Harrington on Camus

Mary Harrington’s three essays on Renaud Camus and the implications of his work are fascinating.

One: “In what follows, the first of a three-part series, I’ll argue with Camus that replacism is not a conspiracy. And yet, polemic aside, it addresses something real: a structural blind spot across the Western world concerning the nature and meaning of human culture, predicated on the idea that peoples have no collective attributes, only individual ones.”

Two: “I’ll set Camus’ reading of [Frederick Winslow] Taylor against my own of Martin Heidegger’s classic 1954 lecture on technology, looking in particular at the epistemological violence Taylorism both enacts and occludes: a kind of unseeing, that I’ll connect with Camus’ own coinage: ‘nocence’. I’ll discuss how this manifests in our built environment, and in the wider sociocultural implications of what I’ve called ‘the nomos of the airport’. And with these references in place, I’ll explain how Camus’ work deepens my own inquiry into the the industrialisation of humans: what we might call the replacism of the body.”

Three: “I’ll link this framework more closely to my own ongoing enquiry into the relation between women, family, and the technological mindset. I’ll draw on Ivan Illich to show how the replacist anthropology is inextricable from the history of modern family relations, how this order is a core precondition for modern market society, and how this culminates in an increasingly literal technologisation first of women’s bodies and finally of ‘human’ bodies whose sex has come to be understood as an optional bolt-on.”

Her concept of “globo homo economicus” dovetails nicely with her powerful analysis elsewhere of “Meat Lego Gnosticism.”