Balibar on Marx 6th Thesis

8/12/2019 Balibar on Marx 6th Thesis

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able of contents1. From Philosophical Anthropology to Social Ontology and Back: What to Do with Marx's Sixth Thesis on

Feuerbach?...................................................................................................................................................... 1

Bibliography...................................................................................................................................................... 22

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From Philosophical Anthropology to Social Ontology and Back: What to Do with Marx's Sixth Thesison Feuerbach?Author: Balibar, tienneProQuest document link

Abstract: This essay is based on a reading of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach from 1845, especially Thesis 6,which discusses its wording with reference to signifying chains tracing back to the constitution of Western

Metaphysics. The claim that "the human essence is not an abstract being inhabiting the singular individual" not

only rejects post-Aristotelian metaphysics, but also theologies of the interpellation of the subject. Saying that "in

its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations" opens the possibility of a multifaceted ontology of relations.

Further, it identifies a weakness in Marx's assessment of Feuerbach's philosophy of the "generic being." It is on

this basis that applications to contemporary debates on philosophical anthropology should be reformulated.

Links: Linking ServiceFull text: The Theses on Feuerbach, an ensemble of eleven aphorisms apparently not destined for publication inthis form, were written by Marx in the course of 1845 while he was working on the manuscript of the German

Ideology, also left unpublished. They were later discovered by Friedrich Engels, who published them with some

corrections (not all insignificant) as an appendix to his own pamphlet, "Feuerbach and the End of German

Classical Philosophy" (1886).1They are widely considered one of the emblematic formularies of Western

philosophy and sometimes compared to other concise texts - such as Parmenides' Poemor Wittgenstein's

Tractatus-- that combine a speculative content of seemingly enigmatic, inexhaustible richness with a manifesto-

like style of enunciation, apparently signaling a radically new mode of thinking. Some of the best-known

aphorisms have achieved a posteriorithe same value of a turning point in philosophy (or in our relationship tophilosophy) as, for instance, not only Parmenides's and Wittgenstein's respective "tauton gar esti noein te kai

einai"2and "Worber man nicht sprechen kann, darber muss man schweigen" (27), but also Spinoza's "ordo et

connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et connexio rerum" (EthicsII, Prop. VII) or Kant's "Gedanken ohne Inhalt

sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind" (Critique of Pure ReasonB75/A51), etc.

In such conditions, it is both extremely tempting and imprudent to embark on a new commentary. But it is also

inevitable that we return to the letter of the Theses, checking our understanding of their terminology and

phrases, whenever we decide to assess the place of Marx (and an interpretation of Marx) in our contemporary

debates. This is what I am trying to do in this presentation, at least partially, with regard to an ongoing

discussion of the meaning and uses of the categories "relation" and "relationship" (both possible equivalents for

the German Verhltnis). The implications of this discussion range from logic to ethics, but involve in particular a

subtle, perhaps decisive nuance separating a "philosophical anthropology" from a "social ontology" (or an

ontology of the "social being," as Lukcs, among others, would put it). My purpose quite naturally leads to

emphasizing the importance of Thesis Six, which in Marx's original version reads as follows:

Feuerbach lst das religise Wesen in das menschlicheWesen auf. Aber das menschliche Wesen ist kein dem

einzelnen Individuum inwohnendes Abstraktum. In seiner Wirklichkeit ist es das Ensemble der

gesellschaftlichen Verhltnisse.

Feuerbach, der auf die Kritik dieses wirklichen Wesens nicht eingeht, ist daher gezwungen: 1. von dem

geschichtlichen Verlauf zu abstrahieren und das religise Gemt fr sich zu fixieren, und ein abstrakt - isoliert-

menschliches Individuum vorauszusetzen. 2. Das Wesen kann daher nur als "Gattung", als innere, stumme, dievielen Individuen natrlichverbindende Allgemeinheit gefat werden.

Here is a standard English translation:

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Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the humanessence. But the human essence is no abstraction

inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled to abstract from

the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract -

isolated- human individual. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as "genus," as an internal, dumb

generality which naturallyunites the many individuals.

(Marx/Engels13-15)

Among the many commentaries devoted to these formulas (and especially to the first three phrases), I single

out those of Ernst Bloch and Louis Althusser, which illustrate sharply antithetic positions.3For Bloch, whose

detailed commentary, part of his magnum opus Das Prinzip Hoffnung, was first published separately in 1953,4

the Thesesinclude the full construction of the concept of revolutionary praxis, presented as a "word/motto (

Losungswort)" that overcomes the metaphysical antitheses of "subject" and "object" and of "philosophical

thinking" and "political action." The Thesesexpress the crucial idea that (social) realityas such is "changeable (

vernderbar)" because its complete notion does not only denote givenstates of affairs or relations arising from

an accomplished process (i.e., the present and the past), but also always already involves the objective

possibility of a futureor a "novelty (novum)" - something neither classical materialism nor idealism ever

admitted. For Althusser, the Thesesare symptomatic of the theoretical revolution (or "epistemological break")

through which Marx would have dropped an essentially Feuerbachian, "humanist" understanding of communism

to adopt a scientific (non-ideological) problematic of social relations and class struggles as the motor of history.

The Thesesthus deserve a (rather counter-intuitive) reading that reveals the "new" ideas twisting an "old"

language to express (or rather announce and anticipate) a theory that, essentially, has no precedent, but whose

implications are still to come. (The main example of this hermeneutic of twisted, internally inadequate concepts

is Althusser's reading of praxisas a philosophical name for "a system of articulated social practices").

Interestingly, both Bloch's and Althusser's commentaries emphasize the temporalscheme of a "future"

objectively included within the present as a disruptive possibility - except that for Bloch, this schemecharacterizes history, whereas for Althusser, it characterizes theoryor discourse.5

What is most interesting for us are the ways they resolve the paradoxes in Thesis Sixthat arise from antithetic

definitions of "human essence (das menschliche Wesen)"; these definitions directly affect the notion of

"anthropology" (inherited from Kant, Hegel, and Humboldt, but above all of course from Feuerbach, whose main

thesis in The Essence of Christianity[1841] is that the secret of theological discourse is anthropological

experience, or that the idea of God and his attributes are inverted, imaginary representations of human

essence). "But the human essence" - Marx bluntly objects - "is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.

In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations." This seems to leave no other possibility than admitting that

"human essence" is indeed a necessary notion (even a fundamental one, indicating the primacy of theanthropological question in philosophy), although it can be understood in different ways: a wrong way (attributed

to Feuerbach--"human essence is an abstraction (or an idea) inherent in every isolated individual"), and a right

way (claimed by Marx himself--"human essence is the ensemble of social relations," whatever the logical value

of "is"). Althusser, however, goes in a different direction: for him, the very use of the expression "human

essence" involves an equivalence of two notions, "theoretical humanism" and "philosophical anthropology," with

which a theory (i.e., a materialist investigation) of the "ensemble" (the system or articulation) of "social relations"

is incompatible, because such a theory refers to continuous historical transformations of what it means to be

"human" in relation (of cooperation, division of labor, domination, and class struggle) to other humans and thus

destroys the very idea of "universal" and "permanent" attributes that could belong to "every single individual" (or

subject). In short, a theory of the ensemble of social relations radically historicizes and de-essentializes our

concept of the human, dismantling both anthropology as a theory and humanism as an ideology. The important

expression in Marx's aphorism would accordingly be "in seiner Wirklichkeit ( in its reality)," signaling (as a



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theoretical injunction or "poteau indicateur" within theory itself) that the discourse of the "essence of man" is no

longer tenable, and ought to be replacedwith a different discourse that would analyze social relations. The

"social" opposes the "human" just as the "relations" oppose the "essence."

