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nature transparent to consciousness. This alleged double trans–
parence, of man and nature, runs directly up against the objec–
tions of the authors being considered here. If all our discourses
are mere symptoms, in which neither consciousness nor the
cogito
speaks, but only the "Other" of Heideggerian Being, the
1
1
project of mastery and transparence through subjectivity is both
naive and mistaken. Hence the radical call, recently made
by
Lyotard, "to render philosophy inhuman. "
Without entering into the details of these critiques of hu–
manism, it is nonetheless possible to make two observations.
First, we note that in this critique French philosophy managed to
j
bring together two currents of thought, Marxism and
Heideggerianism, that had hitherto been thought to be both polit-
ically and philosophically opposed. More anxious to borrow se-
ductive ideas than to remain coherent, French philosophers built
many strange improbable bridges between these two intellectual
traditions in the 1960s, antihumanism being a particularly im–
portant one. If one wishes to understand the peculiar style of
French philosophy in this period, and its weakness, this devel–
opment is worth pondering.
Second, because of their militant antihumanism, the
philosophers of the "sixties" ran up against certain problems
when faced with the best aspects of the modern humanist tradi–
tion-"the rights of man," for instance, which were suspected of
arising from ideological mystification or metaphysical illusion.
Witness the acrobatic attempt of Lyotard, who, in
Le differend,
re–
places the embarrassing notion of "the rights of man" with the
less metaphysically charged "authority of the infinite." Irony is
hardly the correct response to such a remark. One must rather
emphasize the difficulty that gave rise to it. Since the beginning
of the 1980s the idea of human rights has once again become both
theoretically and practically indispensable in the face of totalitar–
ianism, and this idea's resurgence is not unconnected to the
eclipse of the most extremely antihumanist strains in the
"School of '68," that of Marxism particularly. This return to a
humanism of rights explains why certain leading lights of the
philosophical generation of the 1960s felt the need to undergo ver–
itable conversions. Thus Foucault, who since 1965 had bandied
the famous slogan "the death of man ," would find himself, at
the end of his life, drawing up a sketch for a new Declaration of
