we've been debating this for over a year now, right?
>And I'm still confused about your (eloquent and consistent) antihumanism,
Ange! You're a very politically motivated person. <
well, thanks for the kind words; but the only reason you might be bewildered by this -- politics and antihumanism! -- is if you want to adhere to your presumptions, and so regard anything that does not conform with them as an anomaly. you think that antihumanism renders radical politics (or marxism) impossible; i think it's an integral part of those politics. you can either change your presumptions, or i can drop either the politics or the antihumanism (which to me are inseparable, so i can't see that this is possible or desirable). i doubt that any amount of discussion at this level -- interesting though it has been -- is going to make much headway.
so, since i'm so obviously feeling lazy, let me respond to your questions in short form:
>Who is it you seek to emancipate from what?<
to emancipate what isn't from what is; or, in other words, to become other. there is no reason to conceive this as an evolutionary line of development.
> If there be no human essence, what's being alienated by the prevailing
exchange relation?<
labour-power.
> Are humans malleable enough eventually to be made as content under
conditions of exploitation as they would be in any contending scenario?<
i disagree with your presumption that the contradiction is that between a hidden or denied human nature and social reality. as in the above, the contradictions are immanent, not transhistorical.
[same for the next series of habermasian assertions being posed as a question.]
> Is it human to be creative, and correspondingly inhuman to alienate that
human from what, how, with what and for whom s/he labours?<
no. in order to suggest that creativity (and indeed alienation) -- the actual concrete existence, sense and reality of this -- is comparable across time, one requires a table of comparability which is, by virtue of such a move, no longer admitted or interrogated. the question of the mode of life is substituted by the attribution of essences that, in turn, are not queried either. ie., humanism is a brake on the scope of radical politics, critique, etc.
> Is sexuality human...?<
sexuality, romantic love, platonic love, desire ... these are all very recent ways of making sense of and framing the reality of 'sexuality'; as is the claim that to deny the essence of someone's sexuality a recent claim made on the terrain of, more recently, a geneticism where genes are figured as both origin and destiny. i couldn't think of a more conservative approach to sexuality.
> Is the need for recognition human such as the denial of full recognition
to members of selected groups is inhuman?<
are you asking me if corporatism is what it means to be human?
> Is language human such that the denial of free speech is inhuman?<
does the Declaration of Human Rights inaugurate the sense of what it means to be human in modern societies or was it revelation?
Angela _________