But if we return to Bloch's commentary, we observe two things. On the one hand, he clearly falls under this

critique, because he maintains that there are two successive anthropologies (just as there are two varieties of

materialism, and in fact two types of "humanism," one that is abstract and speaks of eternal attributes of "man,"

and one that - in Marx's own terms - is "real" and speaks of historical transformations of society that also create

a "new man"). 6On the other hand, he is able to connect Thesis Sixwith other Marxian writings which are nearly

contemporary, particularly the well-known critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizenin Zur

Judenfrage, which leads him to emphasize that the anthropology of "abstract essence" is in fact itself

historically produced: it expresses the political worldview (or ideology) of the ascending bourgeoisie that

resumes the ancient philosophical tradition of "natural right" (Naturrecht) in order to give its own institution of the

national citizen a universalistic foundation. Thus Bloch not only indicates that "abstract humanism" has a class

dimension; he also indicates that it is difficult to radically criticize everyhumanism and anthropological discourse

while retaining a universalisticperspective (including a socialist or communist revolutionary perspective).

I find these crossed arguments particularly interesting now that debates about universalism(and different types

of universalism--not only bourgeois or proletarian, but also gender-based, Eurocentric, or planetary) tend to

replace the "dispute of humanism" as it was fought in continental philosophy (within and outside its Marxist

circles) in the 1960s and 70s. Perhaps we should say that the new "dispute," equally acute, partly continuing

and partly displacing the "dispute of humanism," is precisely the dispute of universalism. 7My own position from

this angle is that "humanism" and "anthropology" are in fact two distinct notions or problems that ought to be

treated separately. A "non-humanist" or even "anti-humanist" anthropology, however paradoxical the expression

may sound to classical philosophers, could prove not only possible, but necessary. But in order to disentangle

the two notions, a fresh discussion of what Marx's Thesisexactly means proves illuminating.8I divide this

discussion into three parts: 1) a new discussion of the pars destruensin Marx's Thesis Six, namely the critiqueof an "abstract essence" inherent in the "isolated individual," in order to elucidate which doctrines (beyond

Feuerbach himself) are implied in this categorization; 2) a new discussion of the pars construens, namely the

recommendation of an "equation" of human essence with "social relations," in which I focus on some oddities in

the wording of the Thesis; 3) a critical discussion of the "bifurcation" offered by Marx's thesis and an exposition

of which orientations his formulas openand which they close(or even prohibit) in a philosophical debate about

anthropology that predated his intervention and that continued or became renovated after it.

The negative statement: the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.A discussion addressing the semantics and grammar of Marx's statement must rely on the original German. To

translate (into English or French) is useful but insufficient, since Marx's words have no perfect equivalent andinvolve a spectrum of meanings that becomes truncated in other languages. As we will see, it is also important

that Marx uses a Fremdwortor foreign term.

Let us begin with the crucial category Wesen. The usual translation, as we saw, is "essence," and this is of

course inevitable because Marx is discussing Feuerbach, who famously wrote Das Wesen des Christentumsor

The Essence of Christianity, where, as I recall above, the thesis is held that "God's essence" is an imaginary

projection of human essence (i.e., nature). But a perfectly acceptable translation would be also "being," and in

fact the common understanding of "ein menschliches Wesen" in German would be "a human being." A

correlation of the two notions beingand essence(in Greek, to onand ousia) has been effective since the

beginning of Western metaphysics, particularly in Aristotle; even today his legacy remains divided between, on

the one hand, empiricist-nominalists for whom the only "real beings" are individuals (or, in Aristotle's

formulation, "individual substances") and for whom general notions or essences (also called "universals")

represent intellectual abstractions that apply to a multiplicity of individuals bearing similar characteristics, and,



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on the other hand, essentialist-realists for whom the singular individuals "participate of" (or even "derive from")

general ideas (which can be conceived as essences, types, or species) that are themselves (hyper)real.

This general background (long predating "bourgeois" ideology) explains why Marx's critique cannot avoid

raising ontological questions. But there is also, I believe, a need to refer to a Hegelian background that was very

familiar to both Feuerbach and Marx: this is the passage in the Phenomenology of Spirit(1807) where Hegel

defines the essence of "spirit" (der Geist, which generically designates all the figures of consciousness that

have become intersubjective, therefore institutional, and therefore historical) as an "operation of all and

everyone" (Tun aller und jeder), so that a "spiritual essence" (das geistige Wesen) is also, as such, "the

essence of all essences" (das Wesen aller Wesen) (154; Ch. VI, "Spirit").9This is a remarkable formula that we

should not hasten to deem a mere product of dialectical jargon, because it contains the principle of a transition

from individual consciousness, where subjectivity and objectivity remain antithetic, to collective figures, where

subjectivity and objectivity emerge (even if through many contradictions) as complementary aspects of the

same historicity. This is indeed a problematic that Marx will never abandon. A discourse of "essences,"

however, does not capture all the connotations of the passage: if we translate it in terms of "a spiritual being"

and "the being of all beings," we discover another dimension of the same question - one that is not only

ontological but furthermore onto-theological, much in the sense that Heidegger will later define it as an

identification (a confusion, from his point of view) of the "being of being (Sein des Seienden)" with a "supreme

being." We are led to understand that all the "essentialist" formulas are inscribed in a semantic chain, where the

theologicalthesis (that the "being of beings" or "supreme being" is God) and the anthropologicalthesis

advocated by Feuerbach (that the "being of beings" is Man, who is also "supreme" in the sense that all other

beings are included in his representations) can be problematically subsumed under a third one: the "being of

beings" is Spirit (with the latter also serving as a historical transition between the first two, depending on

whether you understand "spirit" as a transcendent attribute of the Divine, or as a transcendental faculty of the

Human, synonymous with intelligence, representation, imagination, and so on). This elucidation adds important

connotations to the debate initiated by Marx and continued after him, because it shows that Marx (in spite of hisadmiration for the critique of religion accomplished by Feuerbach) had a strong prescience that "anthropology,"

inasmuch as its key category is "human nature" or "the essence of man," could be simply another theology, and

"Man" or "Humankind" another name for God (or a Divine Name), provided it be endowed with sufficiently

eminent or transcendent attributes or powers (such as "self-consciousness," "self-emancipation," or "self-

creation") - which, after all, is a heretical but perfectly defendable thesis within a Christian discursive tradition. 10

It also shows that Marx could find himself caught in the same aporia, inasmuch as "History," "Society,"

"Revolution," or even "Praxis" could become instantiations of "Spirit" (in spite of or even because of all

declarations of "materialism"). These categories would then oscillate between an anthropological and a

theological understanding. We know that this was quite frequently the case in the Marxist tradition, and in factfew Marxists are immunized against the (onto)theological recuperation of their concepts (Bloch and Althusser

being no exceptions). The question then becomes: would Marx be aware of such a possibility in the very

moment he uncovers the "metaphysical" content of Feuerbach's "materialism," when he suggests that

Feuerbach remains a "bourgeois theologian"? 11And by what "strategy" could Marx not repeat(or "iterate") the

onto-theological effect, when he keeps referring to the issue of "human being/essence" in his criticism of the

anthropological reduction of theological discourse? Such expressions as "social ontology" or "historical

anthropology" are not sufficient answers, but the solution also cannot reside in cancelling the anthropological

framework from the outside.

A further indication that the conceptual tensions underlying every choice of a word or a propositional form in

Marx's text are not to be understood without a close comparison with Hegel also results from discussing the

antithesis between "abstraction" ( Abstraktum) and "reality" (Wirklichkeit, probably better translated - jargon

permitted - as "effectivity" or "effective reality"). There is a direct source for this opposition in the same crucial



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passage from the Phenomenology: when reaching the level of the "spirit," which (anticipating later

developments of his political philosophy) he identifies with the "ethical life of a people," Hegel explains that

singular entities (figures) or individual subjects (consciousnesses) are only abstractionsor abstract moments of

the "effective" spirit itself. This explains why, in the great antithesis forming the core of the critical argument of

Thesis Six, Marx can at the same time vindicate a "nominalist" point of view laStirner, for which a general

notion or idea (e.g., that of a species or kind, such as Humankind or Mankind) is only an abstraction, and reject

as equally "abstract" the notion of isolated individuals themselves (such as they are imagined, with the help of

metaphysics, by bourgeois political or economic theory): because both the collective essence and the singular

"egoistic" individual are abstractions when they are "isolated" from the Wirklichkeit, which is much more than

"reality" (i.e., more than a de factoexistence or observable "being there") insofar as it is an operation or a

process of realization (Wirklichkeitcomes from Werkand wirken, the German equivalents for opusand operari

). Hegel had defined this process as Spirit, and Marx himself will identify it with an ensemble of historical

processes of transformation affecting social relations. Thus Marx retains Hegel's simultaneous rejectionof the

antithetic "essences," which are all the more "abstract" since they claim to represent the negation of abstraction,

but he also radically subverts the "logic" of that rejection in terms of a "spiritual" operation. How radically, that is

the question. But before we consider his definition of a process that is as "effective" as Spirit while not being

Spirit, we must reflect on another term used by Marx that has remained hitherto undiscussed.

