Charles Piecyk

Disclaimer: This version of the chapter corresponds to that before publication. You can find the published version on the Trivent Publishing website. Philosopher and “historian of ideas” Michel Foucault is remembered among other things for his statement that what we call “man” or “the human” today is an “invention of recent date”, and one that is bound to disappear “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (2022, p. 422). In that regard, he follows on the footsteps of his philosophical “mentor” Friedrich Nietzsche, who had already announced nearly a century before that following the “death of God”, man was something to be (ultimately) surpassed. Fast-forward to this day, forty years after Foucault’s death, the rise in popularity and prevalence of philosophical movements such as transhumanism and posthumanism which challenge the present conception of the human and advocate for its overcoming, seems if anything to confirm the prophecy Foucault formulated back in the 1960s. However, one could wonder to what extent it corresponds to what Foucault had envisioned by the “death of man” [la mort de l’homme]? The goal of this paper will thus be to assess (classic) transhumanism and (critical) posthumanism at the level of discourse from a Foucauldian lens, analysing their main characteristics and identifying potential shortcomings in both—for instance in terms of how they deal with the question of the “self” or “subject” today—and to see if recent alternatives such as Sorgner’s Euro-Transhumanism can provide a conception of the human and its overcoming that would be more aligned with the Foucauldian (and Nietzschean) perspective(s) on the question.

Foucault famously stated in his 1966 book The Order of Things that ‘man is an invention of recent date’, and ‘one perhaps nearing its end’. The aim of this paper is to make sense of the Foucauldian assumption that what we understand by ‘man’ (or ‘the human’) today is a modern notion. It will do so by tracing its origin back to the Kantian project and the Enlightenment, following its subsequent trajectory in Nietzsche, Foucault himself, and then finally in Transhumanism and Posthumanism. It will also show how this notion has been consistently challenged in our culture, exploring the possibility of its end and overcoming, which has been announced with Nietzsche’s proclamation of the ‘death of God’ and of the Übermensch as the next logical step in the development of humankind, and finds its expression today in the Transhumanist and Posthumanist projects, which put the emphasis on the imperative to provide an alternative to what appears to be an outdated and problematic concept as it is.

The posthumous publication, in 2018, of Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh, volume four of The History of Sexuality, defied expectations, both by his choice of the ancient authors he studied and by his broadening of the problems he explored. Based on the archives kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this article formulates, for the first time, a series of hypotheses concerning the stages in which Foucault composed this ‘Christian’ volume over a period of more than six years. The three moments distinguished here correspond to three different ways of approaching the initial problem, formulated in 1975, of the history of the confession of sexuality. Whereas scholars have hitherto assumed that Foucault abandoned his first project during a long period of doubts or hesitations, the archives show, on the contrary, a continuous and coherent work—which does not exclude major evolutions in terms of the corpus, periods, and themes studied. In particular, over the years Foucault’s project appears increasingly torn between two different histories: a history of confession, which was at the heart of the initial project, and a history of moral experience, which, in an analysis of the self, interiorizes the history of sexuality.