Culture March 9, 2015

Long before Feminism, or Theory, or the Great Recession, the category of “Man” was a problem. In fact, the creation of the category in the late eighteenth century already signified an ideological crisis, because to assert the “Rights of Man” as such was to justify rebellion against all existing forms of rule, including slavery. Every generation since that age of revolution has known its own time as yet another age of the crisis of man, for the word itself is both infinitely plural and narrowly singular, and the idea it conjures is at once universal and particular.