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Lost paradigm: The fate of work in post-war

French philosophy

Article · January 2017

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Jean‐Philippe Deranty
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Lost Paradigm: the Fate of Work in post-war French Philosophy

This paper argues that for two decades, in a period extending between the years immediately preceding
the Second World War and for more than ten years thereafter, the most significant authors in French
philosophy conducted their reflections within a “work paradigm”, that is, within a theoretical
background in which work played the central, organizing role. The writings of Simone Weil and Merleau-
Ponty’s Structure of Behaviour (1938) are particularly distinctive documents of the pre-war and the war
period. At the other end of the period, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1961) represents the apex
of the “work-paradigm”. The first three sections of the paper identify the different meanings of work
which, assembled together, and finally brought together under the umbrella concept of “praxis” in
Sartre’s Critique, establish this “paradigm of work”.

Following on from this characterization, section four briefly traces “the fate of work” in structuralism,
that is, its replacement by a new paradigm, organized first around the concept of “structure”, before
other central concepts such as “text” or “discourse” took over. I seek to show that the rise of “structure”
as paradigmatic concept was explicitly directed against “work”. This trajectory culminated in
Baudrillard’s early books, notably The Mirror of Production (published in 1973), which explicitly
identified the “work paradigm” as responsible for the theoretical and practical shortcomings of
modernity in general and critical theories more specifically. In the final section, I identify a “return of
work” in French thought, brought about, I argue, by the problematic severing of theory and practice the
structure paradigm had provoked.

1. Work as metaphysical experience: Simone Weil

The pull that work exerted over French thinkers in the middle of the last century can be witnessed in the
concluding pages of the texts Simone Weil was writing in the final year of her life. In The Need for Roots
for instance, Weil elevates manual labour to the most spiritual of human activities: “all other human
activities, command over men, technical planning, art, science, philosophy, and so on, are all inferior to

1
physical labour in spiritual significance”.1 It is because of this spiritual significance that the cultural and
political regeneration of the nation the text seeks to outline will involve a transformation of the work of
the masses: “It’s not difficult to define the place that physical labour should occupy in a well-ordered
social life. It should be its spiritual core”.2 This puzzling statement is echoed in Gravity and Grace written
in the same final two years of her life, which concludes with a section on “The Mysticism of Work”.3
Again, manual labour is elevated to the status of an epiphanic moment of “spiritual” revelation. Since,
for Weil as for most intellectuals at the time, the central political issue is the proletarian question, the
problem of alienation and the true shape of worker emancipation, again the spiritual significance of
work also determines its cultural and political impact: “a working people’s culture”, according to Weil, is
the defining challenge of the time.4

Work in Simone Weil’s late writings is an eschatological concept as it brings together the political and
the metaphysical. For her human existence has to be defined and evaluated in reference to the capacity
for the individual and the collective to reach a correct cognitive awareness, translated in practical terms
and experienced affectively, of humanity’s position in the world, that is, in relation to its creator. Her
major concept of “rootedness” encapsulates this metaphysical view with strong phenomenological and
existential tones. It designates a spiritual kind of “being in the world”. It is at first cultural and historical
rootedness, connection to the world through taking place in a human world, but it reaches all the way to
the source of all things. Human beings, through their cognitive, affective and practical abilities to
“recreate the world” have the unique capacity to re-present its order, which is also its beauty, and
confirm their place in it.

This leads to a paradoxical ethical imperative in which work takes centre stage. When the exercise of the
human beings’ specific capacities is severed from the order of creation, that is, when human beings only
pursue finite, “all-too human” concerns, they miss out on their higher destiny. Such severing of the ties
to the order of creation is in fact for Simone Weil the source of modernity’s curse, which she sees
emerging with early Christian and Roman civilizations already.5 By contrast, if by willful, conscious
decision human beings make themselves obey necessity, they reach to infinity through finitude and
thereby fulfil their destiny. The free abandon of freedom, the conscious “obedience” to necessity, are
for her therefore the paradoxical traits that can define human salvation. This in turn explains the

1
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (New York: Routledge, 2002), 298.
2
Ibid.
3
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (New York: Routledge, 2004), 178-181.
4
Weil, Gravity and Grace, 178.
5
Weil, The Need for Roots, 293-294.

