Peversion and Autism: Humanism between Foucault and Laruelle

The article presents a comparative analysis of the humanistic projects of Michel Foucault and François Laruelle. It examines the genealogy and key tenets of Foucauldian anti-humanism and Laruelle's non-humanism.
The author shows how Foucault’s anti-humanism, despite its critique of metaphysics, falls into a “perverse” structure: it presumes to know what the Other needs and thereby imposes a new form of alienation. Laruelle, on the contrary, proposes a non-humanism based on the radical immanence of the “ordinary man,” that derives knowledge of himself from himself, bypassing philosophical intermediaries. The key distinction between the two approaches is considered along the psychoanalytic lines of perversion (Foucault) and autism (Laruelle): whereas the former becomes entangled in ethically discordant relations with the subject, the latter affirms the self-sufficient, axiomatic solitude of man. The author also demonstrates how the methodology chosen by each thinker is intrinsically linked to their conceptions of the human.
As a result, the question of humanism emerges as a diagnostic key to the very core of philosophical theory and practice, to their differentiating mechanisms, the product of which is an ontological and epistemological incision of the subject of philosophical knowledge.

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