Étienne Balibar - From Philosophical Anthropology To Social Ontology and Back

23/02/2015 Project MUSE - Postmodern Culture - From Philosophical Anthropology to Social Ontology and Back: What to Do with Marx's
Sixth Thesis on Feuer…

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From Philosophical Anthropology to Social Ontology and Back:

What to Do with Marx's Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach?
Étienne Balibar (bio)
Columbia University in the City of New York
eb2333@columbia.edu
Abstract
This essay is based on a reading of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach from 1845, especially Thesis 6, w hich discusses its w ording w ith
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 w eakness 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.
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Marx in the course of 1845 while he was working on the manuscript of the German Ideology, also left unpublished.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
inw ohnendes Abstraktum. In seiner Wirklichkeit ist es das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse.
Feuerbach, der auf die Kritik dieses w irklichen Wesens nicht eingeht, ist daher gezw ungen: 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 w erden.
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, w ho 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 w hich 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
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23/02/2015 Project MUSE - Postmodern Culture - From Philosophical Anthropology to Social Ontology and Back: What to Do with Marx's Sixth Thesis on Feuer…
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"
(Abstrak tum) and "reality" (Wirk lichk eit, 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 Wirk lichk eit, 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 (Wirk lichk eit comes from Werk and wirk en, 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
[Wirk lichk eit]"), 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 Tätigk eit 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 (verwirk licht)," 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 verwirk licht) 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 Produk tionsverhältnisse ("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 Verk ehr in German.
In the early 19th 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 (Anerk ennung)" 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 ack nowledging (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 (Wirk lichk eit) 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:
a. There is no w ay w e can discuss the tensions in the idea of a philosophical anthropology, and its relations to the ideal of "humanism," w ithout
bringing in an ontological issue, w hich 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 w hen proposing that Marx's "early" materialist philosophy be referred to as an "ontology of the relation," w here the basic notion is not
"individuality" but "transindividuality" (or a concept of the individual w hich alw ays 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 w hom the distinction of Marx's invention w as not a gross
suppression of the anthropological problem, but rather its being transferred from bourgeois/metaphysical abstractions to historical social
determinations - the w hole issue has to do w ith inventing a social ontology. We can see now that this is an ambiguous formula. It could mean that w e
are "ontologizing the social," w hich in turn means either that "society" as a w hole (as a system, organism, netw ork, 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, tw isting the
previous representations, as it w ere, it could mean that w e are "socializing ontology": not in the sense of subjecting ontology to some preexisting,
"more fundamental" social principle (w hich is not very different from installing "Society" w here "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 "w holes," 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, w hatever the "matter" or "substance" and the modalities or functions of these relations. "Relating to" and "being related to"
w ould thus be considered the constitutive ontological mark of the human.
This is indeed w hat I had in mind w hen, 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 w e have been forced to make use of
the adjective "human" in the very formula that w ithdraw s "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, w hile bringing humans together or preventing their "isolation," also
make their differences irreducible, particularly through distributing them among various "classes" in the w idest possible sense - w hich is not to say
that such distributions are stable, eternal, or coherent among themselves.29 In other w ords, "social relations" are alw ays 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) w ithout w hich individuals "relating" to one another w ould 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 pow erfully enunciated in the Theses). The distinctive feature of relations (and also the reason w hy, to a
second degree, they must be articulated w ith one another or influence each other w ithout becoming fused in a single "w hole") is, in other w ords, the
w ay 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 w as 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 w ith a scheme of "open infinity."31
b. But an even greater amphibology still "inhabits" such an attempt at identifying how w e must understand the subversive philosophical operation in
Marx's re-definition/de-construction of "human essence": this is the amphibology about w hether 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 ow n relations.32 This is indeed a very old discussion in philosophy. Here w e are interested in w hy such seemingly
"metaphysical" aporias never cease to return w ithin 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, w hose 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 w ell as in terms of its intrinsic, "aleatory,"
transindividual actions or agencies (w hich he calls "encounters").33 In these concluding remarks, I w ant 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 w hole new episode of the
