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Abstract
This article pursues two distinct yet interrelated levels of analysis. Theoretically, the article seeks to destabilize Western narratives of a transition from humanism to anti- and post-humanism in radical scholarship by foregrounding two traditions from Eastern Europe and the Caribbean where the language of the human persisted long after its declared obsolescence in the West. The argument made here is that these divergent narratives (or “bifurcations”) of the human were neither wholly contingent nor just a matter of distinct intellectual traditions, but were deeply interwoven with both the history of the Cold War and the legacies of colonialism. On a praxical-political level, the article also engages in a close reading of arguably the major tradition of Marxist humanism in Eastern Europe, that of the Praxis circle in former Yugoslavia. While examining the specific political and theoretical reasons for the persistence of humanism in the writings of Praxis, the article argues that, in the end, their radical humanism never completely freed itself from its deep colonial dispositions, leading also to a series of controversial political choices in the 1990s. Drawing on Caribbean humanism as a counter-point to the Marxist humanism of Praxis, the article argues that radical intellectuals in Eastern Europe today need to learn from both the insights and severe limitations of their Praxis predecessors.
Notes
1 For recent and insightful critiques of the Eurocentrism of “Western philosophy,” on either side of the North Atlantic, see in particular CitationNelson Maldonado-Torres (2006), Enrique Dussel (1985, Citation2014), CitationMignolo (2003), and Édouard CitationGlissant (1997). As Maldonado-Torres convincingly argues, the time has come to leave behind trite family feuds between continental and analytic philosophy and move in the direction of developing a truly post-continental philosophical project (2006).
2 It is not being argued that every Caribbean radical intellectual is a closet humanist, nor that an anti-humanist stance may not be or has never been used for liberatory purposes outside the West. A few notable examples include Martinican cultural critic Édouard Glissant, whose “poetics of relation” draws explicitly on Deleuze and Guattari (CitationGlissant 1997); British-Caribbean theorist Paul Gilroy, who has explored the “Black Atlantic” as a “rhizomorphic, fractal structure” rooted in “creolisation, metisasage, mestizahe, and hybridity” (CitationGilroy 1993, 4, 2); and Jamaican born cultural scholar Stuart Hall, whose acknowledged debt to Althusser, French post-structuralism, and the “linguistic turn” has always been accompanied by an attentiveness to race and the legacies of colonialism (CitationHall 1992, 185). Globally, one can think of the importance of French theory in particular to postcolonial and subaltern critical thought from South Asia. The genealogy of (Western) anti-humanism that is explored here is only one among others (also arguably the dominant one). Hence, it is more appropriate to speak of multiple anti-humanisms, and not only of multiple humanisms. I have chosen to contrast the Western anti-humanist tradition with the humanisms of Eastern Europe and the Caribbean, but I am grateful to S. Charusheela for highlighting the above distinctions to me and providing a number of important references.
3 This rupture manifests itself in three major aspects for Althusser: with the emergence of new concepts (social formation, productive forces, relations of production, superstructure, ideology, etc.); with a radical critique of the theoretical pretensions of every philosophical humanism; and with the definition of humanism as an ideology. As Althusser argues, “This rupture with every philosophical anthropology or humanism is no secondary detail: it is Marx's scientific discovery” (Althersser 1999, 277).
4 The Eastern European Marxists were not the only radical theorists in the region to take up the language of humanism. There was also the tradition of human rights (“dissident”) activists, who used it as an undisguised attack on the “totalitarian” regimes in which they found themselves. This tradition was particularly strong in former Czechoslovakia where it was spearheaded intellectually by people like Jan Patočka, one of Europe's most original phenomenologists (who died after prolonged police interrogation in 1977), and by Václav Havel, Czechoslovakia's first post-socialist president, as part of the Charter 77 human rights movement. The influence and significance of their work cannot be overstated: both Foucault and Derrida for instance have cited Patočka as a cardinal influence on their thinking (CitationLom 2002, xix; CitationDerrida 1996; CitationSzakolczai 1994). However, many of the erstwhile dissidents of Eastern Europe did not take long to give up their high ethical standards in the early years of the post-socialist transition. Adam Michnic in Poland, for instance, concluded that democracy is in fact “grey,” i.e., a field of factious conflict and amoral compromise, and Havel himself spoke unabashedly in favor of the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia in the late 1990s (CitationMichnik 1997; CitationHavel 1999). For an insightful critique of Havel's effort to ground politics in an existential pre-political ethical stance see Žižek's “Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism,” an extensive review of a political biography of the Czech dissident and politician (CitationŽižek 1999).