2
spiritual superiority of proletarian labour: “consent to the law which makes work indispensable for
conserving life represents the most perfect act of obedience which it is given to Man to accomplish”.6
The metaphysical superiority of proletarian work, work that is performed when it is the only thing
human beings can rely on to sustain themselves socially, stems from the fact that it is the closest human
beings can get to experiencing becoming matter whilst being conscious. Or we might say that it is the
only way to experience death whilst being still alive. The political implication of this view seems to lead
straight to outright conservatism, except for one thing: the spiritual value of work only arises if those
who perform it are aware of it. This is why “workers need poetry more than bread”.7 “Finality without
end” characterizes both the logic of slavery (working only as a means, not for one’s own ends) and the
logic of beauty. But the beauty of proletarian work cannot appear in the reality of taylorised work. And
so a most conservative-sounding conception of work (the truth of work is that it teaches total obedience
and those who are forced to work in order to eat are “privileged”) contains an utterly revolutionary set
of consequences, since it calls for a complete overhaul of the concrete ways in which the work of the
industrial masses is organized. In the eschatological writings of her last years, Simone Weil continues to
draw on the many studies, reports, autobiographical texts she had written during two decades before
the war as she studied and suffered in her own flesh the reality of industrial work.8 Modern industrial
work, as man-made necessity that re-creates a form of natural necessity, therefore is the true place of
eschatological salvation since it is the place where the destiny of the individual being, and the destiny of
humanity as a whole, can be fulfilled. This fulfillment is to occur through a revolution that will have to be
both aesthetic (“poetic”) and political. In this highly paradoxical sense, Simone Weil’s late thinking
therefore remains a form of proletarian philosophy.

However much the other French philosophers of the time would have disagreed with the specific
content of Weil’s epiphanic, eschatological vision of modern industrial labour, the form of her argument
however, the overall formal shape of her philosophizing, and in particular the central place played by
work in this conception, were arguably shared by many of them, in particular by the most famous of
them, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.9 This is not to say that they were directly influenced by her. But the

6
Weil, The Need for Roots, 298.
7
Weil, Gravity and Grace, 180.
8
Simone Weil, La Condition ouvrière (Paris: Gallimard, 2002).
9
This is particularly striking in Merleau-Ponty’s 1947 Humanism and Terror, in which the phenomenologist
commits to a program of “proletarian philosophy” similar in its formal outline to Weil’s, bar the Christian element.
See for instance this passage, in which a number of the dimensions highlighted are present:” The proletariat is
both an objective factor of political economy and a system of subjective awareness, or rather a style of coexistence,

3
way in which her metaphysical approach led to a connection of anthropological, political, historical and
indeed phenomenological and existential arguments is typical of French philosophy in the decades
around the second world war, a philosophical complex in which work was the central concept tying
these dimensions together.

In this complex, work has a metaphysical dimension as a type of practice and experience in which are
disclosed essential aspects of human existence, aspects of how humans relate to the world and thereby
is revealed something about the world itself. Work discloses something essential about the being of the
human being and something essential about the way in which the human being is in the world. Most of
the French philosophers of the time, and if not all of them, at least the most important of them, think
about this in Hegelian and Marxian terms. Alexander Kojève’s lectures as well as the influential teaching
of Hyppolite, focused their attention on the famous Hegelian trope according to which historical “truth”
in asymmetrical social relations is on the side of the dominated, the ones who work for the “master”,
because they are the ones who work on the material world and thereby are given the chance to work on
themselves. The central lesson they retained from Marx was that this link between disclosure and
emancipation could be captured in the concept of “praxis”, which designates both the human, agentic
side in the general “metabolism between nature and society”,10 through which human beings secure
their survival, and the revolutionary action emanating from the proletariat that would liberate
humankind from class struggle.