age-old philosophical controversy concerning the possibility (or impossibility) of "internal relations," w hich 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 w ho 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—w hich, 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 endow ed w ith 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 w ithout simply returning to w hat it w as meant to overcome, namely, a
mechanistic and naturalistic representation of external relations (i.e., primarily non-subjective relations) w hereby 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 ow n conception of "agency" or even "subjectivity"? Why should "subjecthood" become equated w ith "interiority"?35
If w e project these interrogations onto our reading of Marx's thesis of the Wirklichkeit of the "ensemble" of social relations, it seems to me that w hat
w e uncover is a permanent oscillation betw een tw o possibilities of interpretation: one more "externalist," the other more "internalist," and neither ever
entirely separated from the other. One w ay of reading the "ensemble" identifies it w ith w hat became later know n 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, w hich affect their ideologies or consciousness, their forms of organization, and so on). But another w ay 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" w hat renders the other's
w orldview irreducible to his ow n, 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" w ithin consciousness, so that antagonistic (or simply different) subjectivities are mirror
images of a single "spirit." Using a different terminology, w e 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, w hose w riting accompanies the framing of the Theses on Feuerbach or immediately follow s
it, Marx tries to "mediate" the amphibology of the "internal" and "external" understandings of the category "social relation" (its fluctuating either
tow ards an objective structure or tow ards a pure intersubjectivity) through an almost ubiquitous use of the term Verkehr ("commerce" or
"intercourse"), w hich could be read from both angles (or on both registers). Soon, how ever, the duality w ill return w ith different w ays of explaining
the alienation characterizing the relations w ithin capitalism (and more generally bourgeois society) 36 : either as an estrangement of the subjects from
their ow n collective "w orld," as a splitting of that w orld into antithetic life-w orlds—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 w orld)—, or as a
more strategic pattern of domination, conflict, and political struggle among "classes" (w hat Capital calls the Herrschafts- und Knechtschaftsverhältnis
or political relationship that "directly" arises from the "immediate antagonism" in the production process betw een exploited laborers and proprietors of
the means of production [Book 3, Ch. 47]). In both cases, how ever, 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, w hich 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," how ever 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 aw ay.
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 w as 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 - w hich w as 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 w orking 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), w e w ould perhaps still identify a "society" w ith a spirit, culture, or a political regime. We must, how ever, 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 w ay to measure it, w ithin a discussion of the Theses on Feuerbach, is to indicate w hich 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" (w hich interestingly means that it lacks at the same time a "subjective" and an
"objective" dimension: see Thesis One). Feuerbach, accordingly, w ould keep subsuming single human beings under a human essence that is only an
idea, how ever "concrete" or "empirical" it w as proclaimed to be. By contrast, Marx's ow n materialism identified social relations w ith activity
(Tätigkeit), but this activity w ould become all-encompassing w hen (in the next step) it w as defined as a continuous collective process that is both
poièsis and praxis, ranging from elementary productive activities to revolutionary insurrections and making the collective w orker qua laborer/producer
a potential revolutionary (and, conversely, the revolutionary subject a conscious, organized, and indomitable w orker). 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 w ithout
qualification that Feuerbach's concept of human essence only refers to an "abstract notion of genre" w here 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" betw een subjects distinguished as
"I" and "You." What remains questionable, of course, is w hether 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 w hat 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 w ith) to anthropological notions and "human realities." But he is more precisely concerned
w ith 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," follow ed by a transposition of the Holy Family itself (as an imaginary community) into a more speculative
communication of divine "persons" (hypostases) w ho 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 w ay 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 straightforw ardly identify w ith "God").37 With this doctrine, w e 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 w ould not be directed against
Feuerbach, but w ould rather support his position: it w ould suggest that w hat "inhabits" individuals and makes them "humans" is the sexual relation
w ith its affective dimensions (love) and its institutional realizations (the family). Therefore individuals are constituted in and by relations. This is also a
w ay to emphasize a Verkehr (in the sense of "intercourse") as the producing-reproducing structure of the human.38
What w ould Marx possibly object to this Feuerbachian defense? Probably w hat 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," w hile nevertheless trying to locate the source of religious "alienation" in the imperfection or finitude of human sexuality.
