Self-Hating Nazis

From Heidegger’s portentous “Letter on Humanism” (written in 1946 and published in France the next year) to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s trend-surfing 1980 conference “The Ends of Man” (inspired by Jacques Derrida’s celebrated 1969 essay of the same name), the dereified human subject was over and again cast by leading thinkers of mid-century Europe as a relic of Western metaphysics in decline—on its way out with logocentrism, late capitalism, and liberal democracy. In between, there was Michel Foucault’s “Death of Man,” Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” and, in a similar spirit, Louis Althusser’s “anti-humanist” interrogation of the constitutively benighted “subject of ideology.”

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