Its supporters were obviously out of tune with the theoretical affordances of the time, as manifested in postcolonialism, feminist theory, biopolitics, material studies, and adjacent discourses. Consequently, by the end of the twentieth century, “the human” had become an outdated category. Once its religious and metaphysical foundations had become questionable, traditional humanism proved to be in a fragile position on a dubious and oppressive mission. The discourse on humanism, which had powered the history of European thought from the ancient “Know thyself,” through its Renaissance renewal in Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino, into Enlightenment philosophy by Rousseau and Kant, up to early twentieth-century Neo-Kantianism and existentialism, was exposed as leading to a dead end. Executing Foucault’s conjecture, Derrida ( 1982) declared the end of man in his “Finis homini,” following up on Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism and the anthropocentric deconstruction of Western metaphysics. “Man is an invention of recent date,” Foucault famously wrote, “and one perhaps nearing its end” ( 1994: 387). It was only a question of time when this fate would strike the category of the human as such. The death of God announced by Nietzsche was followed by the death of the subject (Lévi-Strauss) and the death of the author (Barthes).
Twentieth-century philosophy and social theory had its prominent victims.
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