metaphysics —
that is, our language’ (‘Ends of Man’,
121n15).[12]
According to the structural
linguistics which was so important for the development of Derrida’s thought,
language itself is structured into sets of oppositions, and ultimately each
term within language is defined oppositionally, which
is to say, negatively, with respect to all of the other terms in the same
system, as the absence of each and every other — an absence which is marked in
the body of the signifier by traces — the present marks of absent things.
Such a decentred
structure in which each element is identified solely by its differentiation
with respect to all of the other elements within the same system, and without
any reference to something that would stand outside
of the system and thus not be
defined in the same way, is therefore possessed of an inherent urge to stabilise itself and its meaning. It does so by providing
itself with something like a centre, an anchoring
point that would exceed the system and amount to a ‘transcendental signified’,
a transcendent moment that would finally and completely determine the identity
of each of the elements within the system.
Deconstruction would then devote
itself to showing that this pure presence, this unadulterated positivity said
to exceed the system of difference and negativity, is precisely in a relation
of opposition with this system, and
thus forms — in fact and even by rights — a part
of the same system, which is to say that it does not unambiguously stand outside of the system which it was
claimed to found, and hence cannot simply fulfil the role it was assigned by
the discourse in question. This positing of a moment of pure presence as that
which is most fully in being and upon which all other entities depend is
precisely the gesture of metaphysical
philosophy, and in this sense we might say that ‘language is metaphysics’.
‘We philosophers, men’
But
this is not the only respect in which language is metaphysical. There are more
particular instances. For example, there is one word of our language that
Derrida focuses on from one end of the text to the other, and that is ‘we’ (nous). The ‘we’ of natural language and
the natural attitude, everyday pre-philosophical common sense, the attitude of man in his natural habitat, and the ‘we’
spoken by the philosopher, at least from Hegel to Husserl and Heidegger, the ‘we’
that supposedly has some unity independently of the empirical determination of
the species, homo sapiens, the ‘we’
of natural science and the natural attitude from which this science stems. The
philosopher’s ‘we’ is a sublation that wishes to move
beyond the natural, and to arrive at ‘we-consciousnesses’, ‘we egos’, ‘we
Dasein’.
Those philosophers who wish to
relinquish man seem unable to relinquish the vocalisation
of a ‘we’, whilst failing to provide a way to unify this ‘we’ that does without
all reference to the empirical species it surpasses in the direction of the
transcendental. Derrida attempts to demonstrate that this fact ties the
philosopher’s discourse back to precisely that empirical-natural language which
they had professed a desire to overcome.[13] It seems ultimately that if
the sublation of man is a feature of metaphysics and not simply phenomenology, then we might say that it
is a feature and a consequence of our very language.
It is a question of the relation
between natural everyday language and that same language when it is taken up
into philosophy in a technical manner. For Derrida,
when we speak philosophically, we can only sublate our natural language, rather than leaving it behind altogether:
in other words, in philosophical language, at least in the modern age — after
the loss of the technical lingua franca
of philosophical Latin and its Greek ancestor — our terms of art and the
language that is modelled in its entirety upon their supposed precision can
only be a modification of our natural language,
and we shall not be able to free ourselves completely from the latter, as if in
radical opposition to it. The same goes for any attempt to isolate a
philosophical identity, as when a philosophical community attempts to say ‘we’
in a way that distinguishes it from empirical humanity and any of its races and
nationalities — even its sexes; or when a philosopher attempts to speak on
behalf of a community that might otherwise have naively and mistakenly
attempted to identify itself (hence, from the philosopher, ‘Dasein, the entity
whom we are’, ‘transcendental egos’,
‘consciousnesses’).
For
Derrida, there is always a complicity between the ‘we’ spoken by philosophers,
and the ‘we’ of natural language, such that this ‘we’, however purified and
refined philosophically, still speaks of ‘we men’, nous-les-hommes (cf. ‘Ends of Man’, 124/148).
