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Stefanos Geroulanos. An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Print. 423 pp.
Zarathustra's announcement, "God is dead!" offered twentieth century atheisms a formidable vanguard. Western atheism certainly did not originate with Nietzsche's parable; yet philosophers of both atheist and Christian persuasions have since appealed to Zarathustra for atheism's succinct crystallization. For philosophers, as well as historians, literary critics, and theologians familiar with Nietzsche's post-World War II French uptake, God's death also entailed man's (or the centrality of the human's) death. Their mutual demise set the mise en scène for the celebrated clash between structuralism and poststructuralism. "Rather than the death of God-or rather, in the wake of that death and in profound correlation with it," wrote Michel Foucault at the crossroads of that clash, "what Nietzsche's thought heralds is the end of his murderer" (385). This French digestion of Nietzsche made it apparent that the Übermensch signified man's withering, not his triumphant victory. It marked the birth of a "post-human" era. Although Foucault popularized this reading along with other 1960's thinkers such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche's anti-humanism did not originate within this philosophical cadre. Rather, the connection between atheism and anti-humanism only became apparent, as Stefanos Geroulanos argues in his recently published An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, following a generation of inter-war thinkers who first wrested humanism from atheism.
Geroulanos patiently excavates from beneath the 1960s anti-humanists a loosely knit philosophical movement that gave shape to French philosophers' opposition and hatred, congealing in their rejection of humanism. His intellectual history of the second quarter of twentieth-century France re-animates oft-neglected writers like Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève, and André Malraux, situating them in conversation with more celebrated figures like George Bataille, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the enduring German influence on French thought, Martin Heidegger. Despite their disparate metaphysical commitments and political pursuits, these thinkers advanced a brand of atheism that did not aim to redeem a liberating secular or scientific culture. They...