This is the (negative) formula: "...kein dem einzelnen Individuum inwohnendesAbstractum." Up to now,

following most commentators, we have been focusing on the antithetic terms Individuumor Abstractum, the

individual or the abstraction (easily identified with an idea or "universal idea"). But we have neglected to discuss

the (present participle) verb inwohnend, which translations usually render as "inherent in." It was slightly altered

by Engels, who transformed it into "innewohnend," a modern term whose main use refers to "possession" and

"being possessed" (by some magic force, a god, or the devil, etc.), but that is also etymologically close to the

name Einwohner, meaning "inhabitant" (or resident, dweller) of a country, place, or a house, etc. Actually the

original "inwohnend" (with the same etymology) does exist in German, but it is an archaic form found intheological contexts (for instance in Meister Eckhart, whence it passes to Jakob Bhme) : 12it corresponds to

the (church) Latin inhabitare, Inhabitatio(which Thomas Aquinas distinguished from the simple habitatio,

habitare).13Returning to this etymological and theoretical background (with which Marx, as a perfect student of

German Idealism, may have had a direct or indirect acquaintance) is of course not sufficient to support an

interpretation, but it provides a symptom of the complexity of the articulations between an "individual" and an

"abstraction" (or abstract essence) that may be falling under Marx's critique. These articulations broadly obey

two very different models, whose convergence in the end accounts for the construction of the modern

transcendental subject (as defined by Kant and his followers): the (post-)Aristotelian and the (post-)Augustinian

models of individuation.

14

The "metaphysical," post-Aristotelian model (which includes a permanent oscillation between a "nominalist" and

a "Platonist" or "essentialist" interpretation), is better known and more frequently invoked in philosophical

discussions of Thesis Six. It refers to an understanding of the essence as a "genre" or "species" (in this case

Humankind or the Human species) of which the individual beings are "instances" or "cases" who participate of

the attributes of the same essence or, alternatively, whose analogous characters lead to the formation of a

single idea of their common type (a "general idea"). Hence the importance of Feuerbach's use of Gattung

(genre), which, in the classical discourses of natural history and anthropology, names the common type, and

becomes now turned against him by Marx. Eachindividual is a representative of the type, or can be conceived

as separately"formed" or "created" after the type: as a consequence, all the individuals "share" a similar

relationship to the type, but they remain isolatedfrom one another in this similarity, since each of them (more or

less perfectly) partakes of the completetype, which indeed can be a moral or a social type. It is only a posteriori

, when they already exist as typical individuals, that they can relateto one another in various ways: this variable



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relationship is "accidental" and does not define their "essence." From Kant to Feuerbach himself, however, a

correction is made to this: in the case of the "human species" - which is not anyspecies - individuals possess

an additional "essential" character: they consciouslyrelate to the (common) species, and they rely on this

consciousness to build a moral community. In that sense, their "being in common," or "community-forming-

essence" (Gemeinwesen) is already present in potentiain their "specific essence" (Gattungswesen).15But with

this teleological understanding of the nature of Man, we already lean in the direction of a second, equally

traditional model that is symptomatically indicated in Marx's Thesisthrough the use of "inwohnend."

Anybody who has some acquaintance with Augustinian theology knows the statement from De vera religione

(On true religion): "Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi: in interiore homine habitat veritas (Do not go outside, [but]

return to yourself: truth inhabits the internal man)" (29, 72). This echoes many other formulas in his work

(notably in the Confessionsand the De Trinitate) suggesting that what lies at the heart (or the most intimate:

interior intimo meo) of the human soul, and therefore expresses a "truth" that is not only the truth ofman's

condition but also a truth forhim (destined for his redemption), is also what infinitely surpasses him (superior

summo meo), i.e., his singular relationship to God or God's "presence." I argue this is the second model

underpinning Marx's formula in Thesis Six, allowing us to better understand in which sense the idea of "social

relations" subverts classical representations of the "essence of Man." Within this tradition there are many

variations, ranging from reiterationsto interpretationsto transformations(and particularly secularizations).16The

latter can be "psychological," but they are more interesting when they rise to a "transcendental" point of view,

because this is the deepest way to confront the tensions of verticality(or sovereignty) and interiority, or

transcendenceand immanence, that adhere to the problematic of the "subject." Indeed, it is only against the

background of this second, traditional model that the "subjective" dimension of Marx's discussion can be fully

grasped. From the originary theological point of view, the guiding idea is a unity of opposites, since the vertical

relationship between the Sovereign figure (God, or God's Word, or God's Idea) and the individual "subject"

(Man--or better, a singular Man, "each one") must be read from both sides: as a creation, injunction, visitation,

or revelation arising from God's power and grace, and also as a call, demand, recognition, or act of faithexpressing the subject's individual dependency. 17But from the secularized, anthropological point of view, the

guiding idea is displaced by the fact that there is no longer any "verticality" or "sovereignty" governing Man's

subjection (or "subjectivation," as more recent philosophers would say) other than effects of authority(which

can also be read critically as domination) arising from human representations and activities themselves. A good

example (in fact, much more than that) is Kant's notion of the categorical imperative, which is also interpreted

as the "inner voice" of reason expressing the dependency of the human subject with respect to a moral

community of rational beings that renders him autonomous or produces his "emancipation" by virtue of its

essential universality.

Marx seems to be discarding this genealogy when he objects to "Feuerbach" that his conception of humanessence as "Gattung(genre)" remains "mute (stumme)" and tries to "relate" or "unite" (verbinden) many

individuals (subjects) only through a naturaluniversality. Why, then, would he use the term "inhabiting" instead

of simply "informing" or "shaping (bildend, formierend)"? Apart from the theological connotations suggested by

Feuerbach himself (to which I return below), we could think of another violently ironic interpretation (rather close

to the critical discourse of On the Jewish Question), namely, the idea that what "possesses" the "abstract

individual" (or the individualized individual) from inside is nothing else than the "idea of [private] property," which

in the era of bourgeois (metaphysical) materialism has been substituted for God as the "inner truth" of Man.18

The positive statement: In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.The decisive moment is of course the next one, when Marx moves from indicating what "human essence"

cannot beto defining what it actually is, thereby providing the critique with a determinate orientation and

content. As as we know from the commentaries and transpositions, however, this is also where Marx's formula

proves ambiguous and open to contradictory interpretations. Not forgetting that these are "improvised" personal



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notes (but also that they are endowed with a kind of "geniality," as suggested by Engels, or, in Benjaminian

terms, have the quality of an "illumination"), 19we can try to clarify the issue by making as much as possible of

the writing itself.