Language, as the very home of oppositions, tends to recolonise
anything that would oppose itself to it. Hence language itself sublates, and overflows its own borders, expanding its
dominion indefinitely. This is nothing but the ABC of deconstruction itself,
and yet here Derrida makes certain important points about this linguistic sublation in the context of Heidegger. In this case,
Derrida speaks not so much of the relation between ordinary natural language
and philosophical language, as of the relation between the language of metaphysics (philosophy) and the
language of thought, reminiscent at
the very least of the Heideggerian Denken that would come after metaphysics.
Building
on and yet modifying an insight of Heidegger’s, Derrida affirms that it is in
fact necessary for the language of thought to ‘metaphorise’ the metaphysical language
that it is attempting to surpass or ‘deconstruct’ (‘Ends of Man’, 131).
In other words, whenever one wishes
to deconstruct a language or a discourse, one has to borrow certain tropes,
certain signifiers from that language, and then attempt to deploy them in such a way that they signify something
different — this would be the deconstructive gesture, provided that it was
carried out in full and avowed awareness that this is what one was doing. In
Heidegger’s case, this transition is a most subtle attempt at a metaphorical
transportation from the ontic to the ontological, beings to Being, from a
forgetfulness of Being that equates it with a fully present entity, such as god
or the Platonic sun, to the recollection of a potentiality not at all modelled
upon the present or the actual — and indeed, as a preliminary to this, a transition
from man to Dasein, from one kind of proximity to self, and one kind of
proximity between man and Being, to another: Heidegger’s desired proximity
between the essence of man and the
essence of Being in the form of the
question, or eventually of the grant or pledge (Zusage).
The question is, does our
Heideggerian Foucault himself wish to
avoid this metaphorical complicity — and can he? Is he able to relinquish man
as completely as he seems to desire? Some of Derrida’s other writings on
Foucault, and in particular, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ (in Writing and Difference), lead one to
think that he cannot, that Foucault will precisely fail fully to overcome
metaphysics or its language, and in his conception of history in particular…[14]
Deconstruction’s twin
strategies
In
trying to isolate the position of French philosophy when it comes to man, and
also, implicitly the position of metaphysics as a whole, Derrida
identifies two strategies that have been adopted with the intention of moving
beyond man: one that remains on the same ground as metaphysics and attempts
gradually to work its way out of it, in the way of hermeneutics with its
gradual unfolding or stripping away of layers of pre-given meaning; and the
other that leaps immediately to a different ground, to the outside. The first
is characteristic of French Heideggerianism,
not to say Heidegger himself, whilst in the second one can clearly recognise Foucault, at least on Derrida’s reading which, on
the topic of Nietzsche if not throughout, does not seem fully to acknowledge
that there may be a Heideggerianism of Foucault
himself, and hence that these two options might be more intertwined there
than Derrida imagines.
Derrida immediately goes on to align
these two forms of strategy — the Heideggerian and the Foucauldian — with two figures from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: the higher
man and the overman (‘Ends of Man’,
135). To simplify a little, the higher man would be the consummation of
man, man’s eternity and sublation, while the overman
would be that which is simply beyond man, the jubilant forgetting of both the
human and Being, absolute and welcomed oblivion of all metaphysics, theology
and ontology both.[15]
Here, Derrida is quite adamant as to
the risks of the second position, which would wish to leave an epoch or a
system behind altogether, as if it were possibly simply to ‘have done’ with
man, to oppose and end him, to cut the ties that allow one sense of ‘end’ to
refer to the other. Language, metaphysics, sublates
man behind our back, the apparently innocent word, ‘we’ binding thought to
metaphysics, and metaphysics to pre-philosophy.
If Foucault wished in the end to
move beyond the intrication of the empirical and the
transcendental, beyond Kant and Kantian phenomenology, right up to Heidegger
even, in his worse moments, as if this way of thinking were irremediably
anthropological in asserting the intrication without
being able to think it or pursue its archaeology, Derrida tethers us back to
the necessity of remaining human, at least in a certain way and up to a certain
point.
