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The emergence of antihumanism in Fre...

Geroulanos, Stefanos.

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The emergence of antihumanism in French thought, politics, and literature, 1926--1954.

Record Type:	Language materials, printed : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	The emergence of antihumanism in French thought, politics, and literature, 1926--1954./
Author:	Geroulanos, Stefanos.
Description:	433 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-04, Section: A, page: 1500.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International69-04A.
Subject:	Literature, Romance. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3309658
ISBN:	9780549579908

The emergence of antihumanism in French thought, politics, and literature, 1926--1954.
Geroulanos, Stefanos.

The emergence of antihumanism in French thought, politics, and literature, 1926--1954. - 433 p.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-04, Section: A, page: 1500.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Johns Hopkins University, 2008.

During the later interwar and early post-WWII periods, influential French thinkers concerned with the violence and utopian disasters of their time argued that the humanist ambitions of contemporary political movements were bound to fail and facilitate yet more suffering. For them, a world conceived in terms of the philosophical and political centrality of Man (the world of Descartes, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Marxism) could offer no satisfactory alternatives to the ruins that lay in the wake of the Nazi and Soviet disasters; Man could not claim to fill the void left by the "death of God" without paradoxically calling up the worst in human history and denigrating the dignity of the human subject. This dissertation examines three historical, philosophical, and theological dimensions of the rise of antihumanism. First, the political attacks against "bourgeois" humanism that gained force in the interwar period and reached their apex in the late 1940s. Second, a gradual rejection of secular rationalism's expectation of progress toward a more human and fundamentally equal future---in other words, an anti-utopian turn in atheist thought, now rejecting both God and Man as guarantors of human existence and ethics. And third, what I call negative anthropology: the epistemological and existential rejection of man as foundation of knowledge, meaning, and action, and the attempt to explain the specifically human aspect of existence by reference to man's dependence on the world he finds himself inhabiting and engaging.

ISBN: 9780549579908Subjects--Topical Terms:

1019014
Literature, Romance.

The emergence of antihumanism in French thought, politics, and literature, 1926--1954.
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100 1 $a Geroulanos, Stefanos. $3 1676245
245 1 4 $a The emergence of antihumanism in French thought, politics, and literature, 1926--1954.
300 $a 433 p.
500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-04, Section: A, page: 1500.
500 $a Advisers: Hent de Vries; Anson Rabinbach.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Johns Hopkins University, 2008.
520 $a During the later interwar and early post-WWII periods, influential French thinkers concerned with the violence and utopian disasters of their time argued that the humanist ambitions of contemporary political movements were bound to fail and facilitate yet more suffering. For them, a world conceived in terms of the philosophical and political centrality of Man (the world of Descartes, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Marxism) could offer no satisfactory alternatives to the ruins that lay in the wake of the Nazi and Soviet disasters; Man could not claim to fill the void left by the "death of God" without paradoxically calling up the worst in human history and denigrating the dignity of the human subject. This dissertation examines three historical, philosophical, and theological dimensions of the rise of antihumanism. First, the political attacks against "bourgeois" humanism that gained force in the interwar period and reached their apex in the late 1940s. Second, a gradual rejection of secular rationalism's expectation of progress toward a more human and fundamentally equal future---in other words, an anti-utopian turn in atheist thought, now rejecting both God and Man as guarantors of human existence and ethics. And third, what I call negative anthropology: the epistemological and existential rejection of man as foundation of knowledge, meaning, and action, and the attempt to explain the specifically human aspect of existence by reference to man's dependence on the world he finds himself inhabiting and engaging.
520 $a I trace these developments in six chapters, utilizing extensive research in untapped archives and private libraries of, among others, Georges Bataille, Gaston Fessard sj, Michel Foucault, Alexandre Kojeve, Alexandre Koyre, Henri de Lubac sj, Andre Malraux, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Wahl, and the Colloques de Cerisy. In chapter 1, I present the political and intellectual crisis of humanism in the interwar period by centering on attacks leveled against "bourgeois humanism" be Communists, Catholics, and Non-Conformists, rival political camps seeking to reclaim humanism by arguing that their own conceptions of man offered him a dignity and future that no ideological alternative could attain. Chapter 2 centers on new philosophies of science (inspired notably by discoveries in quantum physics) and the influence of Heidegger's phenomenology in the transformation of French thought around 1930, and explains why a mixture facilitated a radical critique of Neo-Kantianism and offered an anti-anthropocentric calling to philosophical research. In chapter 3, I attempt a thorough reinterpretation of Alexandre Kojeve's 1930s lectures on Hegel, focusing on his organization of an atheist rapport between man and world and the radical inflection it forces on Hegel's understanding of religion and the famous but underexamined notion of the "end of history." Chapter 4 compares Bataille's literary anti-subjectivism, Emmanuel Levinas' "excendence," and Jean-Paul Sartre's explicit opposition to humanism in the context of their critiques of transcendence. The final two chapters consider antihumanism's rising credibility in light of World War II and the Soviet terror. I examine Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror in the context of the resistance legacy in chapter 5, and then turn to Maurice Blanchot's dystopian novel The Most High in chapter 6. Here, I focus on these authors' efforts to move beyond or outside of humanism, which they understood as unable to properly defend the humanity of man.
520 $a This radicalization of anti-anthropocentrist efforts led to theories of meaning and ethics that no longer depended on transcendental or humanist foundations, and to the general effort to establish "the human" as a construct of philosophical premises that only recently it had itself grounded. This conception remains paramount in European philosophy and strains of literary and anthropological analysis, and is also crucial for our understanding of contemporary man.
590 $a School code: 0098.
650 4 $a Literature, Romance. $3 1019014
650 4 $a History, European. $3 1018076
650 4 $a Philosophy. $3 516511
690 $a 0313
690 $a 0335
690 $a 0422
710 2 $a The Johns Hopkins University. $3 1017431
773 0 $t Dissertation Abstracts International $g 69-04A.
790 1 0 $a de Vries, Hent, $e advisor
790 1 0 $a Rabinbach, Anson, $e advisor
790 $a 0098
791 $a Ph.D.
792 $a 2008
856 4 0 $u http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3309658