Such deep metaphysical significance granted to the concept of work on the basis of an anthropological
approach, is paradigmatic throughout European philosophy at the time.11 But it was fleshed out in very
different ways. One particularly influential one was Heidegger’s. Even though he rejected an
anthropological interpretation of his ontological inquiries, Heidegger’s thinking was well aligned with the
model of philosophy just outlined. He also believed that in modernity the background categories
framing all approaches to Being were “productivist” ones, reducing Being to a resource to be exploited

at once fact and value, in which the logic of history joins the forces of labor and the authentic experience of human
life”, 127.

10
Karl Marx, Capital I (London: Penguin, 1990), 283: “labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a
process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself
and nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body…, in order to appropriate the
materials of nature in a form adapted to his needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and
changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature”.
11
Marcuse, “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labour in Economics” in Heideggerian Marxism
(University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

4
by an industrial civilisation.12 In this case, the metaphysical significance of a work-centred
anthropological image was a wholly negative one. The overall philosophical conception is based upon an
alternative between two fundamental metaphysical stances, a work-centred one, based on praxis,
ending up in the catastrophes of modern, industrial society, and another, anti-productivist one, that
“lets Being be”. This fundamental metaphysical alternative in which the work-paradigm signals the
route that humanity actually takes, which is also the one through which humanity misses the Being of
beings, can be compared formally with the one that Bergson propounded, another central reference for
the period. The human being for Bergson is essentially homo faber,13 but the fact that all perception is
always intentionally guided and predetermined in its content by the necessities of action is also what
makes human faculties ill-equipped to capture the flow of real, ever-changing reality. Only altered states
of consciousness, such as dreams, meditation, introspective memorization, or indeed spiritism, that is,
modes of consciousness detached from the demands of action, can put us onto that other path that can
reveal the real qualities of the world. In those states, we are at the opposite of work-centred action. At
the heart of those influential philosophies lies the fundamental, ancient opposition between action and
contemplation. The acknowledgment of work’s significance, indeed of its capacity to create its own
metaphysics, is only a negative one.

The French philosophers of the 1940s and 1950s evaluated the metaphysical significance of the
centrality of work differently. Their Hegelianism corrected by Marx made them see work as a form of
true disclosure, one that however is not just cognitively or metaphysically adequate, but also intrinsically
practical, as it allows human beings to “make their history”. Human history, understood dynamically as
collective praxis enabling a gradual appropriation of the world and through this a gradual self-
appropriation, explains the metaphysical value attached to work by French philosophers in the middle of
the century. Let us study more closely the different meanings of work attached and assembled in such a
work-paradigm.

2. The work paradigm in Merleau-Ponty’s pre-war thinking

12
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).
13
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

5
Merleau-Ponty arguably continued to think along the lines of a “praxis” philosophy right to the end.14
The project of a “proletarian philosophy” is, as noted, central to Humanism and Terror. In the first
chapter of The Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty’s reconstruction of the Lukacsian concept of
praxis appears to leave little room for skepticism. And in the last text he himself published, the Preface
to Signs, Merleau-Ponty continued to defend Marxism as “an immense theoretical field in which to learn
to think”, for reasons that continue to look like the theoretical benefits to be found in “praxis-
philosophy”.15

The separate dimensions of work that allowed Merleau-Ponty to propound a philosophy of praxis were
nowhere outlined more precisely than, strangely enough, in his very first book, The Structure of
Behaviour, finished just before the war and published a few years before The Phenomenology of
Perception. In this book Merleau-Ponty already made the concept of work a central one, but strikingly,
not to pursue reflections on politics or history, but for the purpose of establishing a new, “structuralist”
theory of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s aim in the book is to deconstruct “atomistic” or “anatomistic”
analyses of complex, unified system-like behaviours: the “behaviour” of physical systems – for instance
the dynamic equilibrium of forces enabling a soap bubble to emerge and maintains itself; the instinctual
behavior of an organism in its natural environment; and the behavior of human beings in their social
environment. Merleau-Ponty emphasised the necessity to describe and understand these “behaviours”
in “structural” terms, that is, not by addition of discrete, pre-established elements, but in terms of an
internal identity that brings together different elements in functional terms. Because of the identity of
the structure, it is inevitable to posit an exterior to the system. The structural analysis consists in
identifying the internal process allowing the structure to maintain itself, through a constant
recomposition and redistribution of its internal forces, and identifying its mode of interaction with the
environment. Such analysis, directly inspired by Hegel’s logic, is dialectical in two separate but related
senses: first the analysis of an internal structure identifies the dialectical relations between elements
which make up the whole but can only be defined by reference to their place in the whole; and the
relationship between the structure and its environment is also dialectical because the structure owes its
existence to its environment and yet in a sense “posits” its own environment, as the milieu in which this
structure can appear. Famously, for instance, different animal species define their own environment in
relation to the type of instinctual needs they address to external nature.

