i've been fencing with a stomach bug, so a bit late in replying.
Rob Schaap wrote:
> .I would [when you've a few minutes] like to see an advocacy
> of the critical space the antihumanist is able coherently to make for
> herself
well, isn't this earc for a critical space what confounds us all, the impetus for various versions of the party, our various approaches to humanism, universalist claims, the role of ideas and their relation to materiality, et cetera? not surprising really that politics, critical politics that is, would tend to revolve around this question.
so, here goes a brief take on this re a critique of humanism:
1. for liberal, progressive humanism, the space of freedom, or at least the possibility of criticizing what is, is enabled by the distance between various claims to a universal Humanity and the concrete expressions of (how else to put it?) humanity. hence, certain traits are given the status of an abstraction (or perhaps this is an essence) - such as reason, labour, etc. - in order to criticise what are then deemed to be concrete contradictions to this (such as irrationality, the indignity of the conditions of labour, etc.).
the problem with this is that you cannot (as marx argued in his critique of utopian socialism) argue for the historical universalisation of the conditions of bourgeois subjectivity (human rights, freedom of speech, etc.) and deny the specific moments of the 'exception', which are (as he shows) the actual historical constituents of such so-called essentially human ideals: that the ideal of individual freedom cannot be disociated from the emergence of exchange relations premised on the commensurability of different persons, values, etc; that the notion of human rights is founded on the practice and notion of the right to own property; etc.
in short, whilst liberal humanism is definitely a step up from the anti-foundationalist liberalism of someone like rorty (who argues for liberalism with the US as the supposed exemplar of the best the world has to offer), it does not constitute a critique, but only the beginning of one.
2. as a beginning, it is okay, as adorno and others argued: to work on the immanent contradictions of bourgois concepts and ideals is a real point of departure for critique, but it can only work as a point of departure, and it can only work if it not assumed that the practice of theory is to resolve such contradictions. rather, it is to make them unbearable.
3. but when humanism sets itself in a battle against anti-humanism, it really shows its dogmatic, and particularistic premises, becuase it now conducts a rearguard action against a critique of universalisms in an attempt to limit this critique, to halt it at the border of cliams such as: 'we are all essentially the same'; 'a marxian teleology is defensible on the grounds of human essence'; 'the critique of universalism is a kind of nihilism which threatens to destroy all that is good and worthy'. needless to say, what is occuring here is not an argument for an ethics, for a politics, for revolution. all that is actually being advanced here are assertions which rest entirely on a faith in the transcendant and overiding: humanity as an abstraction. when it comes to specifying why what such-and-such regards as being 'truly human' measn, they falls back on the vaguest of claims in which the present can be easily seen as the model for the future: hence, humanism makes a faith in the present order a basis for even beginning to think about the future. this is precisley why marx objected to 'blueprints'.
3. the simple point is this: any attempt to wield certain concepts as universals may work well as a rhetorical strategy for making criticisms of capitalism intelligible and digestible, since this is the way 'advanced' capitalists societies like to see themselves, but it doesn't constitute a critique since the moment one begins to elaborate upon what these universals might be, one is back in the game of the utopians: projecting a one-sided version of various concepts as capable of abstraction (and hence, essentialisation) without the 'bad bits' that are actually their historically constitutive moment and their ongoing precondition.
4. i don't know what others would cast as the 'space of freedom'. i do know that many pomos share with many marxists versions of some of these: that the mind/will is the space of freedom against the unfreedom of the material world; that the party is the historical will of the masses which is a version of the aforementioned; that the identity of labour is the space of freedom since it is not capital. all of these suffer from - well - idealism (an obvious one), but more importantly, from making it seem as if ideas (even marxist ones) can be separated from material processes; or forgetting that the identity of labour in capitalism is actually capital, surplus value being surplus labour.
5. i don't have a general theory of freedom. i do have a (borrowed) theory of capitalism in relation to labour (that the reality of capital is surplus labour, that the reality of labour is both that it is a precondition of capital and at the same time is irreducible to labour power since (unlike any other commodity) it must be reproduced day after day in order for the production process to even 'begin'. i don't think this casts it as the 'space of freedom' in the sense of a place outside of, or free from necessity, but i don't think the world is like that in any case, and i don't think fantasies of it being otherwise have been of any lasting help in this struggle. what do i think might be decisive? depends on where and what you're asking, but i'd begin by working through the contradictions, since this is the possibility of criticism. i can't make any more guarantees than that, and - despite what many people say - neither can marx.
regards,
angela