From Derrida to another
version of the empirical-transcendental doublet
But
even if this is true, then it does not necessarily mean that we have simply to
remain at the level of Derrida’s deconstruction, for there is a particular
discipline which considers this empirical-transcendental doublet, man, that
Derrida himself seems never to have more than mentioned in his published work,
and it is just what ‘The Ends of Man’ begins by naming and effectively passing
over, and that is Philosophical Anthropology.[16]
We saw that Foucault made a similar elision.
To approach the transition to this
new discipline, let us address the notion of propriety, authenticity, or
closeness to self. Derrida speaks of the propriety, the property and self-proximity
of man, as what continues to bind, for instance, Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’ (the
philosophical ‘we’) to ‘man’ (the ‘we’ of natural language and empirical
science). It is as if, for Derrida, the end of man would have to be the end of
man’s propriety, the end of the mutual appropriation that exists for Heidegger
between man and Being as a result of man’s proximity to the enigma of his own being in the form of the question.
To gain some insight into what this might
mean and hence what this alternative could amount to, let us turn very briefly
in closing to the German philosophical anthropologist, Arnold Gehlen.
Philosophical Anthropology: Gehlen
Philosophical
anthropology should by rights be promising for Derrida, because it actually
carries out something that he calls for in his writings on animals, in
particular. These writings are always concerned to break down either of the two
traditional relations that have been posited as existing between man and the animal:
metaphysical opposition and natural scientific continuity, qualitative and
quantitative difference (once again, structurally the same gestures as those
which Derrida habitually identifies, and which we have just encountered in the
guises of the overman and the higher man with respect to the human).
In the name of this deconstruction,
the refusal to accept either option and hence to remain (at least for a while)
at the level of an aporia, Derrida strongly encourages philosophy of the
transcendental type to desist in its persistent ignoring of the data uncovered
by the natural and empirical sciences, especially zoology and primatology,
which at least since Darwin have tended to crush the idea of an opposition
separating man and animal along with the supposed uniqueness of man that was
consequent upon it.
In fact, philosophical anthropology
(Max Scheler is exemplary here) both poses its own problem in just the same
form as deconstruction (the aporia of continuity and discontinuity), and yet
goes further, for it actually deploys
the data that Derrida urges philosophy to welcome, and it does so in a way that
Derrida himself hardly ever did.[17]
The problem: continuity vs.
discontinuity
For
philosophical anthropology, as for Derrida, two distinct conceptions of the
relation between the human and the animal must be avoided: 1) the naturalistic
position which assumes that man and animal share a single continuum and are not
qualitatively different; and 2) the traditional metaphysical opposition, which
asserts that man is unique among all the animals, and (is generally understood
to be) superior to all of them, thanks to his possession of reason or language
and a number of other things, from self-consciousness to an awareness of death.
The strategy of Philosophical Anthropology: man as
uniquely lacking
For Philosophical
Anthropology, man is still unique and set apart from all of the other animals,
but in a non-metaphysical way. Their approach is non-metaphysical in that it
does not presuppose a single defining
feature of man, like a rational intellect, transcendentally, positing it as an
eternal feature of all men. In general, their strategy is
to focus on a certain inherent negativity within man, an in-determinacy or non-specialisation, an ‘ex-aptation’, rather than a positivity or surplus, that would
pick out the human being uniquely and in turn explain the existence of all those positive super-natural traits
which metaphysics assigned to man, for the most part without attending to their
natural and negative foundation. The task then is to not presuppose an opposition between man and animal,
as metaphysics does, but, on the basis of a certain use of empirical data
regarding the human, to then restore an
essential break between man and the other animals at another level and in
another way.