14
See J.-P. Deranty, “The Political Core of Merleau-Ponty’s Late Philosophy”, in J. Reynolds, et al. Global Arts/ Local
Knowledge (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming).
15
Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 10-13.

6
In Merleau-Ponty’s first book, work names the two types of dialectics that characterize the “human
order”. First, work characterizes the second, external dialectic:

human work inaugurates a third kind of dialectic (following the dialectics of physical and organic
structures – jpd), since between the human being and the physic-chemical stimuli it projects “use-
object”, - clothes, the table, the garden, -as well as “cultural objects”, - the book, the musical
instrument, language, - that make up the milieu characteristic of the human being, and allow new
forms of behavior to arise. Just as it seemed impossible to reduce the dyad life situation-instinctual
response to the dyad stimulus-reflex, similarly we have to recognize the originality of the dyad
perceived situation-work. I am purposely using the Hegelian term of « work », which designates all
the activities through which the human being transforms physical and organic nature, rather than
the term of action, as do most contemporary psychologists. For it is very common to link
consciousness to action, but it is rare to to see action taken in its original meaning and concrete
sense16 (176)

In the pages, in which this characterization of the “human order” appears, one of Merleau-Ponty’s main
philosophical targets is Bergson. Bergson’s critique of “spatializing” thought and his attempt to point to
a form of human experience capable of retrieving the fluctuating flows of reality underneath the spatial
categories of utility-based thinking is germane in spirit to Merleau-Ponty’s defence of a “structuralist”,
that is, non-atomistic epistemology. But in his description of actual consciousness (consciousness as tied
to the demands of action) Bergson himself, so Merleau-Ponty argues, adopts an abstract view of it, one
that is not equal to the reality of human perception. In the end Bergson commits the same
methodological mistake as the epistemologies he himself rejects. This is because Bergson does not
distinguish the type of action required of an organism in its natural environment, from the specificity of
human action in its human environment. His understanding of “action” remains the same in the two
orders of the animal and the human: whatever is required of the living entity in terms of adaptation to
and appropriation of the environment for the entity to survive in it. In the end the model of
consciousness ends up being akin to an “atomist”, “sensationalist” one, since the pre-figuration of
reality by the preempting demands of action is seen as reaching out for discrete qualitative features in
the world. The “dialectical” aspects of human perception, that is, the way in which human perception
responds to structures of meaning by apprehending and responding to them in ways that are
themselves holistic, thus gets dissolved in the “sensationalist” model. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty argues,

16
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour (New York: Beacon Press, 1963).

7
in order to capture the specificity of human perception, one has to locate it in the specificity of the
“human order”, that is, take into account the fact that individual human behavior always takes place in a
cultural environment which frames and determines its meaning. However non-reflective, un-conscious
the foundations of human behavior might be, they already are framed by and respond to symbolic
structures and are symbolic in themselves, not just for the observer. Organic behavior has meaning, but
its meaning is reflectively acquired only by the observer, whereas human being is intrinsically
meaningful, saturated with meaning, inasmuch as it symbolically responds to addresses within a context
that is also inherently symbolic.

For Merleau-Ponty in those early years, what characterises the symbolic environment that frames and
qualifies human perception, is not that it is made up of language, but that it is the product of human
work, taken in the collective, “anthropological” sense, as “the activities through which the human being
transforms physical and organic nature.” Later on in this same passage, Merleau-Ponty lists other
specifically human “environments” that call for a specific, symbolic reaction, like the symbiosis between
child and mother. So there seems to be an ambiguity or vagueness in Merleau-Ponty’s argument. In the
passage just quoted he seems to make work the primordial dimension, whereas later on in the text it is
only one of the hominising actions. Perhaps this equivocity can be resolved if we distinguish two
anthropological meanings of work, or two ways in which work can be viewed in an anthropological way,
that is, as the capacity through which humans create their environment.

