Early Modern Humanism and Postmodern Antihumanism In

Early Modern Humanism and Postmodern Antihumanism in Dialogue Jan Miernowski Editor Early Modern Humanism and Postmodern Antihumanism in Dialogue Editor Jan Miernowski University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison , Wisconsin , USA

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Th is Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature Th e registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Th e registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface

What Would Humanists Say?

How would Renaissance readers of Cicero and Aristotle consider animal rights? What would Erasmus say about Foucault ’s death of the author or how would he respond to Derrida ’s assessment of the “human bomb”? Th ese are some of the questions posed by this book. Th ey all stem from contemporary concerns: the moral responsibility of the artist, the place of religious belief in our secular societies, legal rights extended to nonhuman species, the sense of “normality ” applied to the human body, the politics of migration, the extent of individual political freedom , and international terrorism . Yet, while embedded in our culture, all the questions underly- ing this book point in their search for answers to early modernity. Going back almost 500 years in search of insights into our current aff airs requires some justifi cation. When we ask Renaissance humanists for their perspectives on our contemporary problems, we do not expect them to feed us “timeless” wisdom, or to reconnect us with our long- forgotten cultural past. Let’s face it, we know quite well that we are in conversation with strangers, for whom our sense of justice , governmentality, freedom , normality , religious faith, moral responsibility, and our understanding of wartime terror would largely seem exotic, if not outright absurd. Yet, although stemming from a foreign culture of the past,

v vi Preface the voices of Erasmus , Rabelais , and Montaigne resonate anew when they take part in our debates which have been often confi ned to the circle of our mid-twentieth-century master thinkers ( Foucault , Derrida , Deleuze , etc.) and to the lineage they were eager to claim (Kant , Hegel , Nietzsche , Heidegger , etc.). Confronted with the antihumanists of our declining postmodernity, Renaissance humanists bring to the discussion dissent- ing voices which can revive our critical thinking about specifi c problems that, quite unexpectedly, matter both to the recent and to the distant past. After all, is not the clash of ideas what humanism is really all about? Should we see humanism as a perennial, essentialist metaphysics of Man, providing an ideological basis for some institutionalized disciplines of learning (the humanities ), or should we not rather consider humanism to be a lively dialogue between very unlike-minded people, separated by belief, language, and way of thinking? In the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries, such “conversation” involved Western European, Christian intellectuals, and the newly rediscovered ancient Pagans, whom the former greatly admired, yet struggled to understand. Now, at the dawn of the twenty-fi rst century, a hopefully equally fascinating dialogue can involve recently departed antihumanists and Renaissance humanists who seem so foreign to our enlightened and disillusioned contemporaries. Th e time to begin such a conversation is ripe. Not so much because of the pervasive feeling that the humanities at European universities and in American academia are “in crisis.” Indeed, even if limited to the last two or three decades, a bibliography of books deploring the closing of the humanistically oriented mind, the end of liberal education, and the increased professionalization of the university would constitute a large volume by itself. However, when considered from the perspective of Renaissance humanists, the current battle between the humanities and the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) loses its dramatic urgency. Indeed, already Petrarch and Erasmus complained about the narrow specialization of disciplines of learning, which suppos- edly even in the times of humanistic paideia were more interested in min- ute technicalities particular to their respective fi elds than in pondering Preface vii the virtuous, Christian life.1 If Renaissance humanists felt compelled to defend the bonae litterae which in their eyes taught their students how to become more human, it should come as no surprise that we are called upon to justify our contemporary humanities which, for better or worse, cannot rely anymore on a coherent ethic nor on a theology of a transcen- dent absolute , nor on any correlated anthropology of Man elevated to the rank of a privileged creature. In a world beyond good and evil, with Man’s death following closely the death of God, the humanities cannot hope to revert to the studia humanitatis , the study of a humanity the existence of which is being strongly contested or even negated outright in the aftermath of the genocides and totalitarianisms of recent history and in the wake of transhuman copulations of our bodies with technological gadgets. Th e point, however, is not to establish continuities between our postmodern intellectual culture and early modernity, or to build bridges that could lead us back to humanism and the essentialist metaphysics it once relied upon. Th e goal is to see the late twentieth-century antihumanism in the contrasted light of Renaissance humanist ideas. Inviting such intentionally anachronistic confrontation between authors who think in vastly diff erent ways and who have rarely or never met is all the more timely because the antihumanism of the 1960s, although its aftermath is still felt on both sides of the Atlantic, is nonetheless already a dated phe- nomenon. Seen from a distance of 50 years, postmodern antihumanism can be put into its historical context and discussed in the same dispassionate way as early modern humanism from 500 years ago.

Humanisms…

In order to achieve such critical distance which will set the stage for the dialogue between humanism and antihumanism regarding the specifi c issues analyzed in this volume, we need fi rst to acknowledge that both

1 Erasmus , Ratio seu Methodus verae theologiae (1519); Petrarch , Epistolae familiares, XVI, 14, referred to by Eckhard Keβler , “La lecture comme acte d’innovation. Le cas de la grammaire humaniste,” in Penser entre les lignes. Philologie et Philosophie au Quattrocento, ed. Fosca Mariani- Zini (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2001), 30. viii Preface terms have diff erent meanings depending on who uses them and when and in what languages they are used. Th roughout the twentieth century, thinkers representing very diff erent currents of thought have aspired to the label “humanist” and have been opposed by other thinkers claiming radically diff erent visions of “humanism ” or rejecting any “humanism ” whatsoever in the name of, again, a quite diverse sets of ideas. One could almost say: “Show me the humanism you battle against, and I will tell you what sort of antihumanist you are.” For a contemporary English-speaking reader, “ humanism ”—to begin with the most common sense of the term—refers primarily to a system of thought in which human beings have the capacity for rational thinking and for moral action based on free will. Consequently, humanism presupposes a sense of humanity, which is understood in two correlated ways: fi rst, as a collective entity with specifi c interests and privileges, and second, as the capacity of humans to be “humane,” that is, to be concerned for fellow human beings. When such concern for Man is opposed to Man’s reverence for God, humanism may be seen as a secular ideol- ogy fi rmly opposed to theistic religions.2 In addition to its ethical meaning, “humanism ” is also often understood in a historical sense, as the period in European intellectual and artistic history in which philological study was emphasized, especially, though not exclusively, the study of “humane letters,” that is, the writings of Greek and Latin Pagan authors who excelled in their purely human intellectual and moral capacities while being unable to directly benefi t from the grace of the Christian revelation contained in the “divine letters” of the Bible.3 Th e English

