From Philosophical Anthropology to Social Ontology and Back: What to Do with Marx’s Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach?

Abstract

The Theses on Feuerbach, an ensemble of eleven aphorisms apparently not destined for publication in this 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were written by Marx in the course of 1845 while he was working on the manuscript of the German Ideology, also left unpublished.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).¹ They are widely considered one of the emblematic formularies of Western philosophy and sometimes compared to other concise texts – such as Parmenides’ Poem or 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 posteriori the same value of a turning point in philosophy (or in our relationship to philosophy) as, for instance, not only Parmenides’s and Wittgenstein’s respective “tauton gar esti noein te kai einai”² and “Worüber man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” (27), but also Spinoza’s “ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et connexio rerum” (Ethics II, Prop. VII) or Kant’s “Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind” (Critique of Pure Reason B75/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 Verhältnis). 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 Lukács, 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 löst das religiöse Wesen in das menschliche Wesen auf. Aber das menschliche Wesen ist kein dem einzelnen Individuum inwohnendes Abstraktum. In seiner Wirklichkeit ist es das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse.

 
Feuerbach, der auf die Kritik dieses wirklichen Wesens nicht eingeht, ist daher gezwungen: 1. von dem geschichtlichen Verlauf zu abstrahieren und das religiöse Gemüt für sich zu fixieren, und ein abstrakt – isoliert – menschliches Individuum vorauszusetzen. 2. Das Wesen kann daher nur als “Gattung”, als innere, stumme, die vielen Individuen natürlich verbindende Allgemeinheit gefaßt werden.

Here is a standard English translation:

Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. 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 naturally unites the many individuals.
 

(Marx/Engels 13-15)

 
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.³ For Bloch, whose detailed commentary, part of his magnum opus Das Prinzip Hoffnung, was first published separately in 1953,⁴ the Theses include 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 Theses express the crucial idea that (social) reality as such is “changeable (veränderbar)” because its complete notion does not only denote given states 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 future or a “novelty (novum)” – something neither classical materialism nor idealism ever admitted. For Althusser, the Theses are 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 Theses thus 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 praxis as a philosophical name for “a system of articulated social practices“). Interestingly, both Bloch’s and Althusser’s commentaries emphasize the temporal scheme of a “future” objectively included within the present as a disruptive possibility – except that for Bloch, this scheme characterizes history, whereas for Althusser, it characterizes theory or discourse.⁵
 
What is most interesting for us are the ways they resolve the paradoxes in Thesis Six that 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 the anthropological 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 theoretical injunction or “poteau indicateur” within theory itself) that the discourse of the “essence of man” is no longer tenable, and ought to be replaced with 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”).⁶ On the other hand, he is able to connect Thesis Six with other Marxian writings which are nearly contemporary, particularly the well-known critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 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 every humanism and anthropological discourse while retaining a universalistic perspective (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.⁷ My 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 Thesis exactly means proves illuminating.⁸ I divide this discussion into three parts: 1) a new discussion of the pars destruens in Marx’s Thesis Six, namely the critique of 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 open and 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 and involve a spectrum of meanings that becomes truncated in other languages. As we will see, it is also important that Marx uses a Fremdwort or 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 Christentums or 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 being and essence (in Greek, to on and 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, 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”).⁹ This 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 theological thesis (that the “being of beings” or “supreme being” is God) and the anthropological thesis 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 his admiration 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 fact few 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”?¹¹ And 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 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 abstractions or 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 à la Stirner, 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 facto existence or observable “being there”) insofar as it is an operation or a process of realization (Wirklichkeit comes from Werk and wirken, the German equivalents for opus and 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 rejection of 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 inwohnendes Abstractum.” Up to now, following most commentators, we have been focusing on the antithetic terms Individuum or 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 in theological contexts (for instance in Meister Eckhart, whence it passes to Jakob Böhme) :¹² it corresponds to the (church) Latin inhabitare, Inhabitatio (which Thomas Aquinas distinguished from the simple habitatio, habitare).¹³ Returning 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. Each individual 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 isolated from one another in this similarity, since each of them (more or less perfectly) partakes of the complete type, 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 relate to one another in various ways: this variable 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 any species – individuals possess an additional “essential” character: they consciously relate 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 potentia in their “specific essence” (Gattungswesen).¹⁵ But 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 Thesis through 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 Confessions and 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 of man’s condition but also a truth for him (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 reiterations to interpretations to transformations (and particularly secularizations).¹⁶ The 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 transcendence and 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 faith expressing the subject’s individual dependency.¹⁷ But 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 human essence as “Gattung (genre)” remains “mute (stumme)” and tries to “relate” or “unite” (verbinden) many individuals (subjects) only through a natural universality. 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 be to 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 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”),¹⁹ we 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 really is. “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 (Realität)” 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., produced as 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 Tätigkeit and Praxis), but even more than that: this means to indicate what identifies the “essence” with an effectuation or an “actual process.” The concept of being/essence is nothing else than the concept of an activity/process, or a praxis.²⁰ This 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 Aufhebung or 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 praxis in the Theses to 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.²¹ My 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 (aufgehoben and 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 Verhältnisse).
 
