An Atheism that is not humanist emrges in French thought

This monograph traces the emergence of a distinctive atheist tradition in twentieth-century French thought that explicitly rejected both theism and secular humanism. Geroulanos demonstrates how key French intellectuals developed forms of atheism that refused to replace God with humanity as a new absolute, challenging the conventional assumption that atheism necessarily leads to humanism.

The work examines how thinkers from Alexandre Kojève and Georges Bataille through Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida articulated atheist positions that simultaneously critiqued religious transcendence and humanist celebrations of human autonomy, reason, and dignity. Geroulanos shows how this "antihumanist atheism" emerged partly in response to the perceived failures of Enlightenment humanism, which these thinkers viewed as perpetuating theological structures under secular guise. The human subject, in this reading, merely occupied the vacant throne of God without fundamentally altering the metaphysical framework.

Through careful intellectual history, Geroulanos reconstructs how this tradition developed across phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, and poststructuralism. He demonstrates how these thinkers drew on sources including Nietzsche, Heidegger, and ethnography to develop atheisms that emphasized human finitude, the constitutive role of language and social structures, and the death of the sovereign subject alongside the death of God. The work reveals how French antihumanism was fundamentally an atheist project that sought to think beyond both divine and human sovereignty.

The monograph makes several important contributions to understanding the God debate. First, it challenges the binary opposition between theism and humanism that often structures these discussions, revealing a third position that rejects both. Second, it demonstrates how atheism can lead to radical critiques of human exceptionalism rather than its celebration. Third, it shows how the rejection of God can motivate fundamental reconceptualizations of subjectivity, agency, and meaning rather than simply removing deity from an otherwise unchanged worldview.

By situating these developments within broader intellectual and political contexts, including reactions to fascism and colonialism, Geroulanos illuminates why French thinkers saw both theism and humanism as complicit in structures of domination. His work reveals how atheism in twentieth-century France became a starting point for reimagining human existence without guarantees of either divine providence or rational progress.