Whatever it is that singles out the human, Philosophical
Anthropology attempts to explain the
emergence of any such distinguishing marks (spirit, intellect), with the help
of the data from the empirical sciences: thus Philosophical Anthropology begins from the plane of nature upon
which the human is continuous with the animal.
At the same time, while metaphysics asserted that man is from the
beginning endowed with a single feature which makes him greater than all of the other animals, for Philosophical
Anthropology, what makes man unique is that he begins with less than the animals. He lacks
something in relation to them, and this is the indeterminacy or negativity that
we have just invoked.
The undetermined animal
From the myth of Prometheus
and Epimetheus, through the Italian Renaissance to Herder and Nietzsche, there
is a rich strand of philosophy and mythology which had already thought of man’s
uniqueness in this way. It forms something like the prehistory of the
Philosophical Anthropology which combines empirical data with transcendental
thought in an absolutely self-conscious way in the 20th century.
Nietzsche, despite everything we have seen and heard of
his surpassing of man, is one of the most commonly avowed inspirations for
Philosophical Anthropology. For Nietzsche, man is the animal ‘as yet
undetermined’, the animal who promises
to be something, but is not yet essentially anything (cf. Genealogy of Morals, 39). Man’s uniqueness is that he has no one
defining feature. And this could be read in two distinct ways, according to the
Heideggerian and Foucauldian positions that Derrida outlines: either man is
nothing essentially but is precisely thereby always and everywhere capable of
dwelling in and upon the infinitely rich potentiality that is Being, and that is his privilege among the animals, to be
affirmed and protected; or (the Foucauldian version) man is essentially nothing
and thus remains subject to a sequence of historically variable
interpretations, grounded solely on a void. Precisely because man is essentially indeterminate, a mere
absence subject to an infinity of different cultural variations, he can
eventually be swallowed up altogether by those symbolic orders which alone gave
him his meaning and identity.
It seems clear that in order to remain anthropology, the discipline in
question must position itself somewhat closer to the former, a fact which
perhaps helps to explain the very unpopularity of Philosophical Anthropology
after the posthuman turn of the 1960’s. Or perhaps more precisely,
Philosophical Anthropology must dwell on the natural indeterminacy of man which underlies and explains the
possibility of this multiplicity of cultural interpretations and
identifications, and it is the naturalistic character of this gesture that
means it in fact ceases to be
Heideggerian at a certain point, even if Heidegger, perhaps just once (in the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics)
made some important steps in that very uncharacteristic direction.
In any case, the position of Philosophical Anthropology
asserts that what differentiates man from the rest of the animals is not (at
least not in the first place) the
fact that he alone is rational, spiritual, technical, or that he has an
unconscious; but that he has found it necessary to interpret himself in an
endless series of ways in a constantly renewed attempt to differentiate himself
from the animal, upon finding himself to be without any positive defining
traits. He has had to use fire to forge the bricks of the house of language and
symbolic culture that he will live in, and indeed which it will prove necessary
for him to occupy if he is to survive.
Maladaptation
Gehlen agrees that the human has no single trait uniquely
its own; but if we take all of its
traits together then their totality does
characterise it uniquely. What Philosophical
Anthropology must do is to show why
these traits form a totality, how it
is that they can all belong to one single species, and this will involve
locating the primal biological fact
that founds this constellation, a single defect that gives rise to
multiplicity, something like the crack in the One giving rise to the multiple
identities that cover it over.[18]
This would suggest that, while the multiplicity of
cultural traits alone is insufficient to describe the human, neither is biology
enough, since man is not a purely biological figure. And yet this jointure
between the biological and the symbolic, zōon and logos, nature and
culture, can be explained naturalistically. This explanation
involves the fact that the human being is naturally
unfitted to survive — its organs and
instincts are not specifically adapted to any one stable environment that would
sustain it without further ado.
