Contesting Humanism(s) in a Humanist Cause: Musings on Three Kinds of Antihumanist Challenges

Abstract

Against the backdrop of myriad antihumanist challenges that are current in the contemporary theoretical climate, this article distinguishes between and discusses three kinds of such challenges to the received discourse of humanism. The first is the counterdiscursive contestation of universalistic claims of Western humanism on behalf of those subtly excluded from and subdued by this discourse. The second is a critique of the tropology of the human with the aim of unraveling illusory autonomies and helping human subjects to attain (or regain) their subjectivity. The third involves analyzing the implications of redefining the human in the transhumanist/posthumanist context of scientific-technological developments, many of which are comparatively too recent to have been factored in by the conceptual challenges mounted earlier. The article foregrounds the paradoxical possibility of ser ving the humanist cause even as one contests received conceptions of the human as a category.