Chapter 14 - The Antihumanist Tone

Summary

My essay explores how left- and right-wing antihumanist discourses share certain tones. It focuses, in particular, on discourses that understand modernity as a series of dispossessions (especially of community, or of self) and on the critique of the symbol as a form of false consolation.  Across the twentieth century, modernity-narratives blend with critiques of the symbol to create a tone of baleful negativity that runs the political gamut from right to left and that comes to count, in the humanistic academy, as the identifying note of critical theory. My paper will push back against the dominance of the negative tone in critical theory by outlining how advances in our understanding of capitalism have long since left modernity - and demystification-critiques behind, and by demonstrating that contemporary literature, especially poetry, has developed a tremendous tonal range by which to think about political suffering, the experience of “nature,” and the character of symbols.