5 Both spent a number of years in France and drew in their work on the insights of existentialism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, surrealism, and Marxism, among others.
6 Martinican cultural theorist Édouard Glissant's “poetics of relation” draws explicitly on Deleuze and Guattari (CitationGlissant 1997); British-Caribbean theorist Paul Gilroy has explored the “Black Atlantic” as a “rhizomorphic, fractal structure” rooted in “creolisation, metisasage, mestizahe, and hybridity” (CitationGilroy 1993, 4, 2); and Jamaica-born cultural scholar Stuart Hall has frequently acknowledged his debt to Althusser, French post-structuralism and the “linguistic turn,” on a part with his attentiveness to race and the legacies of colonialism (CitationHall 1992, 185). The genealogy of (Western) anti-humanism which I explore here is thus only one among others (if also arguably the dominant one). Hence, it is more appropriate to speak of multiple anti-humanisms, and not only of multiple humanisms. I have chosen here to contrast the Western anti-humanist tradition with the humanisms of Eastern Europe and the Caribbean, but I am grateful to S. Charusheela for highlighting the above distinctions to me and providing a number of important references.
7 For the former see CitationBraidotti 2013; CitationWolfe 2009; Nayar 2013; and Lazzarato 2013; and for the latter see CitationWynter 2003, 2007; CitationMaldonado-Torres 2008b; and CitationGordon 2008.
8 For a discussion on designating a moment of self-organization of matter where the (randomly) chosen alternative retroactively transforms even “the past” of the newly organized system see CitationPrigogine and Stengers 1984.
9 Rue d'Ulm is the location of École Normale Supérieure where Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Badiou, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and others studied and where Althusser spent his academic life as a professor of philosophy. Café du Dôme was Sartre's favorite “workplace,” along with being a gathering place for many post-World-War-Two artists and intellectuals.
10 Sartre for example is very important for Lewis Gordon's work (Gordon 1995), while Nelson Maldonado-Torres draws heavily on Levinas (CitationMaldonado-Torres 2008a). Adorno and Foucault have been important for Sylvia Wynter, as she readily admits (Wynter 2000).
11 This is the case from a rediscovered alternative (“minoritarian”) Modernity (CitationNegri 2006) to a resurrected communist hypothesis (Badiou 2010, CitationŽižek 2010 and Citation2013), commoning (CitationDyer-Whitheford 2005, CitationHardt 2010, CitationDe Angelis), and a “new anarchism” (CitationGraeber and Grubačić 2004, CitationVodovnik 2012).
12 Žižek's essay is the introductory text to the first issue of Critique and Crisis, a radical theory journal based in Southeastern Europe. It is at least in part a response to the series of exchanges between CitationZabala (2012), CitationDabashi (2013), and CitationMignolo (2013) on the forum platform of Aljazeera, around the Eurocentric roots of (Western) philosophy. Mignolo's argument is of a decolonial inspiration—it invites us to think outside a Eurocentric frame of reference. Žižek's counter-claim is that the decolonial turn championed by Mignolo needs to be subsumed within an anti-capitalist project, just as the legacy of colonialism is itself a subset of the growth of global capitalism. Apart from the very problematic (and selective) references to Fanon, Malcolm X, and Douglass in his essay, Žižek certainly refuses to engage a text such as Césaire's letter of resignation to the FCP listed above.
13 See here James's State Capitalism and World Revolution (2013, original edition 1950), which was co-written with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs. See especially chapter IV, “Yugoslavia” (65–88).
14 The international edition would close down in 1973 to become Praxis International between 1981 and 1993 before becoming Constellations today.
15 See Vranicki 1975 and also CitationMarković and Cohen 1975, 32 and Petrović 1979/1973, 160.
16 This is the substance of the argument of Edvard Kardelji, chief ideologue of Yugoslav self-management socialism at the time.
