Freedom and Anti-Humanism in Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze

This thesis aims to confer coherent philosophical status on the notion of anti-humanist freedom using the work of Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze. It argues, against critics of structuralism-aligned anti-humanist thought who claim that we must choose either freedom and a meaningful ethics or anti-humanism and structuralist determinism, that Lacan and Deleuze offer compatibilist anti-humanist concepts of freedom which make freedom and determinism consistent and expand our very conception of the ethical. In doing so, it shows that the cause of freedom is not diminished by anti-humanism but advanced by it. By bringing these thinkers together around the concept of freedom, this thesis also aims to further problematise the orthodox narrative of their relation in which they are portrayed as shibboleths to each other in late 20th century debates within continental philosophy, with Lacan presented as the high priest of structuralism, negativity and lack, and Deleuze as the vitalist philosopher of difference, positivity and immanence. It concludes that in the final analysis Lacan’s anti-humanism is tempered by a residual humanism in his thought, and that Deleuze offers the more profound and successful version of anti-humanist freedom.