2 Th is encapsulates, grosso modo, the meanings 4, 5a, and 5b of “ humanism ” in the Oxford English Dictionary , second edition, 2013, accessed online January 30, 2015. Th e philanthropic meaning of “ humanism ” appears also in French as early as 1765, although in an isolated occurrence (“Humanisme,” Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé, accessed January 30, 2015, http://atilf. atilf.fr/). I would like to thank James Helgeson for directing me to diff erent lexicological sources of the term. 3 Th is corresponds to the meanings 3a and 3b of “humanism ” in the Oxford English Dictionary. In French, the use of “humanism ” to designate an intellectual movement of early modern European history dates back to the March 15, 1877 issue of Revue des Deux Mondes. Th is specifi cally historical use of the term in French follows closely its fi rst occurrence in a more general sense of “study of literature” (albeit still related to early modern humanists) in the review of a German monograph by Gotthard Lechler , Johann von Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der Reformation (Leipzig: Friedrich Fleischer, 1873), which appeared in the Revue Critique d’Histoire et de Littérature of September 5, Preface ix word “ humanities ” developed from this fourteenth- to sixteenth-century interest in the studia humanitatis. Th e term fi rst appeared in the sixteenth century in its singular form, and then, following the 1664 translation of Rabelais by Th omas Urquhart, in its plural form. Initially referring to the study of classical literature, the semantic scope of “humanities ” was expanded in the middle of the nineteenth century to encompass the disciplines of learning currently associated with this word.4 Th e ethical–philosophical meaning and the historical–philological sense of “humanism ” are therefore distinct, yet related to each other through their common history. Th eir genealogies go back to the classical Latin notion of studia humanitatis, understood as the cultivation of letters which transformed the Roman citizen into a human being in the fullest sense of the word. 5 Th is prestigious reference was adopted in the late fi f- teenth century in the milieu of Italian university teachers specializing in a disciplinary fi eld which in the Middle Ages was composed of grammar and rhetoric , and to which poetry, history, and moral philosophy were

1874, analyzed in Marcel Françon , “Humanisme,” Renaissance Quarterly 21, no. 3 (1968): 300–303. 4 See, for instance, the following references in the Oxford English Dictionary: Meredith Hanmer ’s 1577 translation of Eusebius (Aunc. Eccl. Hist., vi, ii, 98), “By reason of profane literature & humanitie opposite vnto sacred letters”; the July 7, 1855, issue of Dwight’s Journal of Music , “For the fi rst time, we believe, in the history of our American Universities, has there been a formal academic recognition of Music as legitimately one of ‘the humanities.’” 5 In that respect, the canonical reference is Cicero ’s use of studia humanitatis in Pro Archia , 3: “quaeso a vobis, ut in hac causa mihi detis hanc veniam, adcommodatam huic reo, vobis, quem ad modum spero, non molestam, ut me pro summo poeta atque eruditissimo homine dicentem, hoc concursu hominum literatissimorum, hac vestra humanitate, hoc denique praetore exercente iudi- cium, patiamini de studiis humanitatis ac litterarum paulo loqui liberius, et in eius modi persona, quae propter otium ac studium minime in iudiciis periculisque tractata est, uti prope novo quodam et inusitato genere dicendi.” “But I crave your indulgence, an indulgence which will, I trust, cause you no inconvenience, and which is peculiarly applicable to the nature of my client’s case; and I would ask you to allow me, speaking as I am on behalf of a distinguished poet and a consummate scholar, before a cultivated audience, an enlightened jury, and the praetor whom we see occupying the tribunal, to enlarge somewhat upon enlightened and cultivated pursuits, and to employ what is perhaps a novel and unconventional line of defense to suit the character of one whose studious seclusion has made him a stranger to the anxious perils of the courts.” Trans. N. H. Watts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955). See also Aulus Gellius’ preference for paideia over philantropia as the Greek corollary of the Latin humanitas ( Noctes Atticae, XIII, 17). On the Roman concept of humanitas, see Max Schneidewin, Humanität (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1897) and other bibliographical references listed by Stéphane Toussaint , Humanismes/Antihumanismes de Ficin à Heidegger. Humanitas et Rentabilité (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2008), 33, note 6. x Preface added in the Renaissance.6 Th ey called themselves “humanists ” (uman- isti ), that is, professionals of studia humanitatis , not unlike the legisti who claimed to be experts in law. Th e word “humanist,” fi rst attested in Italian in 1490 and soon followed with a nonclassical Latin version, became increasingly popular in the sixteenth century, including in countries such as France and England, where it fi rst appeared in 1552 and 1589, respec- tively.7 Renaissance humanists such as Petrarch and Budé were keen to promote the bonae litterae, that is, the reading of the entire circle (the “encyclo-pedia”) of Ancient authors, hoping that such intellectual exercise would make them not only better citizens, more knowledgeable, more ethical men, free from material concerns and petty ambitions, but, most importantly, more spiritual Christians, receptive to what Erasmus called the “philosophy of Christ.”8 Such a hermeneutic which aimed at the ethical and spiritual self-transformation of the reader, followed a specifi c method called “philology .” Th e Renaissance humanists were “philo- logists” in the sense that they were “lovers” of the Logos , conceived not as an abstract logical speculation, but as sermo , which should be understood as reason embedded in discourse, or even better, a dialogic speech inhab- ited by its author, turned toward the reader, and shaped by the historical circumstances of its utterance. In brief, Renaissance philology was an amorous quest through the intricacies of texts, an exploration of language and history in search of the presence of the speaker, be it a human being or, given the Erasmian interpretation of the word Logos from the incipit of the Gospel of Saint John, God made Man.

