Unpaywalled: Great Replacement Part One

I'm unpaywalling my Renaud Camus essays, with discussion

Over the course of this year one of the more extended pieces of thinking I’ve done at this newsletter has been to synthesise my own thinking on posthumanism, with that of the French social critic Renaud Camus on “replacism”.

• In part 1, I discussed what Camus’ coinage of “replacism” is and is not, and who’s really behind it.

• In part 2, I looked at “replacism” as a moral framework, as expressed (for example) in the built environment.

• And in part 3, I linked this with my own work on “Meat Lego” transhumanism.

Camus is widely considered too radioactive even to namecheck. The phrase he coined, “The Great Replacement”, has come to serve as shorthand for a slew of meat-headed, hateful, and sometimes frankly insane conspiracies all of which Camus himself energetically disavows. But I have found his actual work, as opposed to the ideas attributed to him by people who haven’t read him, very thought-provoking, and think it should be more widely understood. Partly so his ideas can be disaggregated from the nutjobs, but also because he homes in on a dimension of the social fabric - that of peoples - that has become taboo even (in some cases) among those “post-liberal” conservatives who speak to aspects of public life that have grown threadbare in the postmodern world.

So over the next three weeks, I’m going to unpaywall parts, 1, 2, and 3 in succession, and host a subscriber discussion thread every Wednesday for anyone who wants to chew over the themes in the essays.

Without further ado, then, here’s part 1 out from behind the paywall:

Comments on the essay itself are for paid subscribers only. But next Wednesday, 16 October, I’ll open a discussion thread for all readers of this newsletter (free and paid). See you there!