17 The Belgrade 8 included the following members of Praxis: Zagorka Golubović, Trivo Indjić, Mihailo Marković, Dragoljub Mićunović, Nebojša Popov, Svetozar Stojanović, Ljubomir Tadić, and Miladin Životić. Their suspension from their academic positions took place through the direct intervention of the Parliament of Serbia.
18 I owe the idea of Marković as a Heideggerian on the left to Martin Matuštík during the Q&A session of the panel on “Decolonizing Comparative Methodologies” at the Continental and Comparative Philosophy Circle Annual Conference in Santa Barbara, CA, in March 2014. My friend Dušan Bjelić, a former member of the Belgrade Circle, highlighted to me Marković's substitution of nationalism for socialism (private conversation). In fact, Marković himself did not seem to see any contradiction between the two: in a rare interview from 2005, a few years before his death, he argued that there is no conflict between socialism/universalism and patriotism, as both (need to) join hands against the onslaught of capitalist globalism (CitationEriksen and Stjenfelt 2005).
19 Similar to my argument, Nikolchina notes the divide between the anti-humanism of European (French) theory and the persistence of the discourse of the human in Eastern Europe. Yet the similarities end there. She ultimately seeks to reconcile the two, via the work of Balibar and Butler. While Nikolchina is very sympathetic to someone like Mamardashvili, she shows no attentiveness to his explicitly colonial definition of Europe(anness), founded upon a dichotomy between a unique “European identity” and a surrounding sea of barbarism.
20 Nor did it only go one way. Althusser himself would claim that, if he wrote any books at all, it was because of the “humanist ravings” of the post-Stalinist liberalization of Eastern Europe (quoted in CitationNikolchina 2014, 80).
21 A final note on my use of the term “bifurcation” is due. Strictly speaking, a bifurcation emerges when a (social, natural, epistemic, etc.) system finds itself in a state “far from equilibrium,” where different simultaneous possibilities for its future development emerge. The actualization of one of these possibilities is then an act of “random” choice, in the sense that individual elements of the system attain a high degree of autonomy and a slight change in any one of them may impact the system globally (CitationPrigogine and Stengers 1984, 142–3). In this sense, one can see how the emergence of theoretical anti-humanism in the West constitutes a bifurcation from the centuries-long humanist tradition in the region, just as people like Fanon and Césaire effectuate another bifurcation from that tradition, this time in an anti-colonial direction. Last but not least, the Eastern European Marxist humanists in turn “choose” not to follow the path of Althusser and Foucault, with whom they are closely familiar.
22 It is worth noting at least two revealing convergences between Althusser's anti-humanism and the Marxist humanism of Praxis. To begin with, both were fighting the same enemy, although with very different tools: the deformation of socialism under Stalinist-style bureaucratization. Perhaps more importantly and parallel to Praxis, Althusser's anti-humanist alternative never departed from its own colonial dispositions. One can trace this line of reasoning from his early claims in 1969 that philosophy proper exists only in the West (CitationAlthusser 2013, 17) to his “Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher” nearly twenty years later (1986), depicting that figure as the hero of an American-style Western who accumulates livestock through hard work, competes (peacefully) with the other land owners, and ends up marrying “the prettiest girl in town” (Althusser 2006, 290–1).
23 For further elaboration of the difference between humanitas and anthropos see the wonderful essay by Japanese philosopher Nishitani Osamu, “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of ‘Human Being’” (CitationNishitani 2006).
24 See for example CitationTlostanova 2009; CitationTodorova 1994; CitationBakić-Hayden 1995; CitationWolff 1994.
25 See CitationTodorova 1994, 455; CitationBakić-Hayden 1995, 918; Žižek 2001, 3.
26 Ultimately, this underlying assumption that the path to a better future can only be paved with Western stones led so many Eastern European Marxists to shift to the right (centrist liberalism) once the utopian energies of their Marxism had become exhausted. Such was certainly the fate of Leszek Kolakowski in Poland, and of the vast majority of the former Lukacs students of the Budapest school (CitationAndor 2000).
27 In my home country of Bulgaria, whenever a person achieves a higher economic and/or social standing, it is customary to say that he or she now lives “like a white person.” The comment is all the more curious, given that no Bulgarian (unless she or he is a Roma or of the Muslim minority) would self-identify as black or brown.
28 See CitationȚichindeleanu 2010.