In the earlier parts of the 20th century, animals other
than man were understood to have a fixed, finite environment, to which their
instincts and sensorimotor organs were adapted. One stimulus from that
environment evoked just one particular instinctual response from the animal,
automatically — along the lines of a machine. To this extent, Descartes was
right. An animal’s instincts were bi-univocally connected to and triggered by
unambiguous signals received from their environment. Above all we associate
this position with Jakob von Uexküll, but it may be
found in so many empirically and philosophically informed conceptions of
animality from the first four decades of the century, right up to Jacques Lacan
from the 1940’s onwards, and Paolo Virno from the
1980’s, to take just two (privileged) examples.
The human, on the other hand — and this view cannot be
said so easily to have been surpassed by more recent insights — lacks at birth
the specialised organs and instincts which would
allow it to have such a finite encircling world. Man is not naturally adapted to a single environment, and this lack of specialisation means that the signals which we receive from
the outside are not limited to those which are relevant for our species’ survival;
rather, the human receives every single signal, from, as Gehlen
says, the farthest mountains to the most distant stars, so many of which have
no immediate relevance at all to the survival of the species (Man, 73). Man does not have an
environment; he has a world, and one that is potentially limitless: from the
openness of indeterminacy, the negativity of a lack, there issues an infinity
(which will in turn require us to seek ‘relief’ [Entlastung] from its overwhelming
burden[19]).
The ultimate biological cause of this disadaptation may
be said to be man’s prematurity of birth (as Louis Bolk,
Adolf Portmann, and Lacan had it (cf. Man, 36) — Gehlen
will also speak, in a way closer to Freud’s Hilflosigkeit, of man as an ‘unspecialised,
organically helpless being’ [Man, 72],
but also of ‘immaturity’ [Man, 33]),
today referred to under the heading of ‘neoteny’, the retention of childhood
and even foetal traits into what should be our
autonomous and independent adulthood: the remnant irrationality of the age of
reason.
The human infant is born without pelt (and remains so
forever), without organs to defend itself, no seriously developed motor skills,
quite unable to fend for itself, fundamentally lacking an inborn knowledge of
how to respond to its ‘environment’ — and indeed, it is without environment for
precisely that reason. Thus, the human child’s period of tutelage remains
unrivalled by any comparable animal.[20]
This is what Gehlen means when
he describes man as a Mängelwesen,
a deficient entity, a creature of lack.
Reversal of the negative into the positive
Perhaps the most important
point, philosophically speaking, concerns the reversal of this lack into a
positivity, a conversion which philosophy has the task of identifying and thinking.[21] After all,
this lack is not, on its own, what
makes man unique, and indeed, it is quite likely that this indeterminacy could
not be identified as negative were it
not for the (comparatively) positive
compensation that arises in response
to it.
Indeed, perhaps one could put it in the following way:
even if we were to understand the indeterminacy of the human animal as a
negativity, this lack would still be a merely quantitative and not a qualitative deficiency with respect to the
other animals: the human being’s childhood is simply longer, its instincts less well-adapted. But this (quantitative) lack is the foundation of the human being’s (qualitative) uniqueness. And this
foundation, which takes the form of a reversal of the (retrospectively
perceived) lack into a surplus, is the business of philosophy to describe.
It is important to stress that this foundation is
biological, it is natural. It is biological because ultimately what is being
asked here is a question to do with life: how can a dis-adapted animal like man
simply survive, before anything else
that it may achieve — how can it live? Naturally, after a certain point, it
cannot and could not have — and yet it did. Something else is needed to
supplement deficient naturality, and that supplement has often been spoken of
in terms of ‘culture’, the symbolic-artificial crutch of a hobbled nature. As Gehlen has it, ‘[t]he clearly defined, biologically precise
concept of the environment is thus not applicable to man, for what
“environment” is to animals, “the second nature”, or culture, is to man (Man, 71), and ‘this cultural sphere is
his “environment” and belongs, indeed, to the natural requirements for life of this unspecialised,
organically helpless being. “Culture” is hence an anthrobiological
concept and man is a cultural being’ (Man,
72).