First, there is work as collective achievement that produces a human world, a world of artefacts and
built spaces. Language is part of that dimension in this text (see the quote above, where language is one
of the “cultural objects”). The symbolic is broader than the discursive for the young Merleau-Ponty. The
anthropological perspective means that the symbolic can be defined, following Hegel (but as we saw
Simone Weil also shared this fundamental assumption), as the dimension through which human beings
have the capacity to re-create the natural world, to create a “second nature”, in which they can feel “at
home”. Much of this symbolic stuff is made up and “stored” in discourse, but not all of it. Useful objects,
objects and spaces that carry or embody symbolic information (in the loosest sense of the term,
including cultural, normative, and basic factual information), alterations to physical spaces, all
contribute to create the specific environment in which specifically human behavior unfolds. As said,
language itself can be conceptualized, from a fundamental anthropological perspective, inasmuch as it is
the human answer to the evolutionary challenge, as a product of human “work”.

8
But work can also be primordial in the sense that it frames or provides mediations for, other symbolic
functions, which cannot be reduced to it, like interaction with the other as an alter ego. Adopting a
genetic perspective, Merleau-Ponty suggests a theory of ontogenesis, whereby the young human being
interacts with the nurturing environment differently from other animals, because her actions and
reactions are addressed and called upon by structures of meaning that have been “produced” by peers
in his world. Within this produced world, this second nature, some structures of meaning cannot be
analysed as work, notably interaction. But interaction for Merleau-Ponty, unlike later intersubjectistic
German philosophers, even though it is genetically primary, is not sufficient to fully explain
hoministation. Interaction has to be framed by “work”, not only in the crude sense that it needs material
support, but more importantly because some key sources of symbolicity which it always already
mobilises, notably language, are forms of work.

These different meanings of work flesh out the external dimension of the dialectic that does justice to
the “structural” dimension of the human order. But work is also at the centre of the internal dialectic.
This comes out clearly in the quote above: “just as it was impossible to reduce the dyad life situation-
instinctual response to the dyad stimulus-reflex, similarly we have to recognize the originality of the
dyad perceived situation-work”. The latter part of the quote can be taken in the sense of the external
dialectic, pointing to work as the social action through which the human species creates its own specific
“niche”. This reading seems required by the context of the full quote. But the rhetoric of the sentence
commands another reading, an internal one. The dyads listed by Merleau-Ponty set up structural
relationships between environment and organism. If the dyads life situation-instinct and stimulus-reflex
are echoed in a parallel way in the dyad perceived situation-work, then work is to be taken in a
subjective sense, as individual activity. And this would be confirmed by the reference to action, which, in
the context of the critique of Bergson, is individual action as anthropologically determined. The idea
then, is that the human individual takes place in the specifically human order most eminently through
work. For Merleau-Ponty at the time, this is “the original meaning and concrete sense of human action”.

There are two ways to interpret this sense of work. First, most simply, individual work can be viewed as
the predominant form of action, framing individual perception, simply because it is an individual
instantiation of the activity which, at the level of the species and at the level of the collective, is
responsible for creating the human environment. If language, as “cultural object” is a product of human
work in the deep anthropological sense, then, in this sense, to learn to speak a language and to speak
the language is to continue and indeed to enact the species’ and the collectivity’s “work”.

