Abstract

In her Paroles suffoquØes, Sarah Kofman writes that Robert Antelme’s The Human Race shows us that the abject dispossession suffered by the deportees signifies the indestructibility of alterity, its absolute character, by establishing the possibility of a new kind of “we,” he founds without founding – for this “we” is always already undone, destabilized – the possibility of a new ethics. Of a new humanism. 1 By way of an apparently rhetorical, though necessary question, Kofman continues: in spite of everything that calls humanism into question “after the death of God and the end of man that is its correlate,” she writes, “I nonetheless want to conserve it, while giving it a completely different meaning, displacing and transforming it. I keep it because what other, new ‘word’ could have as much hold on the old humanism?” 2 At once prophetic and contemporary, this question is surprising, if not disarming. Following the death of God, it is said, ‘Man’ takes the stage, his emergence the necessary event of history. Yet the end of man is the ‘correlate’ of the death of God. The space occupied by divinity, or the sacred, has withdrawn. Humanism attests to a mimesis of the transcendental theme, and unwittingly confirms the emptiness of a sign without origin. Humanismannounces nothing new: the nihilism at the heart of onto-theology emerges fully. Its hypocrisy and pretension fatally exposed, humanism may now – and ought to be – discarded as a ‘metaphysics of the subject,’ a regime of negativity, exclusion and violence