well, with both you and Jim doubting my anti-humanist credentials, what can you expect? a girl's gotta defend her rep.
no, marx didn't ever come out with any stuff about the perfect man = perfect worker. but Stalin certainly did. and so too did the Lassalleans, in their own softer way - all that labour as the origin of all stuff. and yes, I too think that communism entails the abolition of what we are now, but that is not a humanist position. a socialist humanism would lay claim to the future as the unfolding of what we have always been *essentially*, which if one is a workerist of any stripe, comes down to 'being a worker'.
>And why does the proposition that some socialist humanists might evince
>resurgent racism mean anything? It doesn't mean a socialist humanist is
>on a necessary road to racism, does it?
no it doesn't. but it does perhaps point to the ways in which there is a relationship between the socialism of eastern Europe and the racisms being articulated there now. I don't find it convincing to say that there was no relationship, that these racisms are simply a return to the past, or what was repressed, etc.
>A socialist humanist (if his name is
>Rob, anyway) is, among other things, someone who wants to make sense of
>freedom and ethics.
and if his name was rob, I already know that what he does is practice (what Balibar calls in the same essay) a practical humanism as distinct from a theoretical one: I.e.., that he wants to take humanism at its word, which means that the boundaries of what it means 'to be human' are always left open to the reality of that which is (in danger of) being negated. the theoretical humanist, perhaps the humanist who's neat definitions of what it means to be human are given institutional form, allowed to become abstract ideals imposed upon the world, is the one to look out for in my view. as for the question of agency, me thinks that is a question of process (of class composition, say) rather than subject as already-given, whether that be as origin or end of any strategy or programme.
and yes, Derrida's a slippery one, which is sometimes a pain in the neck, sometimes a reminder as to how slippery the ideas, concepts and practices are in reality. I thought the excerpt from Derrida was interesting for this bit mainly: "The democracy to come obliges one to challenge instituted law in the name of an indefinitely unsatisfied justice, thereby revealing the injustice of calculating justice whether this be in the name of a particular form of democracy or of the concept of humanity." it puts together, for me at least, the core of the problem with the discussion we had recently on the death penalty here, the ways in which we should (but prefer not to) in the case of the war be discussing a radically different notion of justice to that of settling accounts, rather than avoiding the issue of justice through the nifty presumption that 'the revolution' will entail absolute redemption, and thereby sort out justice in an absolute way. which is another way of saying we must always defer justice. in the case of Rwanda, for instance,what was happening other than a settling of accounts? same for the ex-yu in many ways. these are not some uncivilised events, since the international conventions of genocide, the entire structures of international and national justice are geared toward the calculation of incalculable injustices -- a very capitalist thing, me thinks. but at the same time, deferral does not seem to work, so, then what?
Derrida, for all his shiftiness, seems to me to be pointing to something important here.
Angela