6 Th e teaching of Ancient poetry was established at the University of Bologna at the beginning of the fourteenth century. I am following here the classical study by Paul Oskar Kristeller , “Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance,” Byzantion 17 (1944–1945): 346–374. 7 French “humaniste ” occurs for the fi rst time in reference to Pontano , in the translation of the Spanish best-seller Silva de varia lección by Pedro Mexía. According to Augusto Campana, whom I follow here, this occurrence seems to be adapted from the Italian version of the text and not from the Spanish original. “Th e Origin of the Word ‘Humanist,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1946): 60–73. See also Kristeller , “Humanism and Scholasticism.” 8 Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine have shown how problematic—at least at the beginning of the humanist educational system—the link was between the study of Ancient literature and the ethical education of the Renaissance man. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). For another, yet equally skeptical take on this issue, see Jacques Chomarat , “Faut-il donner un sens philosophique au mot humanisme?” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 21, no. 1 (1997): 49–64. Preface xi

Beginning in the early seventeenth century, the ethical and theological underpinnings of Renaissance philology gradually faded away, leaving the technical aspect of the method, which consisted mainly in historical and comparative study of Ancient, medieval and modern texts and languages (classical as well as biblical, Western, and Oriental). It was during the nineteenth century, mainly under the infl uence of German philological scholarship, that the “humanities ” in the English-speaking world started to refer to a set of academic fi elds of knowledge, and not only to a part of university curriculum.9 Interestingly enough, it is also in the nineteenth century that the term “ humanism ” began to be used in the historical–philological sense, both in France and in England, clearly under the infl uence of the German Humanismus , launched by Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer in 1808 in his defense of education based on classical scholarship in opposition to a technically and professionally oriented special- ized training. In 1860, Jacob Burckhardt published his Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien confi rming the association between Humanism , a type of learning and an idealist philosophical anthropology, on the one hand, and the Renaissance, a period of European history, on the other.10 German neo-Humanism of the nineteenth century, the collapse of which was so eloquently described by Th omas Mann in Th e Magic Mountain, thus traced its educational ideas back to the Renaissance conceived as the cradle of Humanism par excellence. Yet, as demonstrated by Stéphane Toussaint , Niethammer ’s pedagogy claimed to be deliberately modern; classical learning was not supposed to satisfy some antiquarian curiosity, but to help free individuals and nations facing pragmatic challenges stemming from the industrial revolution. Indeed, the philosophy

9 Th is process is admirably analyzed in James Turner, Philology: Th e Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014). See also Grafton and Jardine , From Humanism to the Humanities. It is interesting to note that the French term “les humanités ,” which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century according to the Trésor de la langue française informatisé, had for a long time a strictly educational meaning. It referred mainly to a path in the curriculum of the lycée, with, as its crowning, “la classe de rhétorique,” eloquently described by Antoine Compagnon in his autobiographical novel, La classe de rhéto (Paris: Gallimard, 2012). Th e term thus rarely designated in French a fi eld of scholarly research which, since the second half of the twentieth century, has been preferably called “les sciences humaines” and which associated both the humanities and some social sciences. 10 Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer , Der Streit des Philanthropinismus und der Humanismus in der Th eorie des Erziehungs-Unterrichts unserer Zeit (Iena: Friedrich Fromman, 1808). xii Preface of Man upon which German neo-Humanism relied was less rooted in Ficino and Pico than it was a response to Kant and Hegel .11

… and Antihumanisms

It is therefore not surprising that French antihumanism of the late 1960s ostensibly bypassed any Hegelian dialectics and chose Kantian anthropology as the main target of its attacks. Th is is clearly seen in Michel Foucault ’s Les Mots et les choses (and the interviews resulting from this 1966 best-selling publication) which, despite its dense argumentation, remained for decades a major reference for postmodernists in the humanities .12 In many respects, Antoine Compagnon was right to consider 1966 as an annus mirabilis in French literary and cultural life, and Foucault ’s programmatic book was in large part responsible for the much adver- tised, although much less genuine, rupture with France’s mostly phenom- enological and Hegelian traditions.13 Foucault ’s spectacular opposition to humanism remained under the direct infl uence of structuralist linguis- tics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis ( Saussure , Lévi-Strauss , Lacan ), but most importantly referred back to Nietzsche and to Heidegger ’s reevaluation of Kant ’s metaphysics . Foucault’s antihumanist stand would reverberate among other authors with many of whom he engaged in complicated ways. In 1968, Derrida gave a lecture in New York criti- cizing what he considered to be an abusively anthropological reading of Heidegger ’s 1946 Letter on “Humanism” ; during the same year, after

11 Toussaint shows how Niethammer bridges Kant with Fichte , Hegel , and Humboldt ( Humanismes/ Antihumanismes, 71–106). Th ierry Gontier points to the neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian context of Gentile ’s, Croce ’s, and Cassirer ’s interest in Renaissance philosophy. “Une catégorie histo- riographique oblitérée. L’humanisme,” in Comment écrire l’histoire de la philosophie? ed. Yves Charles Zarka, in collaboration with Serge Trottein, 267–280, and especially 270 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001). 12 According to a Le Monde article by Th omas Ferenczi dated July 30, 2008, over 110,000 copies of the book were sold during the 20 years following its initial publication in France. 13 See “Antoine Compagnon. Littérature française moderne et contemporaine: Histoire, critique, théorie,” accessed January 31, 2015, http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/antoine-compagnon/ p1346267510085_content.htm. For the Hegelian legacy in French antihumanism , see Judith Butler , Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Refl ections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Preface xiii working on Nietzsche and Kant , Deleuze published Diff érence et répé- tition. It would take less than a decade for the tide of French antihumanism branded as “French Th eory” to reach American campuses where it remained pervasive, especially in literary departments, until the end of the century.14 In the meantime in France, the postmodern antihumanism of the 1960s would be forced to respond to the moral and political indig- nation of the Nouveaux philosophes . In 1977, two programmatic books of this movement—André Glucksmann ’s Les Maîtres penseurs and Bernard- Henri Lévy ’s La Barbarie à visage humain—were published, hailed by Foucault and welcomed by Derrida , but sharply criticized by Deleuze and Guattari .15 As noted by Jürgen Habermas , the French Nouveaux philosophes paralleled the German and American neo-conservatives in blam- ing the Enlightenment and its nineteenth-century German humanist heritage for the perverted inhumanity of the twentieth-century totalitar- ian regimes.16 Nevertheless the harshest—and seemingly fi nal—critique of the so-called antihumanist Pensée 68 came in the mid-1980s from authors eager to revive Kant and adamantly opposed to the limelight enjoyed by Nietzsche in French intellectual life.17 Ultimately however, the diff erent assessments of the role played by the Kantian legacy which divided the movements opposed to postmodern antihumanism did not

