Introduction

Summary

French philosophy today is laying fresh claim to the human. This is not to be mistaken for an exercise in winding back the clock, nor is it a return to previous ideas of the human, much less a coordinated ‘human turn’. It is a series of fundamentally independent and yet strikingly simultaneous initiatives arising across the diverse landscape of French thought to transform and rework the figure of the human. Whereas the latter decades of the twentieth century adopted a decidedly critical and cautious approach to the question of ‘the human’, imprisoning it within the iron bars of scare quotes and burying it under caveats warning against its false universalism and dangerous totalitarianism, now we find ourselves entering a new moment of constructive transformation in which fresh and ambitious figures of the human are forged and discussed, and in which humanism itself is being reinvented and reclaimed in multiple ways. These new figures of the human take diverse and sometimes mutually antagonistic forms, but what unites them all is that they cannot be plotted on the spectrum running between twentieth-century humanism and antihumanism. Each in its own way rejects the assumptions that humanism and antihumanism share. By tracing these varied transformations of the human we can discern one of the most widespread, most surprising and potentially most transformative trends in contemporary French thought.

The aim of this book is threefold: to make visible, to critique and to highlight the dangers and possibilities of this important contemporary trend. I will make these diverse transformations of the human visible as an important feature of contemporary French thought for the first time by bringing them together in one volume and discussing them comparatively. The chapters of this book are not presented as a series of isolated studies but as a cumulative account and progressive critique of different contemporary transformations of the human. This comparative critique opens the way to offering a taxonomy of the current and future ways in which the human is being and can be transformed, as well as showing what is at stake in the reception of these different accounts of the human and how they can shape the future of French thought.