The Story So Far

In part 1 of this 3-part essay on Renaud Camus, I unpacked what the so-called “Great Replacement” is not. I distinguished Camus’ theory of “replacism” from the conspiracy theory memes that circulate among his haters, set out his analysis of “peoples” as distinct entities that, while porous, are not interchangeable, and described the “Great Deculturation” that Camus argues preceded the current political norm of pretending that peoples do not exist. Finally I identified this ideology with the currently dominant American empire.

In part 2 I explored the metaphysics of this “replacist” worldview, drawing on links Camus makes to historic slave-owning practices and the management theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor. I connected these points with Heidegger’s analysis of the instrumentalist, “enframing” technological mindset, to suggest that the core characteristic of replacism is the destructive blindness to relationship: a kind of epistemological violence I gloss with Camus’ term nocence. I offered a brief reading of the airport as a built environment sacred to replacism, in the same way a cathedral is to Christianity, to emphasise how the replacist migration dynamic isn’t confined to those ethnicities usually depicted as subaltern but also encompasses those wealthy, predominantly Western demographics such as “digital nomads”. That, indeed, this group comes far closer to embodying the replacist ideal of maximum fungibility and interchangeability than the Global South populations at the centre of most European migration-related culture war.

Introduction

In what follows, part 3, 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.

I’ll reference the cyborg feminist Sophie Lewis, to show how this propagates into a model of industrialised fertility - of reproduction as manufacture, implicitly always already Taylorist. And I’ll draw on the transhumanist Martine Rothblatt to show how this generalises into a vision of human bodies viewed not as whole organisms but arrays of interchangeable parts. Finally I’ll suggest - perhaps unexpectedly - a note of qualified optimism about the endpoint of this trajectory...