9
But there is another sense of individual, internal working in Merleau-Ponty’s first book. Work is also
used by him in the Hegelian sense of producing an output through negation of the given, and thereby as
an anticipation of a possible or a latching onto, or making apparent of, a virtual reality. In this sense,
work begins not with the human but with the organic. A mechanical system maintains its “identity”
through the dynamic redistribution of internal forces in response to interaction with the environment.
The physical structure exists only in relation to past and present. Already with living structures, feedback
mechanisms for perception and action mean that the organism tends to “produce” the situation to
which its instinctual life has geared it to reproduce itself. The environmental niches that evolution
selects for specific species are not simply given to the latter, but produced by them, “cognitively”
inasmuch as their perceptual organs are adapted for specific aspects of reality (the famous tique-world
analysed by Uexkuell), or indeed practically, inasmuch as animals intervene in their environment to
create the conditions for their survival. Living organisms therefore “negate” the given and project
themselves practically, productively, towards the virtual. Merleau-Ponty does not hesitate to call this
practical form of negation, “work”.17 The fact that this sounds like a metaphor for us, a hardly justified
one at that, one that suggested itself because of the Hegelian language spoken by the French
philosophers of the time, actually strengthens the argument this paper makes. Even in the case of non-
human living organisms, the philosopher of the form is happy to talk about forms of work. This is the
language that immediately imposes itself as soon as creative, practical, proto-symbolic forms of
negation of the given are observed. For Merleau-Ponty work is the most useful concept to bring
together onto- and phylogenesis, individual and collective life understood “practically” and
“dialectically”, as producing the environments they require for their survival.

3. Praxis philosophy: the work paradigm at its apex

In the writings of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre after the war, notably in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical
Reason, the book in which the work paradigm reaches its apex, these diverse but interrelated meanings
of work are maintained, combined with other germane senses and brought together under the single
umbrella concept of praxis. Praxis forms the conceptual background from which the two philosophers
address more specific problems. It functions as the generative concept, fulfilling the functions that “text”
and “discourse” will perform a decade later. But praxis is nothing other than a term uniting several

17
Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour, 146, 149.

10
meanings and dimensions of work, as this central passage from the beginning of Sartre’s 1961 magnum
opus testifies:

human work, as the original (originelle) praxis (my emphasis), through which the human being
produces and reproduces his life is entirely dialectical: its permanent possibility and necessity
stem from the internal relationship (rapport d’intériorité) that binds the organism to its
environment and the deep contradiction between the order of the organic and the order of the
inorganic, which are both present in the individual. Its initial movement and its essential character
are defined as a twofold contradictory transformation: the unity of the project gives the practice
field a quasi-synthetic unity, the crucial moment of work is the one when the organism makes
itself inert in order to transform the inert environment. This criss-cross (chassé-croisé) that
opposes the human-thing (chose humaine) to the thing-man (homme-chose) is what we will find
at every level of dialectic experience.18

Sartre adopts the conceptual language of praxis in order to perform a materialist correction in his
thinking after the idealistic and solipsistic stance of Being and Nothingness. As we saw above, Merleau-
Ponty shared a similar approach.

Praxis allows phenomenologists to maintain the phenomenological stance, which they continue to view
as the correct methodological starting point. As the first Merleau-Ponty book testified already, the core
meaning and model of praxis is individual working activity. In turn, this activity is understood by Sartre
and Merleau-Ponty as a form of intentionality which discloses the world under certain aspects, on the
basis of specific “projects”. These are individual projects in the precise meaning the term takes in the
existentialist uptake of Husserl’s intentionalist theory of consciousness, that is, active structures of
consciousness that not only define individual existence for the subject but equally, on the side of
objectivity, bring specific categorical, spatio-temporal meaning-organisation to a given field.

But with working activity now taken as the primordial form of sense-constituting intentionality, the
“projects” are now indissolubly individual and collective, as well as indissolubly mind- and body-related.
And as work responds to basic anthropological necessity, the primordial form of intentionality is also
one that responds to needs before anything else. In these three related dimensions, praxis therefore

18
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (London: Verso, 2004), 203.

11
truly gives a strong material substance to phenomenological intentionality: intentionality turns out to be
intrinsically social, embodied and needs-based, when its primordial model is work.