Instinctual
disadaptation means that the human being has an infinite world of objects that
it has somehow to make sense of, and among which it must make its home. To put
it very simply, if there is no environment to which the human is innately
adapted, it must construct its own environment. To do this it needs to employ
skills (technai),
including linguistic and symbolic faculties (to interpret or to select what
signals will be salient for it, to make sense of the profuse data — and thus to
experience ‘relief’ or ‘disburdening’), it will have to develop techniques, and
ultimately it may, although it need not, invent technology.
In the end, to make sense of this excess of stimulation
striking it from outside, the human will form a symbolic,
linguistically-mediated world of institutions, establishments of Culture which
will in some way supplement, temporarily and in a historically variant way,
with disparate degrees of success at least partly dependent upon the political
arrangements of its society, the absence of a natural environment. Symbols and
institutions — logos, technē,
and polis — are the remedy for man’s
lacking a one-to-one relationship between stimulus and response, his
disadaptation to the world.
Thus, the compensations for the biological lack of which Gehlen speaks, amount to what Hegel calls ‘objective
spirit’ and even ‘absolute spirit’, the objective forms assumed by human
subjectivity. These encompass the historical, political, legal, and moral world
of traditions, mores, and conventions, right up to the realms of art, religion,
and philosophy — in short, the world of non-natural symbolic laws and the fabrications of
technology, the order of culture.[22]
The reversal as defining the uniqueness of man
The human being is born
naturally unfitted to survive, premature, and yet it survives, by means of its
technique, its intellect, and its language. The human being lacks the natural
conditions for its survival, and yet it survives and even flourishes, with the
help of the technical supports which it invents. Thus, the human deficiency (Mängel) is
transformed into the very means of its flourishing, its inferiority into its
superiority. It is worth noting that this is not the same as a restoration of
harmony akin to that which we imagine the animals to enjoy, for nothing like a
‘natural balance’ or equilibrium is achieved by these technical-artificial
means; rather, the compensation risks becoming so excessive, so imbalanced,
that (the very idea of) nature itself eventually comes to be threatened by an anthropocenic culture with its destructive and
unsustainable technologies.
In any case, all of the human
being’s specific traits are then understood as positive replacements for
negatives. A minus is transformed into a plus, and this conversion defines the unique essence of man as a bio-linguistic or
zoo-logical entity:[23] ‘all the deficiencies in the human constitution,
which under natural conditions would constitute grave handicaps to survival,
become for man, through his own initiative and action, the very means of his
survival; this is the foundation for man’s character as an acting being and for
his unique place in the world’ (Man,
28).
Man is instinctually lacking, and all
of the features that metaphysics has taken to be distinctive of man, are
merely symbolic compensations for
this initial biological lack. In short, what unifies or totalises
all of the many apparently distinguishing traits of man is the fact that they
are all compensations for the same
natural defect.[24] This should clarify what the task of Philosophical
Anthropology actually is, for Gehlen: to describe how
man’s specific supernatural traits,
his symbolic intelligence and language (the logos
of philosophical account), are necessitated by his biological nature, how spirit and intelligence emerge from life, as
Scheler put it, in his crystalline terms.
This is our task as well: to demonstrate the physical
genesis of the meta-physical, the metaphysical tendency but also simply the
super-natural understood as symbolico-politico-technical.
Conclusion
To reassert the possibility
of anthropology in posthuman times, in the wake of May ’68, we have to come to
terms with the Foucauldian problematic of the death of man, and negotiate a
certain route out of it, towards a reinvention of ‘man’. We have therefore
sought indefinitely to postpone the movement beyond man towards a certain
posthumanism. The way we chose to follow in order to pursue this was one of the
philosophically most powerful: Derrida’s attempt to reopen the ambiguity of the
‘ends of man’. And yet we explicated
this movement in such a way that a potential limitation of Derrida’s own work was revealed, and that is a
limitation when it comes to the implication within philosophical theory of
empirical data from the natural sciences. This is where we began to wonder if
philosophical anthropology might come into play, and to take the form of the
‘linguistic anthropology’ the possibility of which was denied by Foucault.