A first point to examine is the semantic value of the opposition "In seiner Wirklichkeit," translated as "In its

reality." A "weak" interpretation reads it as simply marking a reversal: leaving aside what the human essence

was only in a speculative-imaginary-abstract (and therefore wrong) representation provided by philosophers like

Locke, Kant, and Feuerbach, we will now indicate what it reallyis. "Really" then means "truly" or "true to the

facts," as logicians like to say. In a post-Hegelian context, however, it seems advisable to take into account the

logical difference between "reality (Realitt)" and "effective reality" (or "effectivity [Wirklichkeit]"), and this means

not only to indicate what the human essence effectively is, or what it becomes when it is"effectuated" (i.e.,

producedas a result of material and historical "operations," which is the point on which Marx continuously

insists in the Theses, under the heading of such concepts as Ttigkeitand Praxis), but even more than that: this

means to indicate what identifies the "essence" with an effectuation or an "actual process." The conceptof

being/essence is nothing else than the concept of an activity/process, or a praxis.20This is a "stronger"

interpretation, but I believe that it must be pushed to an even more cogent level to suggest that the

"effectuation" affecting at the same time the human essence and the concept of human bein /essence(Wesen)

must also be understood as its dialectical Aufhebungor realization-negation. Thus what the critique is targeting

is not only an "abstract" representation of human essence, but also the notion of "human essence" itself as

"abstraction." Althusser is right on this point, but it is Bloch who provides the clue by systematically referring the

invention of the category praxisin the Thesesto the contemporary motto that "philosophy must be realized (

verwirklicht)," but cannot be realized (or become "real") without also being "negated" (aufgehoben) as

"philosophy" - the reverse also being true: philosophy cannot be negated without being realized.21My personal

complement to this is that, in the context of Thesis Six, the typical form of "philosophy" or philosophical

discourse is precisely anthropology, which leads us to the conclusion: anthropology as a discursive figure (or,

as Althusser would say, a "problematic") must be realized-negated (aufgehobenand verwirklicht) and, since"human essence/being" (das menschliche Wesen) is the category from which the very possibility of a

philosophical anthropology derives, it also must become negated-realized. But the concept that crystallizes this

dialectical operation is "the ensemble of social relations": we must interpret it from this point of view, beginning

with "social relations" ( gesellschaftlichen Verhltnisse).

It is important here to keep in mind a triple philological fact: 1) that Marx's formulas are situated historically in

the wake of a crucial event in the history of ideas (affecting philosophy as well as politics), namely, the

"invention" of "social relations" (as a concept, and originally in French as les rapports sociaux);222) that

"relation" belongs to a complex paradigm that is never fully translatable (German Verhltnisand French rapport

having partly different scopes) and whose philosophical use immediately raises the issues of active versuspassive, subjective versus objective, and internal versus external oppositions (what Kant called the

"amphibologies of reflection"); 3) that any discussion of a Marxian formula involving die gesellschaftlichen

Verhltnisse(and granting them an "essential" function) is inevitably polarized by Marx's later uses of

Produktionsverhltnisse("relations of production" and subsequent economic and non-economic derived

"relations") and Klassenverhltnisse("class relations," with subsequent description of their "antagonistic"

character and their entailing different forms of social "domination"); what is striking in the Theses, however, is

the absenceof this more precise determination and the indeterminateuse of the category "relation" except for

the attribute "social." The question for Marxist readers was thus inevitably posed whether they should read

"social relations" as implicitlydirected towards a (historical-materialist) notion of the determining function of

production and class struggles in human history, or whether they should associate the Theseswith a (potentially

more generalor generic) notion of "relation" that, in turn, would betray a continuity with the tradition of

philosophical anthropology (in its very "realization" or "secularization") or that would open the possibility of a



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broader (social) ontology based on the categorical equivalence of the two key notions ( relationand praxisor

transformation). All these questions are linked, of course, and I can clarify them here only partially.

To begin with, in English a "relation" tends to indicate an objective situation, whereas a "relationship" specifically

indicates a relation between persons that has a subjective dimension; but "relation" also has a logical and

ontological meaning (whereby relations are opposed to forms or substances). French distinguishes between

relation(which commonly means a person to whom one relates) and rapport, which means both a proportion

and an objective structure, but can also be used to indicate an active intercourse among persons, as in "rapport

sexuel" or "rapport social" (especially in the sense of an intercourse that takes place in a "social" environment or

follows "social rules"). The German Beziehungis reserved for logical contexts but also to qualify persons,

whereas Verhltnisessentially means a quantitative proportion or an institutional correlation of situations (e.g.,

the Hegelian and Marxian complex formula "Herrschafts- und Knechtschaftsverhltnis," a relation of domination

and servitude/subjection). All these terms partially overlap, of course, but each time in a different way. It is

important to recall, finally, that each of the three languages has another term of very broad application,

especially in the early modern period, namely "commerce" in French, "intercourse" in English, and Verkehrin

German.

In the early 19thcentury, in the wake of the industrial revolution and the French revolution, which totally

transformed the perception and discourse of politics, a (mainly French) generation of historians and social

theorists invented (as we would say today retrospectively) the concept of "society" in a new sense that went

beyond the classical notions of political/civil association, or normative rules for the education and interaction of

individuals with different statuses, to indicate a system or totality whose transformations and institutions confer

roles on individuals (and shape or challenge their sentiments and ideas), but also follow certain objective laws

or display tendencies that are not reducible to individuals' intentions. It is in this general framework that the

conflicts were fought among the newborn "ideologies" of the post-revolutionary era (such as "conservatism,"

"liberalism," and "socialism") and that the idea of a new "science," called sociology, was born.23The key notion

for the political ideologies and the sociological discourse was precisely rapport social--i.e., a distribution of rolesand a pattern of interaction among individuals and groups marked by reciprocity or domination--, as that which

belongs "organically" to the construction(or "fabric") of a society and characterizes its differencefrom others in

history or geography (and thus makes central the issues of transformation and comparison in the social

sciences).

There is no doubt that this epistemological breakthrough also has affinities with the Hegelian notions of

"objective spirit" and "civil society (brgerliche Gesellschaft)," within which Hegel's phenomenological concept of

"recognition (Anerkennung)" becomes integrated as a subjective (or better, inter-subjective) moment to account

for the permanent tension of individuality and institution in history. But an important difference is that the

Hegelian notions are more "deductive" (or even speculative, in spite of their important realisticcontent thatattests to Hegel's reading of Montesquieu's social history, Adam Smith's political economy, or the German

school of positive Law), because they are meant a priorito justify a construction of the bourgeois constitutional

monarchy as the historical achievement of "rationality" in politics. And there is also no doubt that - in the

Theses on Feuerbachand in the immediately subsequent work (written with Engels and Moses Hess), the

German Ideology, where the "French" concept of "rapport social" is translated and pluralized as die

gesellschaftlichen Verhltnisse-- Marx is beginning to offer his own contribution to this epistemic change by

combining a "communist" perspective of radical social transformation with a specific way of "dialectically"

analyzing conflicts as immanent forces of development and change in the social structures that historically

"frame" human character.

The specific modality of this contribution in the Thesesis what interests us here. It is both very speculative itself

(even when fiercely attacking "philosophical" speculation) and, as I already noted, largely indeterminate - which

also means that several potential developmentsremain latent in the formulations. It was certainly inevitable that,



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trying to overcome pure speculation (or an abstract critique of abstraction), Marx needed to reduce the

indetermination of his concepts. As we know (and most commentators agree), this is already well under way in

the German Ideology(to which I will have to refer again). But in order to understand why the Thesesproduced

such an echo in philosophy, and remain a key text if we want to "problematize" Marx's thought and choices, we

must pay attention equally to what is already thereof the coming "historical materialism" and to what still differs

from the latter's axioms. I believe that two elements are especially important here: one is the articulation of the

two attributes "human (menschlich)" and "social (gesellschaftlich)"; the other is the enigmatic use of a (French)

Fremdwortto name the sum total (or combined effect) of the social relations "equivalent" to a new definition of

the human essence--das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhltnissen--, when so many categories would be

available within the German philosophical tradition.

