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Title: Mediterranean Neo-Humanism: Texts and Contexts of Pensiero Meridiano (Critical Essay)
Author : Annali d'Italianistica
Release Date : January 01, 2008
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 228 KB

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From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s critical theorists converged in questioning the foundational premises of humanism as "the" single grand narrative of Western metaphysics. The sovereignty and autonomy of the Cartesian subject, the transparency of the linguistic medium, the belief in the teleological progress of history and rationality, all came under scrutiny by the likes of Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, to name just the most prominent voices. (1) While the main impetus of this critique originated from a French context, it quickly reached Britain and the United States where it came to be reflected in the work of scholars ranging from Catherine Belsey, Terence Hawkes, and Christopher Norris, to J. Hillis Miller, Paul Rabinow, and Peggy Kamuf. The emergence and development of Subaltern and Postcolonial Studies added new impetus to the discrediting of humanism. Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak not only associated European humanism with the violence of the colonial enterprise, but argued that its presumed universalizing assumptions were, in reality, a means to legitimize an Occidental, Eurocentric episteme and export it to all the corners of the world. However, since the 1990s a revisionist turn with regard to the anti-humanist stance of previous decades has been taking place. On the one hand, despite the fact that many theorists accept the poststructuralist and deconstructive premise that the subject is not an autonomous entity but remains determined by various orders of discourse--economic, linguistic, gendered, psychoanalytical, and so on--they are reluctant to abandon the possibility of socio-political and cultural agency. On the other hand, the discrediting of humanism as the metaphysical project of Occidentalism is increasingly being perceived as having been too radical and undifferentiated, leading to a negation of concepts that remain valuable to the present age. Both Edward Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism and Halliwell and Mousley's Critical Humanisms exemplify this revisionist turn. Halliwell and Mousley no longer examine humanism as a single, monolithic project culminating in the Enlightenment vision of Occidental rationality but discuss it with a renewed sensibility to the diversity and richness of its epistemologies--"Romantic, existential, dialogic, civic, spiritual, pagan, pragmatic and technological" (8)--and with the stated intent of "reanimat[ing] its relevance for dealing with contemporary issues" (16). The revisiting of the humanist tradition also leads Halliwell and Mousley to outline a project of "post-foundational humanism" (9), that is to say, a project that avoids both the universalizing assumptions of Occidental rationality as well as the elision of the human subject that traverses the more radical fronts of post-foundational thought. Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism mirrors Halliwell and Mousley's project. Said, who established himself as one of the most influential critics of Western Occidentalism with the publication of his landmark Orientalism (1978), not only laments the crippling effects of the "ideological antihumanism" (10) of Foucault, Barthes, Lyotard, and others but, as Apter has convincingly argued, seeks to recover "other humanisms that survive the compromise with imperialism: emancipatory humanism, the ethics of coexistence, figural paradigms of ontogenesis in world-historical forms of culture, and the ideal of translation" (35). In Said's words, people all over the world can be and are moved by ideals of justice and equality [...] and the affiliated notions that humanistic ideals [...] still supply most disadvantaged people with the energy to resist unjust war and military occupation [...]. And despite the [...] influential ideas of a certain facile type of radical antifoundationalism, with its insistence that real events are at most linguistic effects, and its close