14 Th e seminal study of the American reception of French antihumanism of the 1960s is François Cusset , French Th eory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze et C ie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis (Paris: La Découverte, 2003), trans. Jeff Fort with Josephine Berganza and Marlon Jones (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). See also Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen , eds., French Th eory in America (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). 15 On the public debate surrounding the Nouveaux philosophes, see Sylvie Bouscasse and Denis Bourgeois, eds., Faut-il brûler les nouveaux philosophes? Le dossier du “procès” (Paris: Nouvelles édi- tions Oswald, 1978). See also Félix Guattari, Les années d’hiver: 1980–1985 (Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, 1986). 16 Jürgen Habermas , Der Philosophische Diskurs Der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 302–303; trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 257. See also Jürgen Habermas, “Les néo-conservateurs américains et allemands contre la culture,” Les Temps modernes 40, no. 449 (1983): 1110–1137. 17 Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut , La pensée 68. Essai sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), trans. Mary H. S. Cattani (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990) . A coalition of French anti-Nietzscheans published a collective manifesto, Pourquoi nous ne sommes pas nietzschéens (Paris: Grasset, 1991), trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also Louis Pinto, Les Neveux de Zarathoustra. La reception de Nietzsche en France (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995) and Jacques Le Rider , Nietzsche en France. De la fi n du XIXe siècle au temps présent (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999). xiv Preface prevent Alain Badiou from branding both the Nouveaux philosophes and the neo-Kantians as representing the same “animal humanism” of contemporary democracies, and to see them as expressions of a single reac- tionary thought unable to conceive of Man as an absolute .18 Th e point here is not to sketch the history of the antihumanism of the 1960s, its reception, and its ultimate decline that we are witnessing today. As judiciously reminded by Stefanos Geroulanos , the whole French intellectual tradition starting with the First World War and leading up to the 1950s can be described as the history of struggles between diff erent humanisms and antihumanisms.19 It is worth noting that some of those debates were infl uenced by currents of thought coming from the other side of the Atlantic. 20 For the sake of contrasting early modern humanism and postmodern antihumanism, it is, however, more important to understand the self-proclaimed rupture of the late 1960s, a much adver- tised event that is best embodied in Foucault ’s gesturing that surrounded the publication of Les Mots et les choses in 1966. What made Foucault question the existence of Man and what meaning did he ascribe to his rejection of humanism ? Philosophically speaking, the main target of Foucault ’s animosity in 1966 was Kant ’s transcendental subject, in other words, an essentialist human being who was at the same time the subject and the object of knowledge. 21 Nourished by Bataille ’s concept of transgression, Foucault

18 Alain Badiou, Le siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005), 247. 19 Stefanos Geroulanos , An Atheism Th at is not Humanist Emerges in French Th ought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). I would like to thank Kathleen Perry Long for directing my attention to this excellent study. It is worth noting that Vincent Descombes already traces the genesis of the 1966 outburst of antihumanism in France to Kojève ’s 1933–1939 lectures on Hegel . Le Même et l’Autre (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979), trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). For the American corollaries of French debates analyzed by Geroulanos, see Mark Greif , Th e Age of the Crisis of Man. Th ought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 20 Most notably by Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), whose infl uence is still felt by some conservative thinkers in the USA. See Christian Richard, Le movement humaniste en Amérique et les courants de pensée similaires en France (Paris: Nizet et Bastard, 1934). See also Louis J.-A. Mercier, Le movement humaniste aux États-Unis. W. C. Brownell, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More (Paris: Hachette, 1928). 21 See Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), as well as a series of declarations and interviews surrounding these publications and contained in Dits et écrits, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, vol. 1, 1954–1969 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994): “Préface à la transgression” (1963); “Philosophie et psychologie” (1965); “Philosophie et vérité” Preface xv rejected the sovereignty of human consciousness capable of positing itself as the foundation of all possible knowledge as well as the prerequisite of all limits of such knowledge. Th is dual capacity of the subject seemed to him illogical in the light of Kant ’s own stress on human fi nitude , a fun- damental problem which would later be reformulated by Alain Badiou and to which, exactly 40 years later, Quentin Meillassoux would propose an original solution. 22 Indeed, prior to Kant, thinking about the diverse aspects of human existence—language, work, body—was predicated on the existence of an infi nite truth. Kant’s reversal did not consist of positing the infi nite from the perspective of which human aff airs can be contemplated, but, on the contrary, of starting with the fi nite subject, limited, yet powerful enough to consider, as if from the outside, its own limitations, while remaining confi ned within its own being. According to Foucault, this double bind allowed for an anthropology encumbered with all the moral themes of humanism and “soft Marxism” à la Teilhard de Chardin and Camus; it also favored a dialectic of historical struggle, which, as postulated by Sartre, aimed at recovering authen- tic humanity lost in the bondage of alienation. Nonetheless, as Foucault stated in 1966, the moral humanisms and the historical dialectics of Christian, Marxist, and Existentialist affi liation had run their course. Man, born with Kant, was about to die with the demise of Sartre’s philosophy. Most notably, the advent and disappearance of Man was not only a matter of metaphysics (in the Kantian sense of the term) but also a problem of semiotics. If the human being came to existence at the end of the eighteenth century, it was because with the decline of the classical episteme at the dawn of modernity, discourse had ceased to organize knowledge and words no longer imposed their taxonomies on the empir- ical world. It was precisely, said Foucault, in the “lacuna” of the discourse that “man constituted himself, a Man who is as much one who lives, who

