Freedom and Alienation; Or, Humanism of the Non-All

Abstract

Today, the popular concept of the Anthropocene, used to denote the human geological age, puts to question the centrality of human subjectivity as an ethical agency. Critical posthumanism, in this context, demands the de-centring of the human subject, which in its apparently hubristic disregard for the non-human, seems to have set the world on fire. But what if the human subject is already constitutively de-centred and selfalienated? What purpose is served by aiming to de-centre the already de-centred subject? Beginning with Freudian and Marxist conceptions of a social humanity, this article ties together Hegelian and Lacanian conceptions of ontological incompleteness to argue that it is precisely in our constitutive alienation that we discover the freedom required for ethical action. In contrast to posthumanist and Marxist humanist conceptions of subjectivity, the article shows that it is precisely in the movement from the hysterical discourse to the analytical discourse, in the Lacanian sense, and with it the Hegelian conception of love, that we may discover a dialectical humanism capable of helping us to grapple with the material conditions that plague us today.