More specifically, the turn to philosophical anthropology
lets us affirm a certain uniqueness of the human but in a way that avoids the
dilemma between continuity and metaphysical opposition that Derrida insisted upon,
whilst also supplementing Foucault’s early blindness to the possibility of
anthropology itself: a natural, empirically specified lack is transformed into
an excess in the guise of the unnatural spiritual features of man which come to
compensate for it. And this gesture of compensation is what makes man unique, oppositionally separated from the non-human animals in the
end, but not at the beginning.
We might describe this process as the passage from a
quantitative difference to a
qualitative opposition, and thus the
natural genesis, so far as such a thing is amenable to description, of the
symbolic order of signifiers, understood as the very place of oppositions — the biological emergence of the symbol or rather
the word. Thus ultimately, the human can be said to be neither less nor more
than the animal; it is rather uniquely different in transforming a minus into a
plus, a negative into a positive, both of which have no sense outside of their relation with the other. In man, a deficient life blossoms into
an overflowing and superabundant spirit.
Philosophical Anthropology thus incorporates both
empirical science and philosophical insight, providing a reflective version of
the transcendental-empirical fold which Foucault condemned it to remain unable
properly to think. The initial lack is specified empirically and on the basis of a continuum posited between man and the other animals, while the
compensations, in their totality, can only be identified by philosophy — and, most importantly, the
human’s cultural-symbolic order is indeed radically lacking in all other
animals. Thus what Philosophical Anthropology gives us
is an example of an empirically informed, materialist understanding of the
biological basis for positing an opposition between man and animal, an
opposition that will not be metaphysical. And equally importantly, it gives us
a genetic account of the very emergence of oppositions as such, and hence of
the signifier, which man alone possesses, or which possesses him: something
like an empirical genesis of the transcendental in the guise of man
understood as the animal possessed of language (animal rationale, zōon logon echon), the philosophical animal or the human being on
philosophy’s account. In the guise of philosophical anthropology, a linguistic anthropology would indeed be possible.
Foucault refused to believe in such a thing, and denied
us the possibility of thinking man and language together. But Derrida’s work
allowed us to demonstrate that not only may such a thing be possible, it might
also be necessary, and Philosophical Anthropology presents us with an example
of one way in which this linguistic anthropology might be carried out. If one
is concerned at the perhaps overwhelmingly conservative bent of the German
Philosophical Anthropologists (Gehlen, in particular,
in his theory of those institutions which must come to stabilise
the unstable human animal), and if one thinks that no-one today could possibly
think of relying on such supposedly outdated science, particularly when it
comes to the animal, it is the merit of Paolo Virno
to have shown how these very ideas can be turned in quite the opposite
political direction. He makes the case, today, and precisely with the intention
of understanding our contemporary moment, for deploying these ideas of animal
and human nature, and this precisely involves a subtle rethinking of the empirical in relation to the
transcendental: in other words, the empirical facts are not treated naively, as
perhaps they were by some of the earlier ethologists and zoologists, if not by
the Philosophical Anthropologists themselves. And the work of Jacques Lacan,
whom Foucault will have spoken so little about — although perhaps by
indirection he says quite a lot, even giving us a potential genealogy of his
thought, at the intersection of the three sciences which were so important to
him and to the current age: ethnology, linguistics and psychoanalysis, in which
language takes its revenge upon man — may be seen at the same time to develop
just this kind of linguistic anthropology, an account of the emergence of
oppositions, the genesis of structure, that Foucault ruled out.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 16, Winter
2018/2019, ISSN 1552-5112
Bibliography
Where two page references are
given, the first refers to the English translation, the second to the original.
