Abstract
This article suggests that humanism is a decisionism in contemporary critical political theory. Despite obvious and multiple differences, leading critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and Jürgen Habermas, among others, share an investment in stabilizing the human being as a ground of the political. This stabilization of the human should concern political theorists, as this article argues, because it uncritically reproduces conceptual affinities between the notion of the human being and sovereign authority. By investing in the stability and centrality of the human being, these theorists perform what will be called, paraphrasing an often neglected argument by Carl Schmitt, a decision to be human. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that Schmitt’s decisionism is not merely circumscribed to sovereignty’s juridico-political dimension, but that it also includes a peculiar commitment to God’s decision to become human in Christ. Against this decisionism as humanism, the article draws on Walter Benjamin, Roberto Esposito, and Jacques Derrida to propose an alternative politics that destabilizes humanity and sovereignty through the emergence of the animal, or what will be called melancholic lycanthropy.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Julieta Suárez-Cao, Inés Valdez, and two anonymous reviewers for comments, suggestions, and criticisms. Special thanks go to Bonnie Honig for her substantial feedback to several drafts of this paper. All remaining mistakes are my own. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support of FONDECYT (Project 11130663) and the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Stateness and Democracy in Latin America (RS130002), supported by the Millennium Scientific Initiative of the Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism of Chile.
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Rossello, D.H. “To be human, nonetheless, remains a decision”: Humanism as decisionism in contemporary critical political theory. Contemp Polit Theory 16, 439–458 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-016-0070-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-016-0070-2