It could be useful to discuss each single use of the words "human" and "social" in the Theses. For the sake of

brevity, I shall concentrate on the implications of Thesis Tenin relation to the anthropological question: "The

standpoint of the old materialism is civil society (die brgerliche Gesellschaft); the standpoint of the new is

human society (die menschliche Gesellschaft), or social humanity (die gesellschaftliche Menschheit)." Again,

we find here one of these beautifully symmetric formulas invented by Marx that nevertheless remains difficult to

interpret! Engels's "corrections" are revealing, because they bring to the fore an only latent political content at

the risk of blurring the analytical implications. Apparently he was worried that the apposition "die menschliche

Gesellschaft," "die gesellschaftliche Menschheit" amounted to a tautology. Therefore he introduced a more

explicitly "socialist" content by transforming the latter into "die vergesellschaftete Menschheit" or socialized

humanity: a society (or a "world") in which individuals are no longer separated from their own collective

conditions of existence and thus forced into an "abstract" form of existence that paradoxically makes

individualism the "normal" form of social life and that "alienates" humans by isolating them from the relations to

others on which their "practical" life depends (or that lends those relations a coercive, inhuman form--a

"separation" leading to a "split of the self [ Selbstzerrissenheit]" that religious communal feelings then seek to

heal in the imaginary) (Thesis Four). To complete this clarification, Engels also puts quotation marks around theadjective in "brgerliche" Gesellschaft, which is a way of indicating that the term retains its technical value in

Hegelian philosophy (usually translated today as "civil society," as opposed to "State" or "political society"), but

also a way of suggesting that this civil society has a bourgeoischaracter, in which social relations are

dominated by the logic of private property generating individualism and an alienated form of society. The full

argument then becomes explicit: "ancient Materialism" (to which Feuerbach still belongs) will not be able to

overcome the alienation that it loudly denounces, because it is still a "bourgeois" philosophy assuming an

individual "naturally" separated from others (or separatelyreferred to the essence of the "human"), whereas a

"new Materialism" - whose key categories are "social relations" constituting the human and praxis, or a practical

transformation already at work in every form of society - is able to explain how humanityreturns to its essence(or its authentic being) by acknowledging(not denying, repressing, or contradicting) its own "social"

determination. The human, in other words, was always "social" from the point of view of its material conditions

(or never consisted in anything else than "social relations" in itself), but it was for itselfsplit and alienated,

contradicting this essence in its ideology and its institutions, with the modern "civil-bourgeois" society pushing

the contradiction to the extreme. And it is necessary now that the contradiction be resolved, with society

practicallyeliminating its own alienating "products" and becoming reconciled with itself, which is to say,

becoming both fully "human" and effectively "social."

This is a reading fully compatible with some of Marx's most explicit statements about the various stages of

human emancipationas they were enunciated in his contemporaneous writings that proposed a "dialectic" of

the reversal of alienation (or the separation of human beings from their own essence).24But it also too easily

resolves the philosophical tensions involved in Marx's permanent double use (quid pro quo) of the terms

"human" and "social" by distributing their moral (or ethical) uses and their historical (or descriptive) meaning into



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different categories, thereby transforming the strong performativedimension of Marx' s writing (which is also at

the core of his "practical humanism" or "real humanism") into a political syllogism. Marx was in fact suggesting

that an authentic relationship of subjects to their own being/essence (Wesen) would inevitably transform our

interpretation of what it means to be (a) "human," because it would reveal that the human is essentially "social"

and that the "social" is both a condition of possibilityfor every individual life ("man is a social animal," as the

post-Aristotelian tradition registered it) andan ideal realizationof man's ethical aspirations (in other words, a

"communist" form of life); whereas Engels now suggests that a process of socializationis to take place

historically for the conditions to emerge that make it possible to transform "human nature" in a revolutionary

manner. But this redistribution of the ethical and historical sides of the two categories among the

complementary realms of "ends" and "means" also effectively injects into Marx's formulas a "social ontology"

that is not necessarily there (or not literallypresent). And, as a result, while reducing the indetermination of

Marx's statements, it also reduces their potentialities.25We find confirmation that this reduction has been taking

place when we examine the other enigmatic stylistic effect in this part of Thesis Six, namely the use of the

"French" word ensemble.

I submit that we cannot just explain it "weakly" through a reference to circumstances and conditions of writing:

the fact that Marx (who in any case wrote and spoke fluent French) was living in Paris at the time, and would

quite naturally insert French words into his personal notes when they came to his mind quicker than German

concepts (he did the same later with English). This may be true, but it blurs the fact that certain crucial

semantic oppositionsare at stake here. In fact "ensemble" is, I would suggest, an aggressively "neutral" or

"minimal" term, which makes sense if we see it as an alternative to such speculativenotions, central to Hegelian

dialectics (but also to the emergent "sociological" discourse with its obsession for "organicity"), as das Ganze,

die Ganzheit(or Totalitt), or die gesamten(gesellschaftlichen Verhltnisse), i.e., the whole, the (organic)

totality of social relations. What Marx is carefully avoiding here is a category that indicates completeness, in the

very moment in which he seems to follow exactly the Hegelian movement of privileging the "concrete

universality" against "abstraction" (since the concreteand the completeare synonyms in Hegel).26Therefore heis departing from Hegelin the moment in which he also comes closestto him. To put it more provocatively, it is

as if Marx were reversing the Hegelian choice for the "good (or real) infinity" (meaning an infinite that becomes

integrated in the form of a totality) in favor of the "bad infinite" (an infinite that is only "indefinite" and that is

identical with a mere addition or succession of terms that remains open). This hypothesis is supported by a

single symptomatic word, but it has the great interest of making it possible to combine all the logical, ontological,

and even onto-theological elements of the debate in one single critical operation.

I believe that three positive connotations can be attached to the apparently negative preference for das

Ensembleinstead of das Ganze, in other words for the use of a Fremdwortthat performatively deconstructs the

totalization-effect or (to borrow from Sartre) indicates that the "new" category of being/essence (Wesen) onlyworks as a "de-totalized totality" (or perhaps even as a "self-de-totalizing totality"). The first is a connotation of

horizontality: "social relations" are interact or interfere with one another, but they are not to become vertically

hierarchized (with some social relations being more decisive or more essentially human, and one type of

relation determining the others "in the last instance").27The next is a connotation of indefinityor seriality,

meaning that social relations constitutive of the human form an open-ended network for which there is neither a

conceptual closure (no a priorior empirical demarcation between what is human and what is not) nor a historical

one (no limitsascribed to the developments of social relations/activities that open new possibilities for the

human, whether constructive or even destructive). Finally we can evoke a connotation of multiplicityin the

strong sense, i.e. heterogeneity: not only are there in fact several "social relations" that "form" the human, but

they belong to many different realms or genres(or, as Bloch would say, they form a multiversum) and not to a

single one that would confer upon them the "human" quality. Thus it is not like in the Aristotelian polis--with

which Marx's conception seems to share so many "anti-individualistic" axioms--, where there is a multiplicity of



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social relations, symmetric or dissymmetric but always attributed to the human by virtue of their use of language

(or discourse-- logos); it is, rather, more like in Aristotle's metaphysics, where different, heterogeneous genres

of beingare called that by analogy and distributively, but are not emanations of a univocal supreme genrethat

would be "Being as such."

If we assume these connotations together (and carefully avoid imposing at a more generic level something like

an "ensemble of the ensembles"), we finally understand why the internal critique of the very notion of "essence,"

the dissolution of "abstract" representations of the Human (or "humanist" notions inherited from the

metaphysical tradition and appropriated by bourgeois philosophers to reconcile economic individualism with

moral and political notions of the community), and a contradictory use of Hegel's concept of "effective reality"

are imbricated in this complex manner. To write that "in its reality ( Wirklichkeit) the human being/essence (

Wesen) is notan abstraction inhabitingthe single/singular/isolated individual, but the (open, indeterminate)

ensembleof social relations" is a performative gesture that simultaneously transforms the meanings of all the

key terms it uses. As "essence" becomes applied in a "materialist" manner to the anthropological problem, it

also acquires a paradoxical (anti)ontological meaning whereby its accepted consequences are reversed:

instead of "unifying" and "totalizing" a multiplicity of attributes, it now opens an indefinite range of

metamorphoses (or historical transformations) inasmuch as individuals are essentially "modes" (as Spinoza

would say) of the social relations they actively produce, or they collectively interact with others and with natural

"conditions." This critique reveals that there can be a single alternative to the apparently antithetic notions of

individuality and subjectivity inherited from Western metaphysics - an alternative that also tentatively avoids

creating a new figure of the "supreme being."