Dates in square brackets indicate the original date of publication or delivery.
Agamben,
Giorgio (2011 [2007]), The Kingdom
and the Glory (Homo sacer, II, 4 [originally II,
2]). Trans.
Lorenzo Chiesa (with Matteo Mandarini). Stanford: Stanford UP. Il Regno e la
gloria: per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo. Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2007.
—
(2016 [2014]), The Use of Bodies.
(Homo sacer, IV, 2). Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford UP. L’uso dei corpi. Vicenza: Neri Pozza,
2014.
— (2018 [2016]), What
is Philosophy? Trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford: Stanford UP [Marked 2018 but actually published September 2017]. Che cos’è la filosofia?
Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016.
Bennington,
Geoffrey (1994), Legislations: The
Politics of Deconstruction. London: Verso.
Derrida,
Jacques (1997 [1967]) Of
Grammatology. Trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. De la grammatologie. Paris:
Minuit, 1967.
—– (2001 [1967c]), ‘Violence
and Metaphysics’ in Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge. L’Écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967.
— (1982 [1972]), ‘The Ends of Man’ in Margins:
Of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Marges — De la Philosophie. Paris:
Minuit, 1972.
— (1979 [1978]), Spurs:
Nietzsche’s Styles / Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche.
Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
— (1992), ‘Onto-Theology of National-Humanism
(Prolegomena to a Hypothesis)’. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington in Oxford Literary
Review 14 (1992).
— (with Elisabeth Roudinesco) (2004 [2001]), For What Tomorrow… A Dialogue.
Trans. Jeff Fort. Stanford: Stanford UP. De Quoi
Demain… Paris: Fayard & Galilée, 2001.
— (2018), Geschlecht III: Sexe, race, nation, humanité.
Eds. Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth, and Rodrigo Therezo.
Paris: Seuil.
Foucault, Michel (2008 [1961]), Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. Ed. Roberto Nigro. Trans.
Roberto Nigro & Kate Briggs. Los Angeles, CA.: Semiotext(e).
Introduction à l’‘Anthropologie’ de Kant. Paris: Vrin, 2008 [Foucault’s secondary doctoral thesis,
University of Paris-Sorbonne, 1961].
— (1989 [1966]), The
Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. A. Sheridan. London:
Routledge. Les Mots et les choses. Paris:
Gallimard, 1966.
Gasparyan, Diana (2018), From Fundamental Ontology to Fundamental Anthropology: The Subject as
Negativity (Hegel, Kojève, Heidegger, and Sartre).
PhD Thesis, Philosophy, Staffordshire University, December 2018.
Gehlen,
Arnold (1988 [1940]), Man: His Nature and Place in the World. Trans.
Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer. New York: Columbia UP. Mensch, seine Natur und seine Stellung in der
Welt. Frankfurt: Anthenaion, 1940/1950/fourth
edition, 1974.
Janicaud, Dominique
(2015 [2001]), Heidegger in France.
Trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew.
Bloomington: Indiana UP. Heidegger en France. Paris: Albin Michel.
Lacan, Jacques (2006 [1966]), Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink in collaboration
with Héloïse Fink & Russell Grigg. New York:
Norton. Écrits.
Paris: Seuil, 1966.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974 [1882/1887]), The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes
and an Appendix of Songs. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.
— (1996 [1887]),
On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic.
Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: OUP.
Plessner,
Helmuth (1970 [1941]), Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behaviour. Trans. James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970 Lachen
und Weinen: Eine Untersuchung
nach den Grenzen menschlichen Verhaltens. Bern: Franke, 1941, third edition,
1961.
Virno,
Paolo (2018 [2013]), An Essay on
Negation: For a Linguistic Anthropology. Trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. London; Calcutta: Seagull. Saggio sulla negazione: Per una antropologia
linguistica. Turin: Boringhieri.
Notes