(1965); “Michel Foucault. Les Mots et les choses ” (1966); “Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal” (1966); “La pensée du dehors” (1966); “L’homme est-il mort ?” (1966); “Qui êtes-vous, professeur Foucault?” (1967); “Foucault répond à Sartre” (1968); “Michel Foucault explique son dernier livre” (1967); as well as in vol. 2, 1970–1975: “Michel Foucault. Les réponses du philosophe” (1975). Selections of these texts have been published in English in Essential Works by Foucault, 1954–1984, eds. Paul Rabinow and James D. Faubion, 3 vols. (New York: New Press, 1997–2000). 22 Quentin Meillassoux, Après la fi nitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006), trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2009). xvi Preface speaks and who works, as one who experiences life, language and work, as one fi nally who can be known to the extent that he lives, speaks and works.”23 If, at the end of the 1960s, Man ( l’homme) was supposed to fade again into oblivion, it was because the problem of discourse and of sig- nifi cation (sens ) reappeared once more. Th e order of Man and the order of signs were mutually exclusive and they reigned alternatively throughout history. During the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, approximately from Kant to Sartre, the order of signs receded and Man had the upper hand. Now (in 1966) signs had again been given voice thanks to Saussure, Freud, and Husserl, and to the analytical thinking of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Russell. Hence, Man could not be heard anymore: “Where ‘it speaks,’ Man exists no more.”24 Th is alternation between Man and meaning can best be seen in Foucault’s use of a series of metaphors aimed at describing these concepts. In his 1966 interviews, he alternatively depicted Man and meaning as some “superfi cial impressions” ( eff et de surface), a “glimmering” or “foam” formed on the surface of “systems” and “structures.”25 Foucault always refused any structuralist label, and rightfully so, since his work was so original that even at its early stages it would hardly fi t any standard methodological categorization. Nonetheless, in 1966, he used a style of expression heavily indebted to the structuralist parlance of his time because he wanted to create a clear-cut distinction—even opposition— between the contingency and fl eeting character of Man and meaning on the one hand, and the fi rmness and durability of the conditions that pro- duced them on the other.26 By reducing meaning and Man to the status

23 Quoted from Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault. 1954–1984, 2:264 (“l’homme s’est constitué, un homme qui est aussi bien celui qui vit, qui parle et qui travaille, que celui qui connaît la vie, le langage et le travail, que celui enfi n qui peut être connu dans la mesure où il vit, parle et travaille.” Dits et écrits, 1:501). 24 “Où ‘ça parle,’ l’homme n’existe plus.” Dits et écrits, 1:544. My translation. 25 See in particular the televised interview with Pierre Dumayet, “Michel Foucault à propos du livre ‘Les mots et les choses,’” accessed December 17, 2014, http://www.ina.fr/video/I05059752/ michel-foucault-a-propos-du-livre-les-mots-et-les-choses-video.html and the interview with Madeleine Chapsal in Dits et écrits, 1:514. 26 A similar metaphor, more gastronomic in nature, is used by Jean-Marie Domenach in describing the Annales School’s conception of an historical event, which seems to be nothing but a small “granulation” between the massive layers of long periods of almost static time. Enquête sur les idées contemporaines (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981), 38. Preface xvii of some passing and contingent accident, Foucault strove to eliminate the sovereign human consciousness which, in his view, should not be allowed to reign over history, reality, and ultimately over itself. In doing so, he further distanced the human sciences ( les sciences humaines ) from the tradition of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century humanities. Th ese disciplines should not strive to understand what is human ( l’humain ), the truth about Man, his essence, nature, and destiny, in sum, what early modern humanists called propria hominis . Th ey should stop looking for Man and they should start examining the forms and their combinations into systems. 27 Why such insistence in Foucault’s tone, why such determination to put an end to humanism? Was it for purely philosophical reasons, namely, as he put it, because it was impossible to think humanism through, as it was impossible to think happiness? From the standpoint of such intellectual economy, humanism was a myth to be discarded because it was philosophically useless, in contrast to the benefi ts one could draw from analyz- ing the “functioning” of human species which was an ongoing process without any conceivable end or proper justifi cation. In fact, Foucault’s declared antihumanism not only grew from his concern for intellectual expediency. It was, rather, a very personal matter, and indeed, as he put it, a political commitment resulting from an internal struggle. Th is intimate character of Foucault’s philosophical choice was very clearly portrayed in the conclusion to the Archéologie du savoir (1969), which unexpectedly took the form of a dramatic prosopopoeia. In this emotionally charged internal debate, Foucault struck back at the imaginary critics of his antihumanist philosophy who, although already retreating under the pressure of the general tide of structuralism which swept across the human sciences, still persisted in their defense of the most important bulwark that Foucault was determined to storm and destroy: the existence of a sovereign, transcendental consciousness. After a series of heated exchanges with his adversary, Foucault concluded that the entire controversy over the sovereign rational subject boiled down to the problem of human

27 Interview with P. Caruso, published in la Fiera letteraria in September 1967 and reprinted in Dits et écrits, 1:616. See also the interview with J.-P. Elkabbach, published in La Quinzaine littéraire, March 15, 1968 and reproduced in Dits et écrits, 1:663. xviii Preface

freedom. To this question, said Foucault, there was no other answer than a “political” one. In the last sentence of the book, Foucault aimed directly at the defenders of the Logos : “you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don’t imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a Man that will live longer than he.”28 What was clearly at stake in Foucault’s challenging apostrophe was the reproach of anthropotheism that he addressed to the diverse humanisms of his times.29 Th e issue for him was not to ban thinking about the subject altogether. On the contrary, already in the Archéologie du savoir , Foucault saw his work as an investigation of the positioning and func- tionality of the subject within the diversity of discourses. Later on, during the pivotal years 1980–1981, he would look back at his antihumanist gesturing of 1966 and stress that he had always been interested in a history of “subjectivity,” that his aim had always been to study the modes of “subjectivation,” which amounted to “replacing the principle of transcen- dence of the ego with research into the subject’s forms of immanence.”30 In an interview published shortly before his death, Foucault pointed to the historical context in which he launched his attack on humanism, namely, the confusion caused by the widespread and often con- fl icting ideological appropriations of this concept. After the Second World War, everybody claimed to be humanist—Christians, Marxists, Existentialists, Stalinists, and even Nazis—while the gruesome political