The bifurcation: rival ontologies and anthropologiesDrawing lessons from these philological and semantic considerations, and returning to the central difficulty,

which concerns a "transformative" or "performative" relationship of Marx's thought (and conceptual choices,

expressed through words) to the issue of "anthropology" (for which antithetic interpretations in the history of

Marxism testify), I would summarize my conjectures in the following manner:1. a. There is no way we can discuss the tensions in the idea of a philosophical anthropology, and its relations

to the ideal of "humanism," without bringing in an ontologicalissue, which in fact forces us not only to locate the

debate about anthropology in its immediate modern or "bourgeois" context, but also to return to the broader

realm of the "history of metaphysics," its "revolutions," and its problematic "end." I have suggested as much in

the past when proposing that Marx's "early" materialist philosophy be referred to as an "ontology of the relation,"

where the basic notion is not "individuality" but "transindividuality" (or a concept of the individual which always

already includes its relation to - or dependency on - other individuals). 28

But then a perilous ambiguity may arise. We could believe that - just like Bloch and others for whom the

distinction of Marx's invention was not a gross suppression of the anthropological problem, but rather its beingtransferred from bourgeois/metaphysical abstractions to historical socialdeterminations - the whole issue has to

do with inventing a social ontology. We can see now that this is an ambiguous formula. It could mean that we

are "ontologizing the social," which in turn means either that "society" as a whole (as a system, organism,

network, development, etc.) is installed in the place of "being," or that the emergence of the social (as opposed

to the biological, the psychological, etc.) is "essentially" attributed to some quasi-transcendental instance that

has a "socializing" quality (such as language, labor, sexuality, or even "the common" or "the political"). Or,

twisting the previous representations, as it were, it could mean that we are "socializing ontology": not in the

sense of subjecting ontology to some preexisting, "more fundamental" social principle (which is not very

different from installing "Society" where "God" used to be in classical metaphysics), but in the sense of

"translating" every ontological question (e.g., individuation/individualization, the articulation of "parts" and

"wholes," the imbrication of past, present, and future, etc.) into a "social" question in the most general sense,

that of the conditions or relations that prevent human individuals from the possibility of isolation, whatever the



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"matter" or "substance" and the modalities or functions of these relations. "Relating to" and "being related to"

would thus be considered the constitutive ontological mark of the human.

This is indeed what I had in mind when, some years ago, I interpreted in this sense Marx's statement that "in its

reality, the human essence/being is the ensemble of social relations." But something disturbing remains to be

clarified here, namely, that once again we have been forced to make use of the adjective "human" in the very

formula that withdraws "humanism" from our discourse, i.e., that prevents us from any possibility of

identifying/defining "the human" prior to the (forever incomplete) discovery of the multiplicity of other waysof

"relating humans" or of "relating to any human." I see only one possibility for overcoming this difficulty: this is to

radically draw the conclusions from the fact that "humans" (or "men," in classical language) only exist in the

plural. This is not only to say that a plurality made of irreducible singularities (or "persons") is an originary

condition of being-human (Arendt's thesis), perhaps not even only that "multitude" is the originary figure of

human existence in society and history (Negri's thesis), but also that social relations in the strong sense are

those that, while bringing humans together or preventing their "isolation," also make their differences irreducible

, particularly through distributing them among various "classes" in the widest possible sense - which is not to

say that such distributions are stable, eternal, or coherent among themselves.29In other words, "social relations"

are always internally determined as differences, transformations, contradictions, and conflicts that are radical

enough to leave only the heterogeneitythat they create as "the common" (or, in more jargonesque philosophical

terminology, the "being-in-common" or Mitsein) without which individuals "relating" to one another would return

to essential isolation or ontological "individualism."30But this is not really different from explaining that social

relations are "practical" (or that the essence of society is praxis, as Marx powerfully enunciated in the Theses).

The distinctive feature of relations (and also the reason why, to a second degree, they must be articulated with

one another or influence each other without becoming fused in a single "whole") is, in other words, the way they

make it possible for some "individuals," "groups," "parts" (or even "parties") to transform others, be transformed

by others, and perhaps in the end transform the modality of the relation itself. As Marx was suggesting,

"relation" and "praxis" become strictly correlative terms (and the second is no less metamorphic or vernderbarthan the first) as soon as a notion of "effective reality" is cut from the (theological, spiritual) ideal of

"completeness" and is associated instead with a scheme of "open infinity."31

2. b. But an even greater amphibology still "inhabits" such an attempt at identifying how we must understand the

subversive philosophical operation in Marx's re-definition/de-construction of "human essence": this is the

amphibology about whether the "relations" and their intrinsic process of "transformation" (or change--

Vernderungin the terminology of the Theses) should be interpreted as "external" or "internal," i.e., as inscribed

in a (changing) distribution of conditions and forces, or implied in a (decisive) effort (perhaps just a deviation) on

the part of subjects that then constitutes them as makers of their own relations.32This is indeed a very old

discussion in philosophy. Here we are interested in why such seemingly "metaphysical" aporias never cease toreturn within a "dialectical" discourse that, officially, exposed their purely "abstract" character (first in Hegel, but

also in Marx). Many a brilliant "Marxist" discourse has been elaborated to philosophically resolve the dilemma of

externality versus internality by transposing onto a different plane the Hegelian notion of subjectivation as the

dialectical interiorization of external relations. Let us simply recall (in opposite directions) Lukcs's "ultra-

Hegelian" notion of the Proletariat as a "subject-object" of history, whose class-consciousness involves the

negation of the "totality" of the social relations already transformed by capitalism into commodity-relations, and

is therefore an immanent, active reversal of these "reified" relations themselves. Or Althusser's "Spinozistic"

(and radically anti-Hegelian) suggestion that the same "overdetermined" historical processcould become

analyzed in terms of its "external," objective, and necessary conditions as well as in terms of its intrinsic,

"aleatory," transindividual actions or agencies (which he calls "encounters").33In these concluding remarks, I

want only to describe how the amphibology surfaces in the "moment" of the Theses(and of the German

Ideology--, in short, in the year 1845).



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I believe that the aporias in Marx's text are interesting not only as objects for "Marxologists," but also because

they form a whole new episode of the age-old philosophical controversy concerning the possibility (or

impossibility) of "internal relations," which in a sense (from Plato to Russell) redoubles the controversy among

nominalists and realists concerning "universals." Hegel is indeed a privileged example of a philosopher who

defends the idea of the existence of "internal relations" (i.e., relations that are not only contingently and

externally bindingfor those "terms" like individuals or substances that remain independent of their relations, but

that are furthermore mirrored in the constitution or disposition of their bearers themselves)34; but he also

defends the much stronger idea that relations are "real" onlyif they are, precisely, internal or internalized--

which, in his case, can only mean that they are "spiritual" relations or have become moments in the

development of the (objective) Geist, i.e., are realized in the form of historical institutions endowed with the

consciousness of their cultural value, their political function, and so on. How to criticize this "spiritualistic" (and

also teleological) construction of the internalityof relations without simply returning to what it was meant to

overcome, namely, a mechanistic and naturalistic representation of external relations(i.e., primarily non-

subjectiverelations) whereby the supporting terms (be they "individuals," "nations," "cultures," "classes," etc.)

are passiveand autonomizedfrom their "common" element? But also: Why avoidthe privilege of externality

(space, matter, dissemination, contingency, etc.) that, precisely, every spiritualism abhors and every

materialism a contrariovindicates and tries to build into its own conception of "agency" or even "subjectivity"?

Why should "subjecthood" become equated with "interiority"?35

If we project these interrogations onto our reading of Marx's thesis of the Wirklichkeitof the "ensemble" of social

relations, it seems to me that what we uncover is a permanent oscillation between two possibilities of

interpretation: one more "externalist," the other more "internalist," and neither ever entirely separated from the

other. One way of reading the "ensemble" identifies it with what became later known as a structure, and insists

on the "logical" fact that processes of subjectivation accompanying the passivity or the becoming active (even

revolutionary) of the social agents are interdependent and are formally dependenton the relations forming their

"conditions." (Anti-capitalist movements, for instance, are dependent on the transformations of capitalism, whichaffect their ideologies or consciousness, their forms of organization, and so on). But another way of reading it is

to bring back the great Hegelian model of intersubjectivityor "conflictual recognition" (as exposed primarily in

the Master-Slave dialectics of the Phenomenology): this model avoids all risk of ontologizing the relationship in

the form of a formal or abstract structure overlooking the actions of historical subjects, because it suggests that

the institutional dimensions of social relations are essentially crystallizations or materializations of the

dissymmetryaffecting each subject's perception of the other (the mutual inability of the Master and the Slave to

"perceive" what renders the other's worldview irreducible to his own, for instance: sacrificing one's life for

"prestige," or cultivating labor as a progressive value). But this model also produces the illusion that, in a given

social conflict, anything taking place "in the back" of the conscious subjects (or remaining bewusstlos, as Hegelputs it) can ultimately become reintegrated or "interiorized" within consciousness, so that antagonistic (or simply

different) subjectivities are mirror images of a single "spirit." Using a different terminology, we could say that

there is an element of "transindividuality" in each of these possibilities.