In the German Ideology, Marx (and Engels) w ill explain that sexual difference (as a difference of human "types") results from "a division of sexual
labor" (sic) among men and w omen. And in the Communist Manifesto (1847), borrow ing from Saint-Simonian "feminist" criticism, they w ill explain that
marriage and the bourgeois family are a form of "legal prostitution" (in perfect agreement w ith 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 pow erful
argument, w hich 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 ow n "theses" in order to avoid "opening" the "ensemble" of social relations tow ards 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") w ith the specifically (or essentially) human attribute of "labor" (and w ork). It is through a revolution in the division of labor
that human agents may transform their ow n constitutive relations (w hich 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 w ay, the pow ers of the One (of unity,
uniformity, and totality) are even more forcefully imposed, because they become the very pow ers of the novum, the emancipation to come.39
Étienne Balibar
Étienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université 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 w idely in the area of
Marxist philosophy and moral and political philosophy in general. His many w orks include Lire le Capital (w ith Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Jacques
Rancière, Roger Establet, and F. Maspero) (1965); Spinoza et la politique (1985); Nous, citoyens d'Europe? Les frontières, l'État, le peuple (2001); Politics
and the Other Scene (2002); L'Europe, l'Amérique, la Guerre. Réflexions sur la mediationeuropéenne (2003); and Europe, Constitution, Frontière (2005).
Footnotes
1. Marx himself had died in 1883. Engels explained that Marx w as so secretive about the Theses that he did not share them w ith him, even though the
tw o men w ere already cooperating and cow riting. 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 w ith the famous Thesis Eleven, w hich in Marx's original formulation reads: "Die Philosophen haben die
Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt drauf an, sie zu verändern." It w as corrected by Engels like this: "Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur
verschieden interpretiert; es kom m t aber darauf an, sie zu verändern." By changing the mode of the verb and adding the w ord aber in the second
sentence, Engels imposed the idea of a relationship of mutual exclusion betw een "interpreting" and "transforming" that w as not necessarily there in
Marx's version. With the help of other formulations in the Theses, the Eleventh w as understood subsequently as positing a general opposition betw een
(revolutionary) praxis and (mere) theory. As w e w ill 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 Marxüber 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 pensée marxiste," w ritten in 1982 and published posthumously.
4. The Principle of Hope w as w ritten in the w ar period w hen Bloch w as in exile in the US, but published only after his return to Germany (the GDR)
betw een 1954 and 1957.
5. This scheme is very different from the traditional idea, inherited by Hegel from Leibniz, that the present time is "pregnant w ith" the future to w hich it w ill
give birth. In fact it is the opposite. It w ould 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 w ork (w ith Engels), The Holy Family (1844); see the beginning of
the forew ord:
Real humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism, w hich substitutes "self-
consciousness" or the "spirit" for the real individual man and w ith 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 w e 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,
w hich makes its last effort by transforming "criticism" itself into a transcendent pow er."
7. I borrow the expression "dispute of humanism (la querelle de l'humanisme)" from Althusser himself, w ho projected a book (left unfinished) under this
title. I coin "dispute of universalism" on the same model.
8. In the follow ing argument, w hich 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, w hich 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 Thèses 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, w ho w as certainly not unacquainted w ith the Logic, w as mainly focusing
on the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right.
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" w ith 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 answ er must be yes, also for the follow ing reason: w hen 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), w hich w as published the same
year (1845) and w hich 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 Böhme 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 w ould indicate a more intimate and more intense relationship, such as the "presence" of God w ithin the soul of
the faithful Christian. Its use is especially associated w ith developments of the Trinitarian doctrine; see Lehmkuhler.
14. This presentation is strongly indebted to Alain de Libera's w ork on the genealogy of the "subject" betw een scholasticism and modernity ; see his
contribution to our common entry "Subject," and his Archéologie du sujet.
15. An essential link betw een Kant and Feuerbach on this point is indeed Hegel, in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817 and 1830),
w here, how ever, 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 w ay that has been criticized by eminent
phenomenologists w ho claim that he retained only one side of the Augustinian motto (asking the philosopher to "abstract from the w orld" 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 w ell preserved in Descartes's transposition of the Augustinian argument into the language of ontology: "I exist w ith
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'hérésie."
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 w ho "ow n themselves" separately are isolated because w hat makes them identical humans is not only the
pow er of an "abstract idea" (private property), but the pow er of the idea of "abstraction" itself. This is a very acute understanding of the logic of the
