Italian interview Feb 2008 in Monthy Review Magazine (wow, times are a changin)
It is necessary to be careful when we talk about ‘humanism’. We only have to look at the various legacies of humanism to see that there is not just one kind of humanism: the forms that emerge in Italy are very distinct from those that emerge in France. There is also a humanism based in classical liberal political philosophy that can not be assimilated into literary humanism. In any case, if we agree that philosophical anthropology is a form of humanism that supposes that there is just one single idea of what it is to be human, and that it is possible to attribute defining traits to this human subject, then we are taking that which is human as something given, something that already exists. What I want to suggest is the following:
for humanness to become possible — in specific times and places — depends on certain types of social norms that are involved in the exercise of producing and ‘de-producing’ humanness. In other words, for that which is human to be human, it must be in relationship with that which is inhuman or non-human, and this is a differential operation of power. Humanness is produced and sustained in one form and is ‘de-produced’ and not sustained in other forms: the human being is a differentiating effect of power.
In the USA, for example, at present there is a very powerful discourse that sets out to define humanness as being a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Similarly, we have some morphological policies that define humanness in terms of certain ideas about what a human body should be like. And this produces a population with disabilities, or of disabled individuals whose bodies do not match the morphological idea. Remember that any regulatory ideal of humanness always produces exclusions, ‘outsiders’, and creates a problem: how should we refer to these beings that appear human but are not? We only have to think of the history of slavery, something which survives in the USA, where it remains unclear if all the black men who are imprisoned are human or not.
Humanness is not something given, it is a differentiating effect of power, but we need the term because without it we cannot understand what is happening. I am worried by those positions that say: “that which is human belongs to humanism, so we can never talk any more about humanness”; “choice belongs to voluntarism, we have to stop talking about choice”; “the Enlightenment belongs to that which we have dismantled, so we can no longer speak of Enlightenment”. But they don’t ask themselves what the Enlightenment was. Why go back to that which was? Why go back to humanness? Well, because these concepts, these really important ideals, have not left us, they continue to form us. And there is a new way of understanding them that starts with the idea that they do not have a single form and that, in fact, their regulation operates politically to produce exclusions that we must challenge. For someone to say that a person who is considered non-human is, in fact, human means a resignification of humanness and emphasises that humanness can work in another form. On occasions it is important to use the term precisely in the way that the Human Rights discourse sometimes does: taking someone to whom the defining characteristics of humanness are not attributed and affirming that person is human is a performative act that redefines humanness in terms of liberation, as emancipation. It is not a question of searching for what was already there, but of making it happen.