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);²² 2) that “relation” belongs to a complex paradigm that is never fully translatable (German Verhältnis and French rapport having partly different scopes) and whose philosophical use immediately raises the issues of active versus passive, 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 Verhältnisse (and granting them an “essential” function) is inevitably polarized by Marx’s later uses of Produktionsverhältnisse (“relations of production” and subsequent economic and non-economic derived “relations”) and Klassenverhältnisse (“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 absence of this more precise determination and the indeterminate use 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 implicitly directed towards a (historical-materialist) notion of the determining function of production and class struggles in human history, or whether they should associate the Theses with a (potentially more general or 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 broader (social) ontology based on the categorical equivalence of the two key notions (relation and praxis or 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 Beziehung is reserved for logical contexts but also to qualify persons, whereas Verhältnis essentially means a quantitative proportion or an institutional correlation of situations (e.g., the Hegelian and Marxian complex formula “Herrschafts- und Knechtschaftsverhältnis,” 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 Verkehr in German.
 
In the early 19^th century, 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.²³ The key notion for the political ideologies and the sociological discourse was precisely rapport social—i.e., a distribution of roles and 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 difference from 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 (bürgerliche 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 realistic content that attests 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 priori to 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 Feuerbach and 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 Verhältnisse— 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 Theses is 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 developments remain latent in the formulations. It was certainly inevitable that, 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 Theses produced 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 there of 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) Fremdwort to name the sum total (or combined effect) of the social relations “equivalent” to a new definition of the human essence—das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen—, 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 Ten in relation to the anthropological question: “The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society (die bürgerliche 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 the adjective in “bürgerliche” 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 bourgeois character, 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 separately referred 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 humanity returns 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 itself split 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 practically eliminating 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 emancipation as 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).²⁴ But 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 different categories, thereby transforming the strong performative dimension 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 possibility for every individual life (“man is a social animal,” as the post-Aristotelian tradition registered it) and an ideal realization of man’s ethical aspirations (in other words, a “communist” form of life); whereas Engels now suggests that a process of socialization is 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 literally present). And, as a result, while reducing the indetermination of Marx’s statements, it also reduces their potentialities.²⁵ We 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 oppositions are 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 speculative notions, central to Hegelian dialectics (but also to the emergent “sociological” discourse with its obsession for “organicity”), as das Ganze, die Ganzheit (or Totalität), or die gesamten (gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse), 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 concrete and the complete are synonyms in Hegel).²⁶ Therefore he is departing from Hegel in the moment in which he also comes closest to 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 Ensemble instead of das Ganze, in other words for the use of a Fremdwort that performatively deconstructs the totalization-effect or (to borrow from Sartre) indicates that the “new” category of being/essence (Wesen) only works 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”).²⁷ The next is a connotation of indefinity or seriality, meaning that social relations constitutive of the human form an open-ended network for which there is neither a conceptual closure (no a priori or empirical demarcation between what is human and what is not) nor a historical one (no limits ascribed 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 multiplicity in 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 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 being are called that by analogy and distributively, but are not emanations of a univocal supreme genre that 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 not an abstraction inhabiting the single/singular/isolated individual, but the (open, indeterminate) ensemble of 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 “anthropologies”

 
Drawing 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 ontological issue, 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 being transferred from bourgeois/metaphysical abstractions to historical social determinations – 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 “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 ways of “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.²⁹ In other words, “social relations” are always internally determined as differences, transformations, contradictions, and conflicts that are radical enough to leave only the heterogeneity that 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.”³⁰ But 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 veränderbar than 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

1. 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—Veränderung in 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.³² This is indeed a very old discussion in philosophy. Here we are interested in why such seemingly “metaphysical” aporias never cease to return 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) Lukács’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 process could 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”).³³ In 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).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 binding for 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” only if 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 internality of relations without simply returning to what it was meant to overcome, namely, a mechanistic and naturalistic representation of external relations (i.e., primarily non-subjective relations) whereby the supporting terms (be they “individuals,” “nations,” “cultures,” “classes,” etc.) are passive and autonomized from their “common” element? But also: Why avoid the privilege of externality (space, matter, dissemination, contingency, etc.) that, precisely, every spiritualism abhors and every materialism a contrario vindicates 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 Wirklichkeit of 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 dependent on the relations forming their “conditions.” (Anti-capitalist movements, for instance, are dependent on the transformations of capitalism, which affect 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 intersubjectivity or “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 dissymmetry affecting 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 Hegel puts 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 Feuerbach or 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 alienation characterizing 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 Theses describing the ideological “redoubling” of the social world)—, or as a more strategic pattern of domination, conflict, and political struggle among “classes” (what Capital calls the Herrschafts- und Knechtschaftsverhältnis or 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 [Überbau]”) 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 Manifesto states right away.

1. c. After the fugitive moment of the Theses, Marx may have had very good reasons to accomplish this anthropological reduction to alienated labor cum ontologization 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 negative form, 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. Without this 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 Theses against 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 (Tätigkeit), but this activity would become all-encompassing when (in the next step) it was defined as a continuous collective process that is both poièsis and praxis, ranging from elementary productive activities to revolutionary insurrections and making the collective worker qua laborer/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 existential rather 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”—Beziehung rather than Verhältnis) arises from the former’s arbitrary decision to identify certain relations and practices (linked to production and labor) as social relations and as socializing practices at the expense of all others?Let us be more specific. Thesis Four is 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 relations among humans (marked by desire, imperfect love, and sensual pleasure) into an ideal, perfect love (that celebrated passages of the Bible straightforwardly identify with “God”).³⁷ With 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 support his 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 Four and 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 contradictions through 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 Four that the “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 eliminate some of the potentialities of his own “theses” in order to avoid “opening” the “ensemble” of social relations towards an unlimited range of heterogeneous modes of socialization (and therefore also modes of subjectivation), and instead reinstate a quasi-transcendental equivalence 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 (which makes 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