Is the critical theory of society compatible with, or similar to, structuralist ‘antihumanism,’ as is sometimes asserted nowadays, or is it a humanism? It can only be the latter, but in a rather qualified sense (which integrates the truth-content of critiques of various humanisms) that requires giving greater determinacy to the category of humanism, rather than treating it as a monolithic, made-to-measure straw man, as its opponents do. To this end, we must introduce a distinction between positive (or transcendental, normative) humanism, and negative (or immanent, critical) humanism.
A negative humanism would be one that grants methodological priority to the determinant power of the fetishistic categories of capital, while critically disclosing that these categories are themselves the displaced, perverted social practice of women and men in definite historical conditions (unlike an Althusserian antihumanism, which grants methodological priority to structures claimed to determine every society, the genesis of which it can’t explain but only assume, and thereby eternalize). A negative humanism is animated by the contradiction between the empirical existence of the whole of the species, and the concept of humanity (as universal humaneness, or historical subject) which is a potentiality produced through the former’s heretofore blind, nature-like, antagonistic development, but presently exists only in the mode of being denied, as a not-yet (in Bloch’s terms). It imputes no originary ‘essence’ or ‘nature’ to humanity, but rather sees humanity itself as an ‘emergent property’ not yet fully attained (hence Marx’s view that we’re still in “the pre-history of humanity”). As we once wrote: “There was no generic human being in precapitalist epochs: capital produces human universality in perverted, topsy-turvy form by universalizing dehumanization[1].” Thus Postone’s argument that disalienation is not the return to an invariant human essence from which we have been estranged, but rather the appropriation of species-capacities that have been developed in alien form, as the capacities of capital.
One could call this a ‘realization’ of humanity, but it’d be the realization of a produced potential, not of something that was always there except hidden, stolen, repressed, whatever. There are drives that are repressed, but these are not what make us human, they are basically the drives of all animals, and ceasing to repress them, or to repress them in such narrow, traumatic ways, may be a moment of the realization of humanity, but it wouldn’t mean ceasing to repress humanity, it’d mean accepting, rather than frantically beating back, the fact that humanity is always also part of nature, thereby freeing us from the spell of natural history by renouncing the bestial claim to domination.
Positive humanism would be the inverse of all this: humanity is unproblematically existing, has an invariant nature/qualities, and its conscious subjective practice can be immediately considered as the historical movens here and now.
[1] The reality of dehumanization needs no philosophical proof by reference to an external, normative standard to those who experience it daily, nor does our struggle against it require any program of justification, and so the demand to become human subjects and thereby attain concrete universality has remained a revolutionary one inscribed on the banners of insurgent proletarians, women’s liberationists, and the great black radical thinkers (James, Fanon, Boggs, Césaire); only complacent tenured academics, career activists, and party hacks can afford to whine about humanism tout court as some bogeyman, and badger the dehumanized back into the impotent, marginal mire of our particular abjection, nailing us to the constricting carapace of those alienated role-determinations called ‘identities’ so that these pseudo-intellectual spectators can admire the oh-so-picturesque richness of our ‘difference.’