"ontology" that w e can call, after C.B. MacPherson, "possessive individualism." See my essay "My Self et My Ow n. Variations sur Locke."
19. It is of course fascinating to search for echoes betw een the Marxian Theses on Feuerbach and Benjamin's Theses on the Concept of History
(1941), w hich 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-Französische Jahrbücher), "An Introduction to the
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," w here das Proletariat is used for the first time to name the revolutionary "subject" (see my "Le moment
messianique de Marx" in Citoyen sujet). Interestingly, borrow ing again from the theological tradition haunting the Theses, the tw o notions "Verwirklichung
(realization)" and "Verweltlichung (secularization, literally becoming-w orld)" are used by Marx here in a quasi-synonymous manner.
22. This is an important subject to w hich several discussions have been devoted. I give here only one reference: Pierre Macherey. Macherey highlights
the importance of w orks by Louis de Bonald (a conservative), François Guizot (a liberal), and Comte Claude de Saint-Simon (a socialist, w hose influence
on Marx's intellectual formation can hardly be underestimated).
23. See Wallerstein. A key analytic notion - perhaps the single central one - arising from the constitution of sociology w as that of individualism (first
introduced into French by Tocqueville) as distinct from moral egoism to describe the behavior of persons w ho are detached from their social affiliations
(status groups, family, and religious confessions), w hich of course different ideologies valued differently. In his Jewish Question (1844), Marx keeps
using "egoism," but in a sense rather akin to "individualism," i.e., to denote a contradiction betw een the social conditions and their ow n result.
24. Most important in this respect are the developments in On the Jewish Question, an essay best know n for its critique of the "abstract" distinction
betw een "rights of man" and "rights of the citizen" as an expression of the bourgeois reduction of "man" to the private-property ow ning individual (w hich
includes the Lockeian notion of the "proprietor in one's person"). Just as "religious emancipation," w hich liberates individuals from their subjection to
imaginary transcendent pow ers, is not yet "political emancipation," w hich allow s for the juridical equality and freedom of every individual (w ithin the limits
of the Nation-State), political emancipation (how ever progressive in the history of mankind) is not yet "social emancipation," w hich liberates individuals
from their alienating isolation and from the iron law s of competition that make everyone a "w olf" for everyone. And it is only a social emancipation that
can be considered a fully "human emancipation."
25. What allow s Engels (before many other Marxists) to carry out this rectification is, of course, the fact that he has become familiar w ith Marx's later
"historical materialism" and the analysis of the relations of production w ith their internal contradiction, as explained in Capital: there, Marx w ould describe
the structure of material production (including exploitation and class domination) as a matrix that generates transformation in the historical character of
the human type, and w ould argue that capitalism relies on an increasing degree of "socialization (Vergesellschaftung)" of the labor process (including
cooperation, industrialization, and polytechnic education) that must become incompatible w ith the rules of private property. An interesting intermediary
formulation is offered in the German Ideology, w here Marx emphasizes the determining function of labor in "producing" human "nature" and equates the
development of productive forces w ith a succession of modalities in the division of labor that first generates private property and then communism
(famously defined as the "real movement that abolishes-overcomes - aufhebt - the existing social state"). Instead of using the technical terms "relations
of production" and "modes of production" to make this argument, how ever, he makes extensive use of the terms Verkehr and Verkehrsformen
(intercourse/commerce and its forms).
26. Remember the motto in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: "das Wahre ist das Ganze" (the true is the same as the w hole, truth and totality
are synonyms ; 15).
27. One is reminded of Michel Foucault's explanations in The Order of Things (1966): anthropological definitions of the Human essence in the 19th
century, after the Kantian revolution that cuts it from its theological dependency or confers upon it a "constitutive finitude," relate alternatively to three
"quasi-transcendental" categories: "labor," "language," and "life." It is w idely assumed (by Foucault himself as w ell) that the "Marxian" paradigm chooses
the first possibility w hen it comes to addressing the anthropological question (w hich is exactly w hat Arendt and others reproached Marx for having
done: chosen a definition of Man as animal laborans). But w e are concerned here w ith the modalities, hesitations, and suspensions of that "choice."
28. See my The Philosophy of Marx, chapter tw o. On this basis I had also proposed a discussion of the affinities betw een Marx and, particularly,
Spinoza and Freud (w ith all their differences). Other names could be added of course, if it is true that there is hardly any great philosopher to w hom the
issue of transindividuality did not occur and w ho did not consider, at least hypothetically, the possibility of view ing "relations," not "terms" [change
"terms" to "forms"?] or "substances," as the prime category for understanding the real. In his very instructive commentary on Feuerbach's theses (Marx
1845, 137-160), Macherey elaborates on this idea w ith a thesis about Marx transforming an "essence" into a "non-essence" that is quite compatible w ith
w hat I have tried to explain in this paper.
29. There are some important affinities betw een this formulation and w hat Maurice Blanchot, in a famous and very abstract essay, not w ithout relation to
his almost contemporary meditation on "Marx's w ords," calls "Le rapport du troisième genre (relation of the third type/kind)," w here one also finds the