It is very interesting to see that, in the German Ideology, whose writing accompanies the framing of the Theses

on Feuerbachor immediately follows it, Marx tries to "mediate" the amphibology of the "internal" and "external"

understandings of the category "social relation" (its fluctuating either towards an objective structure or towards a

pure intersubjectivity) through an almost ubiquitous use of the term Verkehr("commerce" or "intercourse"),

which could be read from both angles (or on both registers). Soon, however, the duality will return with different

ways of explaining the alienationcharacterizing the relations within capitalism (and more generally bourgeois

society)36: either as an estrangement of the subjects from their own collective "world," as a splitting of that world

into antithetic life-worlds--one utilitarian and individualistic, the other imaginary and communitarian (the

explanation clearly privileged by the aphorisms in the Thesesdescribing the ideological "redoubling" of the



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social world)--, or as a more strategic pattern of domination, conflict, and political struggle among "classes"

(what Capitalcalls the Herrschafts- und Knechtschaftsverhltnisor political relationship that "directly" arises

from the "immediate antagonism" in the production process between exploited laborers and proprietors of the

means of production [Book 3, Ch. 47]). In both cases, however, the initial multiplicity (and heterogeneity) of the

"social relations" has been subsumed under (and in fact reduced to) the absolute privilege of the labor relations

, which bring back a "social ontology" because they confer upon "labor" the unique capacity of really

"socializing" subjects in a "division of labor," and because they tend to represent society as a "productive

organism," however complex one might conceive the system of other instances (later called "superstructures [

berbau]") deriving from the material function of labor or ideologically covering it. Social alienation in all its

forms (psychological, religious, artistic, and so on) is essentially a development of the alienation of labor. And

political conflict is essentially an antagonism among classes that are either laboring classes or propertied

classes living off other men's labor, as the Communist Manifestostates right away.

3. c. After the fugitive moment of the Theses, Marx may have had very good reasons to accomplish this

anthropological reduction to alienated labor cumontologization of the indeterminate statement in Thesis Six

about "human essence" (and let us once again repeat that this is not so much a "betrayal" of the philosophical

radicality expressed by the 1845 aphorisms than a continuation, in a given conjuncture, of the risky speculation

they initiate): there was the huge extent of social phenomena, ranging from everyday life to the constitutional

transformations of the State and the new forms of mass politics, produced by the industrial revolution and the

ascendency of capitalism - which was probably even more decisive in its negativeform, namely, the

"materialist" imperative to counter the bourgeois suppression of the active social role of laborers and working

classes, and the intellectual denial of the "productive" forces and activities. Withoutthis equation one-sidedly

asserted by Marx (social relations = relations of production, or their consequences), we would perhaps still

identify a "society" with a spirit, culture, or a political regime. We must, however, take the full measure of the

anthropological consequences(I am tempted to say the anthropological price) involved in this reduction, first of

all in the sense of a "reduction of complexity.".Perhaps the best way to measure it, within a discussion of the Theses on Feuerbach, is to indicate which

distorting consequences it produced for the reading and interpretation of Feuerbach himself. Marx's main

objection in the Thesesagainst Feuerbach is that his conception of materiality/sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) remains

"abstract" or "inactive" (which interestingly means that it lacks at the same time a "subjective" and an "objective"

dimension: see Thesis One). Feuerbach, accordingly, would keep subsuming single human beings under a

human essence that is only an idea, however "concrete" or "empirical" it was proclaimed to be. By contrast,

Marx's own materialism identified social relations with activity ( Ttigkeit), but this activity would become all-

encompassing when (in the next step) it was defined as a continuous collective process that is both poisisand

praxis, ranging from elementary productive activities to revolutionary insurrections and making the collectiveworker qualaborer/producer a potential revolutionary (and, conversely, the revolutionary subject a conscious,

organized, and indomitable worker). This is the basis of the communist great narrative. But is it a correct

reading of Feuerbach himself? Not quite, obviously, and for one good reason: it could not be said without

qualification that Feuerbach's concept of human essence only refers to an "abstract notion of genre" where the

"relational" dimension is absent (and that consequently imagines the genre as separately"inhabiting" every

individual, conferring upon them all a "human" quality in the same manner). Feuerbach's genre (Gattung) is in

fact profoundly relational itself, because it is conceived in terms of a "dialogue" between subjects distinguished

as "I" and "You." What remains questionable, of course, is whether the kind of dialogic "relationality" that,

according to Feuerbach, is inherent in the human essence can be called "social." Probably it is existentialrather

than social. But is there not in turn a risk that Marx's denial of a "social" character in what Feuerbach calls a

"relation" (or, more precisely, a "relationship"--Beziehungrather than Verhltnis) arises from the former's

arbitrary decision to identify certain relations and practices (linked to production and labor) as social relations



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and as socializing practices at the expense of all others?

Let us be more specific. Thesis Fouris a good guide here: in The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach does

"demystify" the mysteries of theology by reducing theological notions (the concept of God, to begin with) to

anthropological notions and "human realities." But he is more precisely concerned with an interpretation of the

Christian dogma of the Trinity in terms of a double transposition: a transposition of the "terrestrial" institution of

the family into the ideal image of the "Holy Family," followed by a transposition of the Holy Family itself (as an

imaginary community) into a more speculative communication of divine "persons" ( hypostases) who are

supposed to be One in Three (i.e., fully "reconciled") - the Father, the Son (incarnated Word), and the Spirit

instead of the Father, the Son, and the (virgin) Mother. From there it is not a long way to explain that the

"secret" of Christian theology is a projection of sexual relationsamong humans (marked by desire, imperfect

love, and sensual pleasure) into an ideal, perfect love(that celebrated passages of the Bible straightforwardly

identify with "God").37With this doctrine, we see another possibility of interpreting such a statement as "The

human essence is not an abstraction... in its reality it is the ensemble of (social) relations" that would not be

directed against Feuerbach, but would rather supporthis position: it would suggest that what "inhabits"

individuals and makes them "humans" is the sexual relation with its affective dimensions (love) and its

institutional realizations (the family). Therefore individuals are constituted in and by relations. This is also a way

to emphasize a Verkehr(in the sense of "intercourse") as the producing-reproducing structure of the human.38

What would Marx possibly object to this Feuerbachian defense? Probably what is latent in Thesis Fourand

slightly more developed in the German Ideology, namely, that Feuerbach's vision of the "terrestrial family" is not

very "real" itself, because it removes the contradictionsthrough its (romantic) emphasis on "love," while

nevertheless trying to locate the source of religious "alienation" in the imperfection or finitude of human

sexuality. In the German Ideology, Marx (and Engels) will explain that sexual difference (as a difference of

human "types") results from "a division of sexual labor" (sic) among men and women. And in the Communist

Manifesto(1847), borrowing from Saint-Simonian "feminist" criticism, they will explain that marriage and the

bourgeois family are a form of "legal prostitution" (in perfect agreement with the statement in Thesis Fourthatthe "contradiction" inherent in the terrestrial "basis" of religion can be resolved only through the "theoretical and

practical annihilation" of the family). This is a powerful argument, which amounts to explaining that

"metaphysical" notions of human essence are not only inherited from an ideological past, but also permanently

reconstituted through processes that "sublimate" social contradictions of all kinds. But it also confirms the

Marxian tendency to eliminatesome of the potentialities of his own "theses" in order to avoid "opening" the

"ensemble" of social relations towards an unlimited range of heterogeneousmodes of socialization (and

therefore also modes of subjectivation), and instead reinstate a quasi-transcendentalequivalence of the "social"

(and the "practical") with the specifically(or essentially) human attribute of "labor" (and work). It is through a

revolution in the division of labor that human agents may transform their own constitutive relations (whichmakes them human), not through a "revolution" in any of the subordinated or accidental relations that form so

many fields of application for the same general division of labor. And in this way, the powers of the One (of

unity, uniformity, and totality) are even more forcefully imposed, because they become the very powers of the

novum, the emancipation to come.39

tienne Balibartienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Universit de Paris X - Nanterre and

Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, and is currently Visiting Professor at

Columbia University in the City of New York. He has published widely in the area of Marxist philosophy and

moral and political philosophy in general. His many works include Lire le Capital (with Louis Althusser, Pierre

Macherey, Jacques Rancire, Roger Establet, and F. Maspero) (1965); Spinoza et la politique (1985); Nous,

citoyens d'Europe? Les frontires, l'tat, le peuple (2001); Politics and the Other Scene (2002); L'Europe,

l'Amrique, la Guerre. Rflexions sur la mediationeuropenne (2003); and Europe, Constitution, Frontire



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(2005).

