Man is the Indestructible: Blanchot’s Obscure Humanism

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 ‘corre-late’ 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 The space occupied by divinity, or the sacred, has withdrawn.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. Humanism announces 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.