Another important dimension is also attached to intentionality once it is conceptualized from the point
of view of praxis, namely the political one. Since work, the primordial sense of praxis, takes place in the
social and technical divisions of labour, the point of praxis is not just to point to the social dimensions of
individual activity in a neutral way, but to also insist on the way in which individual experience is framed
by the logic of domination associated with specific modes of production. Praxis corrects the solipsism of
phenomenology but also introduces the key dimension of social domination. The post-war
phenomenologists can thus embrace the famous ambiguity of the term “praxis” in the Theses on
Feuerbach, as introducing an essential political dimension, designating emancipatory political action. But
even in this last sense praxis continues to borrow its meaning from productive work since its main
achievement is to overcome the alienation of capitalistic work and the oppression that is characteristic
of capitalistic relations of production. In this overturning of alienated work, the emancipation at the
horizon of the revolution is synonymous with a return of work to its truth, namely as a way for the
human beings to transform themselves by transforming nature, to recognize themselves as a collectivity
through their collectively based interactions with nature. Two mottoes are used constantly by both
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as shorthand for articulating the separate dimensions of praxis as background
concept, namely the “recognition of man by man” as “mediated by things”,19 and the “struggle against
nature and against other human beings”. 20

In short therefore, praxis is for Sartre and for Merleau-Ponty a way to associate Husserl with Marx.
Praxis gives intentionality a materialist depth, whilst the phenomenological stance provides the entry
point to read Marx in a non-mechanistic way.

The third core reference for the French philosophers in the 1950s is Hegel. As the citation from Sartre’s
Critique above makes clear, indeed as any of the texts by leading French philosophers of the time testify
(Camus being the notable exception), the correct way to think philosophically is to think “dialectically”,
that is, without breaking down structural interactions into external relations between abstract, discrete
units, nor by making individual entities disappear into structural conditions. Praxis understood from the
point of view of work offers precisely the model of a structural relationship in which the pole of the
individual (the working agent) and the pole of the universal (the division of labour, the mode of

19
Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 79.
20
Merleau-Ponty , Humanism and terror, 122.

12
production) equally matter for a proper conceptual approach; and secondly work obeys a logic in which
entities “turn into their opposite”, as the human makes itself “inert”, turns into objectivity, and the
objective thing takes on and incarnates “human” qualities, becomes expressive of subjects.

The general problem to which praxis is supposed to provide the generic paradigm answer is that of
“totalisation”. The Husserlian, genetic perspective gives a dynamic sense to the Hegelian concept. But
the Hegelian imperative remains, it is the one we already summarily highlighted: that it makes no sense
to try and account for the whole without taking the activities and intentions of the individual parts into
consideration, and reciprocally, that individual beings owe the conditions in which their actions,
perceptions and intentions unfold to the broader social, cultural, political and economic context. All
specific problems , notably the models of social ontology and intersubjectivity Sartre details at
(excruciating) length in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, are considered as specific forms of
“totalisation” within the overall context of history as the most general form of totalisation. This is
history inasmuch as, following what is for the phenomenologists the core Marx quote, “Men make their
own History ... but under circumstances ... given and transmitted from the past”.21 Work is the
paradigmatic activity giving more specific content to this activity of history-making.

4. Structure versus work

The rise of a new paradigm in the years following the publication of Sartre’s Critique saw “structure”
play the generative role previously played by work. This new paradigm targeted specifically the
conception of history as praxis that was used by the phenomenologists as background conception.
Merleau-Ponty in his writings of the 1950s and 1960s had combined without major shift insights from
Saussurean linguistics and the new cultural anthropology to his continued reliance on genetic
phenomenology.22 Sartre’s Critique equally sought to integrate the new anthropology arising from Levi-
Strauss’ seminal critique of Mauss. So it wasn’t so much the emphasis on structure that constituted the
rift between the older and the new generation, as an explicit, self-conscious rejection of history as praxis,
of work as the central conceptual model to think society and politics. The disappearance of work from
the philosophical radar in the structuralist years was not just a side-effect of a new philosophical

21
Sartre, Critique, 35 for instance. As Sartre notes, “the whole of dialectical rationality is contained in this
sentence”.
22
See for example the article republished in Signs, “From Mauss to Levi-Strauss”, Signs, 114-125.

13
approach, say, a consequence of the rejection of the phenomenological approach. Rather, through the
critique of phenomenology, it was specifically the work-paradigm and all it entails, that was rejected.