Footnotes1. Marx himself had died in 1883. Engels explained that Marx was so secretive about the Theses that he did not

share them with him, even though the two men were already cooperating and cowriting. Some of Engels's

corrections, meant to improve a "hasty" redaction and clarify the Theses' intention, are far from innocent. This is

particularly the case with the famous Thesis Eleven, which in Marx's original formulation reads: "Die

Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kmmt drauf an, sie zu verndern." It was

corrected by Engels like this: "Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber

darauf an, sie zu verndern." By changing the mode of the verb and adding the word aber in the second

sentence, Engels imposed the idea of a relationship of mutual exclusion between "interpreting" and

"transforming" that was not necessarily there in Marx's version. With the help of other formulations in the

Theses, the Eleventh was understood subsequently as positing a general opposition between (revolutionary)

praxis and (mere) theory. As we will see, Thesis Six also contains a correction that deserves discussion.

2. "For the same thing is thinking and being" (Poem III). See the new edition and commentary - in French - by

Barbara Cassin.

3. For Ernst Bloch, see Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Vol. 1) and "Keim und Grundlinie. Zu den Elf Thesen von

Marxber Feuerbach." For Althusser, see "Marxism and Humanism," chapter seven of For Marx. Althusser

returns to the interpretation of the Theses on Feuerbach in a much more critical manner in "Sur la pense

marxiste," written in 1982 and published posthumously.

4. The Principle of Hope was written in the war period when Bloch was in exile in the US, but published only

after his return to Germany (the GDR) between 1954 and 1957.

5. This scheme is very different from the traditional idea, inherited by Hegel from Leibniz, that the present time

is "pregnant with" the future to which it will give birth. In fact it is the opposite. It would be interesting to relate

this scheme to both Bloch's and Althusser's (independent) insistence on the "non-contemporaneity" of the

present as its typical structure.6. The notion of "real humanism" is above all used by Marx in his immediately preceding work (with Engels),

The Holy Family (1844); see the beginning of the foreword:

Real humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism, which

substitutes "self-consciousness" or the "spirit" for the real individual man and with the evangelist teaches: "It is

the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing." Needless to say, this incorporeal spirit is spiritual only in

its imagination. What we are combating in Bauer's criticism is precisely speculation reproducing itself as a

caricature. We see in it the most complete expression of the Christian-Germanic principle, which makes its last

effort by transforming "criticism" itself into a transcendent power."

7. I borrow the expression "dispute of humanism (la querelle de l'humanisme)" from Althusser himself, whoprojected a book (left unfinished) under this title. I coin "dispute of universalism" on the same model.

8. In the following argument, which partly rectifies my oral presentation at the conference "The Citizen-Subject

Revisited," I do not attempt a complete reading of the Theses (even if I draw some illumination from Marx's

other aphorisms). Therefore I leave aside the issue of the "order" or "structure" of the Eleven Theses, which I

had touched in passing. Both Bloch (in his essay) and Althusser (in his oral teaching) had specific "thematic"

suggestions about how the theses should become "divided" and "regrouped" in order to highlight the latent

construction of their argument and concepts. A very interesting subsequent explanation is offered by Georges

Labica; see his Karl Marx. Les Thses sur Feuerbach.

9. I leave aside the other great reference: Hegel's Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik), divided into three Books: the

Doctrine of Being (Sein), the Doctrine of Essence (Wesen), and the Doctrine of Concept (Begriff). In the 1840s,

Marx, who was certainly not unacquainted with the Logic, was mainly focusing on the Phenomenology and the

Philosophy of Right.



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10. The idea that God's true essence is a self-creating or self-emancipating Man runs from ancient Gnostic

doctrines to modern Protestantism to the positivist idea of substituting the superstitious "religion of the

transcendent Deity" with a rational or affective "religion of Humankind," notoriously defended in the Romantic

era by Auguste Comte in France, but also by Feuerbach himself. See Decloux and Sabot.

11. The answer must be yes, also for the following reason: when Marx drafted the "Theses," he may have been

already affected by the Stirnerian critique of every "essentialist" (or non-nominalist) category, in The Ego and Its

Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum), which was published the same year (1845) and which particularly targets

both Feuerbach's notion of Man as "generic being" (Gattungswesen) and the doctrine of communism based on

the idea of Man as "community being" (Gemeinwesen).

12. See Bhme 3-1.5 and 3-7.4.

13. It is common in the philosophical and theological tradition to explain metaphorically that the soul "inhabits"

(habitat) the body, or that the body forms a "house" for the soul. Inhabitare/inwohnen would indicate a more

intimate and more intense relationship, such as the "presence" of God within the soul of the faithful Christian. Its

use is especially associated with developments of the Trinitarian doctrine; see Lehmkuhler.

14. This presentation is strongly indebted to Alain de Libera's work on the genealogy of the "subject" between

scholasticism and modernity ; see his contribution to our common entry "Subject," and his Archologie du sujet.

15. An essential link between Kant and Feuerbach on this point is indeed Hegel, in his Encyclopaedia of the

Philosophical Sciences (1817 and 1830), where, however, the concept of Gattung as "species" is limited to the

animal life.

16. Augustine's formula is famously quoted by Husserl at the end of his Cartesian Meditations from 1929, in a

way that has been criticized by eminent phenomenologists who claim that he retained only one side of the

Augustinian motto (asking the philosopher to "abstract from the world" in order to investigate an inner truth, but

failing to understand that this inner truth also represents the place "inhabited" by man's "visitor" from heaven,

i.e., Christ himself, and therefore deprives man from his own mastery, or "dis-possesses" him from inside). See

Jean-Luc Marion (139).17. This typical unity of opposites is well preserved in Descartes's transposition of the Augustinian argument

into the language of ontology: "I exist with such a nature that I possess an idea of God in my mind" and

therefore as a finite substance (or "essence") harboring an infinite substance (or "essence"). See my

commentary in "Ego sum, ego existo. Descartes au point d'hrsie."

18. This suggests an emphasis other than Kant's on the secularized form of the truth "inhabiting" the individual:

the one provided by John Locke in his theory of personal identity: the subjects who "own themselves"

separately are isolated because what makes them identical humans is not only the power of an "abstract idea"

(private property), but the power of the idea of "abstraction" itself. This is a very acute understanding of the logic

of the "ontology" that we can call, after C.B. MacPherson, "possessive individualism." See my essay "My Self etMy Own. Variations sur Locke."

19. It is of course fascinating to search for echoes between the Marxian Theses on Feuerbach and Benjamin's

Theses on the Concept of History (1941), which consciously try to follow the tracks of the former (and therefore

provide an interpretation that is also a transformation!)

20. It is also on this point that quasi-simultaneous texts, particularly The Holy Family, pay an explicit tribute to

Hegel.

21. This motto is especially insisted upon in Marx's essay from 1844 (published in the Deutsch-Franzsische

Jahrbcher), "An Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," where das Proletariat is used for

the first time to name the revolutionary "subject" (see my "Le moment messianique de Marx"

Documents

Balibar on Marx 6th Thesis