equation "L'homme, c'est-à-dire les hommes (Man, that is men)" (101). I shall return to this comparison elsew here.
30. This also explains, in my view , w hy it is insufficient to relate the primacy of "social relations" to the emergence of a historical (or, for that matter,
cultural) anthropology: because such an anthropology (w hose almost unsurpassable prototype lies in the Hegelian description of the "epochs" of w orld
history as constructions of successive "spiritual" ideas of the human) only relativizes (chronologically and geographically) the validity of any definition of
the "human essence," w hile insisting that such a definition must be common to everyone in the considered society or must subordinate all the oppositions
and differences w ithin itself.
31. In his little book Eléments d'autocritique, Althusser credited Spinoza for "inventing, almost alone in the history of philosophy, the notion of a totality
w ithout a closure." He w as apparently not aw are that a similar distinction formed the core of Emmanuel Lévinas's masterw ork Totalité et infini: Essai sur
l'extériorité (1961), also directed against the Hegelian legacy in philosophy.
32. I take the category "amphibology" in the strict sense used by Kant in w hat is arguably the most remarkable development of the Critique of Pure
Reason, the "Amphibology of the Concepts of Reflection," but I assume that it can apply not only to the cases listed by Kant (unity vs. diversity,
adequation vs. inadequation, interior vs. exterior, matter vs. form), but also to others that matter especially in "practical" matters: activity vs. passivity,
subjective vs. objective, etc.
33. I collapse indications from the "early" and the "late" Althusser, w ho are certainly not completely incompatible; see Emilio de Ipola, Althusser, L'adieu
infini, Paris: PUF, 2012, and Warren Montag, Althusser and his contemporaries: Philosophy's Perpetual War, forthcoming from Duke UP, 2013.
34. A classic example for this discussion concerns the issue of paternity: does "fatherhood" connote an "external" relationship betw een individuals w ho
then become socially recognized as "father" and "child," or an "internal" quality of each (as a result of their personal history, including birth, etc.)? How
about a "mother"? a "son," or a "daughter"?
35. To be sure, there is a third traditional possibility of overcoming this kind of amphibology: invoking a generalized concept of "life" (or organicity,
systematicity, etc.). I observe here only that classical concepts of "organic life" tend precisely to preserve interiority at the expense of psychology,
consciousness, and subjectivity.
36. And let us note in passing that the single English or French term "alienation" renders tw o German concepts used by Hegel and Marx: Entäusserung or
"externalization," projection "out of oneself"; and Entfremdung or "estrangement," subjection to an "alien pow er," the pow er of the other.
37. The phrase from John's Epistle I, "God is Love," plays a central role in mystical developments of Christianity as w ell as in "anthropological"
interpretations of Christianity ever since Spinoza; the tw o influences converge in Hegel, w ho transforms the phrase into a symmetric equivalence (Gott
ist Liebe, die Liebe ist Gott). See my essay "Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist. Le mot de l'esprit" in Citoyen Sujet.
38. It w ould also retain the etymological proximity of the German name for "kind" or "genus" (Gattung) and the names for "spouses," "husband," and
"w ife" (Gatte/Gattin). This proximity is used extensively by Hegel to push sexuality back into the "animal" dimension of Man, and by Feuerbach to
emphasize the "typically human" dimension of the sexual, w hich a "spiritualist" discourse euphemizes and sublimates. On all this, see Sabot.
39. The reference to Saint-Simonian sources are crucial historically (although the critique of bourgeois marriage as "legal prostitution" ultimately derives
from earlier feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft) but above all politically and theoretically. As w e know , there is nothing simple in applying a single
concept of "social relation," "social movement," and "emancipatory politics" to both the emancipation of w omen from patriarchy and to the the
emancipation of w orkers from capitalism, though this formed the core of Saint-Simonian "utopian" socialism and other romantic doctrines. This is also a
problem of historicity, as clearly illustrated by the opening sentences of the Communist Manifesto, w here Marx and Engels borrow a list of successive
"class dominations" directly from the Exposition de la doctrine saint-simonienne (1829), w hile eliminating the "domination of w omen by men" from the list;
this may be due to their male chauvinist prejudices, but there is also no w ay for this other form of exploitation-domination to be inserted into the
chronological succession that leads from "primitive communities" to capitalism and to communism according to transformations in the regime of property.
See Étienne Balibar, Françoise Duroux, Rossana Rossanda, Communismo e femminismo, Einaudi editore, Torino (forthcoming).
Works Cited
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Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung. 3 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985. Print.
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de Libera, Alain and Étienne Balibar. "Subject." Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Ed. Barbara Cassin. Paris: Seuil, 2004. Print.
———. Archéologie du sujet, Paris: Librairie Vrin, 2007. Print.
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Étienne Balibar - From Philosophical Anthropology To Social Ontology and Back

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23/02/2015 Project MUSE - Postmodern Culture - From Philosophical Anthropology to Social Ontology and Back: What to Do with Marx's

Sixth Thesis on Feuer…

From Philosophical Anthropology to Social Ontology and Back:

Here is a standard English translation:

The bifurcation: rival "ontologies" and "anthropologies"

12. See Böhme 3-1.5 and 3-7.4.

———. Archéologie du sujet, Paris: Librairie Vrin, 2007. Print.

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