28 Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 211: “il se peut que vous ayez tué Dieu sous le poids de tout ce que vous avez dit; mais ne pensez pas que vous ferez, de tout ce que vous dites, un homme qui vivra plus que lui.” (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 286. 29 See also Dits et écrits, 1:664. Quite interestingly, at the same time Louis Althusser blames the Marxisms of his time for deifying Man. “Th e Humanist Controversy (1967),” in Th e Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966–1967), ed. François Matheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 258–9. 30 See his notes for the lecture on Th e Hermeneutics of the Subject delivered at the Collège de France in 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros and trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2006), 525: “il s’agissait aussi de substituer au principe de la transcendance de l’ego la recherche des formes de l’immanence du sujet.” L’herméneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France (1981–1982), eds. François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard, Éditions du Seuil, 2001), 507. See also the dictionary article “Foucault” that he wrote about himself in 1980 under the pseudonym “Maurice Florence,” in Dits et écrits , 4:631–632 (published in English in Essential Works , 2:459–463). Preface xix reality contradicted such gratuitous ideals.31 Given the way such humanisms tended to subjugate (assujettir ) the individual while transforming it into a subject ( sujet ) of power, Foucault proclaimed the freedom to shape one’s own, new forms of subjectivity. 32 If we are thus to believe his end-of-life declarations, the care for the self which attracted his attention in the 1980s appears not as a reversal of his initial commitments, but as the continuation of a pursuit that was consistent throughout his career, despite the spectacular antihumanist gesturing of his philosophical debut. Had Foucault thus been an unwavering crypto-humanist after all? Or was his latter day interest in the hermeneutic of the subject not so much a manifestation of his perennial philosophical concerns with human subjectivity as a genuine change of direction dictated by French intellectual life in the 1980s? Was he responding in his last lectures and writings to the advent of the moral and political neo-humanism of the Nouveaux philosophes and the rising tide of neo-Kantians, very much like his anti- existentialist attacks of 1966 were, according to his own testimony, a reac- tion to the frustrating context of the postwar intellectual scene crowded by compromised and sterile humanisms? Or maybe, as Alain Badiou suggests, Foucault’s opposition to Sartre is only seemingly so? Maybe Sartre’s radical humanism and Foucault’s no less radical antihumanism concord in their search for Man freed from God and conceived as a radi- ant possibility, a programmatic endeavor for philosophical thinking. But is Badiou’s dream of posthumously reconciling Sartre and Foucault not conditioned by his own frustration with the intellectual landscape he faced at the dawn of the twenty-fi rst century, a cultural and political context which proved to be so disappointing for this last faithful of the 1960s French radical left?33 Is such wishful intellectual ecumenism not a call for the heirs of past revolts to reject the “animal humanism” of the end of the last century and to courageously accept, once more, the antihumanism of contemporary art, politics, and science longing for the “overhumanity” ( surhumain ) of Man completely disconnected from God?

31 Interview conducted in May 1981 but published for the fi rst time only in March 1984 and reprinted in Dits et écrits, 4:666–667. 32 “ Th e Subject of Power” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 208–226. 33 Alain Badiou, Le siècle, 239–251. xx Preface

Perspectives

Foucault’s initial positioning, second thoughts, and reassessments are a telling example of the role that humanism and antihumanism played in our very recent past and continue to play in our contemporary intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. Clearly, these concepts depend largely on the perspective one adopts, that is, the philosophical and historical frame one uses. In the late 1960s, Foucault rejected Sartre’s humanism, yet during the early 1980s, he was less eager to wave an antihumanist banner. Twenty years later, moved by his frustration with the widespread departure from antihumanists ideals, Badiou eagerly lumped Sartre and Foucault together and called for a renewed Nietzschean antihumanism for the twenty-fi rst century. Dürer used to explain perspective as kind of “seeing through” (Durchsehung ). Analogically, historical study can be understood as “seeing through” the mental framework of the moment. Such perspectivism is clearly unavoidable, yet the authors of this volume turn this curse into opportunity. Th ey free themselves from the shortsighted perception of our recent intellectual past by adopting a long, multisecular view. If the problems at hand are so deeply enmeshed in our postmodern antihumanist thinking, it seems intellectually fruitful to see them contrasted through the lens of the more remote, early modern humanism. Such a long view is mutually benefi cial: while Renaissance humanism provides a critical perspective on our antihumanism, we can also gain a deeper insight into the distant, historical past, by acknowledging our recent antihumanist inheritance. Stepping back four or fi ve centuries should not, however, justify any hasty generalizations nor blur the nuances one can get by a close reading of texts. On the contrary, the team of authors who contributed to this volume ally historical hermeneutics with genuine, yet dispassionate, interest in our present conceptual constructions. Th is is why they are able to study the humanist past while being free from the positivist illu- sions of some extra-temporal objectivity; it is also why they examine our contemporary culture with a sense of a philological acumen that allows them to distinguish not only the historical specifi city of the antihumanist Preface xxi thinking of the 1960s but also the subsequent departures from the loudly proclaimed orthodoxies of yesterday. Such departures from the antihumanism of the 1960s present a wide range of “anti-antihumanisms,” “neo-humanisms,” and “posthumanisms” that fracture what is often considered at face value to be a monolith of thought and reopen the discussion about the humanism of the future. Th e sense of nuance provided by the crisscrossed historical perspectives is further amplifi ed by the nominalist approach that puts in the spotlight a series of very specifi c, mostly ethical and political problems. Indeed, Early Modern Humanism and Postmodern Antihumanism in Dialogue comprises seven self-contained chapters interconnected by the common orientation of the entire project. Th e overall argument leads the reader from a refl ection on discursive agency to ethical issues related to religion and nature and ends with problems pertaining to politics. James Helgeson’s chapter begins the book by asking the question: Is the Author Responsible? Th e point is not to consider the “death of the author” or its Anglo-American conceptual cousin, “the intentional fallacy,” as pre- suppositions of interpretative practice, but rather as phenomena of our cultural history, especially prevalent at American universities, that need to be critically assessed. Helgeson does so with the help of a cross-reading of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly , Rabelais’ grotesque chronicles, and Renzo Martens’ 2008 fi lm, Episode III: Enjoy Poverty . George Hoff mann ponders the possibility of An Ethics for Antihumanism . Faced with the tensions between radical religious politics and Western European secular states, he invites the reader to look beyond the secular–religious dichotomy which stems from the Reformation’s divorce of ethics from social and rhetorical considerations. He advocates a return to the early modern, humanist vision of ethics as practice which would allow us to embrace a conception of the common good based on process, mutual learning, and cultural grounding. Should We Practice Justice toward Non-Human Animals? asks Ullrich Langer who confronts the classical concept of reciprocal justice and the subsequent Renaissance notion of human dignity with the recent call issued by the radical animal liberation movement that human species not reproduce in order to reduce the suff ering of other species on the planet. xxii Preface

