Escaping Humanism
The crisis of the environment has led numerous forms of contemporary thought to challenge the idea that anthropocentrism comes from Humanism, reconsidering man as one of the elements that exist within nature. The philosopher Frédéric Neyrat considers that we have nonetheless never stopped being humanists, and works for his part on developing the figure of a labyrinthine human being who, refusing to subject chaos to order, would use it to loosen the grip of order. Post or trans-humanist perspectives, stemming from new hybridities, seem to him to extend Humanism, despite their promises to go further than the modern separations between nature and technology, between human and non-human. Is it necessary to substitute a fanatical hybridization for the cartesian/capitalist divide, that we now know is the source of catastrophe? Risking a monopoly and a technological nightmare, he opposes “non-fusional alliances”. Associated with the figure of the labyrinth, these alliances form what he qualifies as “anti-humanism”, a new existentialism that allows us to surpass humanism while at the same time avoiding false post-humanist exits.