What Came Before, What Comes After Normal? wonders Kathleen Long, refl ecting on the fundamentally modern tendency to establish ideal bodily types and functions as the model for all citizens who have rights within social and political institutions. By bringing Montaigne, Canguilhem, and Foucault into the conversation about the status and meaning of the extraordinary body, she envisions the possibility of life beyond normal. Th e next chapter leads the reader further into the domain of politics by considering the possibility of Colonies without Colonialism . Timothy Hampton dialogically brings together the representations of colonial space by Machiavelli, More, Rabelais, and Montaigne with Foucault’s work on population, territory, and the exercise of power. Th e humanist tradition allows Hampton to reassess the postcolonial experience and to highlight the limitations of the antihumanist focus on the control exer- cised by the national state. Michael Randall confronts Th e Master Th inkers and Humanist Freedom . He analyzes how Nouveaux philosophes and neo-Kantians such as Glucksmann, Lévy, Ferry, and Renaut look to sixteenth-century humanists to counter the claims of their older antihumanist brothers such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. He considers how all these moderns understood, or misunderstood, humanist freedom, as represented by Renaissance thinkers such as Erasmus, Rabelais, and La Boétie. What is at stake is the political freedom threatened by modern totalitarianisms and by early modern voluntary servitude. Can a Bomb Be Human? is the question I address at the end of the book. It is directed at Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus and Rabelais, at postmodern antihumanists such as Derrida and Baudrillard and at their successors and opponents such as Glucksmann and Žižek. Th e question tests our ability to conceive the humanity of the suicide bomber, or, con- versely, our inability and unwillingness to do so. Th e book closes by pondering over the posthuman reality of our present times and our place as intellectuals within it. On the last page of his Elementary Particles of 1998, Michel Houellebecq wrote:

As the last members of this species are extinguished, we think it just to render this last tribute to humanity, a homage which itself will one day Preface xxiii

disappear, buried beneath the sands of time. It is necessary that this tribute be made, if only once. Th is book is dedicated to mankind.34

We do not share Houellebecq’s ironic grandiloquence or his pessi- mism. On the contrary, by conversing with the humanists of the past on specifi c problems of our times, we cautiously hope that there is still room for humanity today.

Jan Miernowski University of Wisconsin-Madison/University of Warsaw, Madison , Wisconsin , USA

34 Th e title of the 2001 Frank Wynne’s English translation is Atomised (London: Vintage, 2001), 379. “Au moment où ses derniers représentants vont s’éteindre, nous estimons légitime de rendre à l’humanité ce dernier hommage; hommage qui, lui aussi, fi nira par s’eff acer et se perdre dans les sables du temps; il est cependant nécessaire que cet hommage, au moins une fois, ait été accompli. Ce livre est dédié à l’homme.” (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 316–317. Acknowledgments

Th is book would never have come to fruition without the intellectual courage, hard work, and fi rm commitment of my friends who agreed to take part in the dialogue which underlies its pages. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. Initially, the project grew out of a panel of the 2010 Sixteenth Century Society Annual Meeting in Montreal. I would like to thank Cathy Yandell for welcoming this initiative at the conference and my colleagues from the Sixteenth Century Society for their insightful remarks and critiques during the discussion. Th e interdisciplinary character of this volume is a refl ection of many intellectual exchanges with colleagues from diff erent fi elds of learning: fi rst and foremost within my own department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but also at other institutions, such as Brandeis University, University of Poznań, Aix-Marseille Université, and the University of Oxford. I am particularly thankful to the interdisciplinary team of scholars and doctoral students gathered in the International PhD program “Th e Traditions of Mediterranean Humanism and the Challenges of Our Times: Th e Frontiers of Humanity” led by Jerzy Axer at the University of Warsaw; the fascinating seminars of that program were a crucial inspiration for me. Such a project, involving participants from diff erent institutions, required a great deal of technical assistance. I would like to thank Robert Przybysz and Krzysztof Miziołek for their unwavering support for our xxv xxvi Acknowledgments team’s videoconferencing needs, Mary Noles for keeping the books in perfect order, as well as Steel Wagstaff , Caitlin A. Yocco-Locascio, Jeff rey M. Th omas, and Kerry Fast for their assistance in formatting and editing the manuscript of the book. Th is work was fi nancially supported by a Kellett Mid-Career Award and a sabbatical leave I received from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. I am very grateful to my home institution for its generosity. My thanks go also to the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” of the University of Warsaw for its fi nancial assistance in the purchasing of source materials. Th e fi nal, editorial stages of work on this volume took place among my colleagues from the Aix-Marseille Université and at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence. I would like to thank in particular Sylvie Daviet, Jean-Raymond Fanlo, Stéphane Lojkine, Claude Perez, and Burno Viard for welcoming me at the Centre Interdisciplinaire d’Étude des Littératures (CIELAM), as well as Ingrid Astruc, Philippe Ferrand, Laure Orlo, and Vincent Sablayrolles for assisting my research at the Bibliothèque Méjanes. I dedicate my work on this book to my son, Tomek. Contents

1 Is the Author Responsible? Artistic Agency in Humanist and Antihumanist Perspectives 1 James Helgeson

2 An Ethics for Antihumanism? Belief and Practice 25 George Hoff mann

3 Should We Practice Justice Toward Nonhuman Animals? Radical Animal Interests, Humanism, and Classical Justice 49 Ullrich Langer

4 What Came Before, What Comes After Normal? Some Humanist and Postmodern Antihumanist Th oughts on the Concept of Normalcy 71 Kathleen Long

5 What Is a Colony Before Colonialism? Humanist and Antihumanist Concepts of Governmentality from Foucault to Montaigne 93 Timothy Hampton

xxvii xxviii Contents

6 Humanists, Antihumanists, and Nouveaux Philosophes on What Makes Us Free 117 Michael Randall

7 Can a Human Bomb Be Human? Humanist and Antihumanist Perspectives on War and Terrorism 139 Jan Miernowski

Afterword 173

Bibliography 189

Index 209 Notes on Contributors

Timothy Hampton is Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of French at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professorship. He has written widely on early modern literature across the Romance languages and English. Among his interests are the politics of cultural transmission, the history of diplomacy, travel literature, historiography, and the history of lyric and popular music. He is the author of Writing from History: Th e Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (1990), Literature and Nation: Inventing Renaissance France (2000), and Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (2009). He is working on a project about multilingualism in the Renaissance and a book on the history of cheerfulness. James Helgeson lectures in the French department of the University of Nottingham. He holds a PhD from Princeton and has also taught at Princeton, Columbia, and Cambridge. He is interested in sixteenth-century literary and intellectual history, as well as questions of historical method, in particular the applicability of both the post-Wittgenstinian tradition of linguistic philosophy and research in cognitive science to historical reading. His most recent book is Th e Lying Mirror: Th e First-Person Stance and Sixteenth-Century Writing (2012). In 2011 he published a collective volume entitled Wittgenstein: Th eory, Literature , a special issue of the journal Paragraph , published as a book by Edinburgh University Press. His fi rst book was Harmonie divine et sub- jectivité poétique chez Maurice Scève (Droz, 2001). In 2012–2013 he was a

xxix xxx Notes on Contributors research lecturer in the Balzan prize project of Prof. Terence Cave (St John’s College, Oxford) entitled “Literature as an Object of Knowledge.” George Hoff mann is Professor of French at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He published in the history of the book ( Montaigne’s Career , 1998) before turning to social and religious history. His recent work includes a forthcoming book on Reformation satire, Alone unto Th eir Distance: French Reformers, Satire, and the Creation of Religious Foreignness . He has recently fi nished essays on the reformed theological notion of communication, “From Communion to Communication” and “Can Th ere Be Conversions without Conversion Stories?” for the Early Modern Conversions Project. Hoff mann continues to publish regularly on Montaigne, on topics including early modern perfect friendship (“Was Montaigne a Good Friend?”) and the importance of Montaigne’s childhood theatrical training (“Self-Assurance and Acting in the Essais”). Other interests include the history of science, court perfor- mance, and biographical criticism. Ullrich Langer is Alfred Glauser Professor of French and former Director of the Center for Early Modern Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His recent publications include Penser les formes du plaisir littéraire à la Renaissance (Garnier, 2009), Th e Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (ed.) (2005), Au-delà de la Poétique: Aristote et la littérature à la Renaissance/Beyond the Poetics: Aristotle and Early Modern Literature (ed.) (Droz, 2002), and Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is working on several projects, including a series of studies of the remonstrance in early modern political and rhetorical culture, as part of an interdisciplinary research team, and a book on the notion of equity in legal and literary discourse in the context of early modern France. Kathleen P. Long is Professor of French in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Her primary fi elds of research are the history of religious violence, the history of science and medicine, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of two books, Another Reality: Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch, and Ronsard (1990) and Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (2006). Long has also pro- duced three edited volumes: High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France (2002), Religious Diff erences in France (2006), and Gender and Scientifi c Discourse in Early Modern Culture (2010). She is completing a study of the works of Th éodore Agrippa d’Aubigné (Politics and the Personal in the Works of Th éodore Agrippa d’Aubigné ), a translation of L’Isle des hermaphrodites (1605) by Notes on Contributors xxxi

Artus Th omas, and a book-length study of concepts of abnormality before the era of disability studies ( Monstrous Knowledge: A History of Disability before Normal ). Jan Miernowski is Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Visiting Professor of the Humanities at the University of Warsaw. His research interests pertain to literary aesthetics studied in a broad philosophical and cultural context. He has published on early modern French literature and its relationship to science (Dialectique et connaissance dans “La Sepmaine” de du Bartas, Droz, 1992) and negative theology (“Signes dissimilaires.” La quête des noms divins dans la poésie française de la Renaissance, Droz, 1997; Le Dieu Néant. Th éologies négatives à l’aube des temps modernes, Brill, 1998; L’ontologie de la contradiction sceptique. Pour une étude de la métaphysique des Essais, Champion, 1998). Miernowski’s most recent publications include a book on hatred as an aesthetic category in French literature from early modernity to the present ( La Beauté de la haine. Essais de misologie littéraire , Droz, 2014) and a col- lected volume devoted to the intersection of the sublime and the grotesque (Droz, 2014). His most current project is a monograph on humanism in posthuman times. Michael Randall is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University. He is the author of Building Resemblance: Analogical Imagery in the Early French Renaissance (1996) and Th e Gargantuan Polity: On the Individual and the Community in the French Renaissance (2008). Previous projects have looked at how medieval legends evolved during the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, at how Renaissance writers like Rabelais might have been aff ected by late medieval poetics and politics, and how the doctrine of the Incarnation is depicted in a late medieval allegory. Randall is working on a book on the notion of “good deceit” in the French Renaissance.