As is well-known, the structure-paradigm takes as its model in analyses of language which aim to explain
how the infinite diversity of linguistic utterances are produced generatively on the basis of a finite set of
functional rules. These rules link minimal units which are themselves defined internally to the system
considered, that is, through their diacritical relations. Such an approach to language led via
generalization and analogy (this is precisely the process by which a “paradigm” is established) to a new
vision and a new ideal for the social sciences and philosophy: taking linguistics as a model, or indeed
phonology in the case of Lévi-Strauss, the social sciences were to strive to become rigorous sciences, by
providing formalized descriptions of their fields through the extraction of functional rules linking the
basic elements of the systems and structures studied. At the horizon of formalization was the ideal of a
knowledge of human realities that would be able to take mathematical form, amenable to formal
calculus. This new vision of the social sciences was premised on a number of key assumptions, but one
in particular was especially important, as it made the new paradigm willfully and explicitly at odds with
the phenomenological stance, namely the radical separation between experience and analysis. Speakers
of a language can be fully competent or indeed expert in using the phonetical, grammatical and
semantic rules making up that language, without having any reflective knowledge or even conscious
awareness of these rules. The new conception of theory was premised on the idea that the theorist’s
work of reducing the empirical diversity of the field to hidden structural mechanisms amounted to
uncovering the “unthought”, the “unconscious” that underlies forms of practice, thought or experience
and makes them possible. Such an “unconscious” however was seen as accessible only to theory, not to
the subjects or social collectives studied by theory. Just as the structures of language remain
“unconscious” to the speakers of the language, the mechanisms underlying a subject’s psychic life
remain unconscious to her, and the mechanisms that effectively produce the shape of social relations
inherent in a specific mode of production remain hidden from the individuals living in that society. In
turn, whereas praxis-thinking aimed to connect experience and structure to political action, the
theoreticist stance of structuralism led to a disconnect between experience and politics.

At the most fundamental level, the main bone of contention was the conception of human history as a
general “production” of humanity by itself through its work upon external nature, a paradigm in which,
as we just saw, individual work constituted not just an instantiation of the general work of the species,
but offered at the same time the very model for that “work”. This target of structuralism is particularly

14
explicit in Athusser’s introduction and chapter in Reading Capital, some of the founding texts of the
structuralist wave.23 Althusser’s main adversaries are interpretations of Marx which present his thinking
as a “philosophy of work”, readings that develop an “anthropological ideology of work, of the
‘civilisation of work’”.24 For Althusser, one completely misses the rupture that Marx’s “immense
theoretical revolution” represents, a revolution he seeks to show directly anticipated the revolutions
introduced by structuralist methods in psychology and linguistics, if it is read on the model that
constitutes “the most serious of temptations”, namely, an understanding of historical materialism in
which “history is the transformation of human nature which thereby becomes the true subject of the
history that transforms it”.25

The explicit targeting of the praxis model and with it, of the work-paradigm, is also a key stake in
Foucault’s archeological texts of the 1960s. In these texts, as is well-known, Foucault demarcates three
different epistemological landscapes, the classical, the modern, and a new paradigm that announces
itself as overcoming of the modern. Foucault does this work of historical demarcation by identifying the
structural parameters that define in each case a specific way in which words, meanings and things are
made to relate to each other and thereby specific ontological carvings of the world lead to different
types of epistemological a priori. The point of these reconstructions is not merely historical and
descriptive. Foucault aims to de-naturalise and radically contextualize the epistemological context in
which the sciences of the human emerge, in order to show that they are not the result of a necessary
progress in the evolution of rationality, but only correspond to a historical moment which can be
replaced by a new one, as is indeed beginning to occur. Significant theoretical and practical
consequences flow on from this historical and conceptual contextualization. If the sciences of “Man”
arise with a social model that is already overcome in its core foundations, as Nietzsche is said to have
shown, then one has to think and act in new ways, in ways corresponding to the newly emerging
paradigm. The modern paradigm that is thereby shown to be already obsolete is precisely one of which
praxis-philosophy is the typical, late philosophical representative.

In The Order of Things, Foucault lists three fields around which the transitions from the classical to the
modern to the post-modern epistemes occur: life, work and language. According to Foucault’s
archeological reconstruction, the “return of language” as sign of the rise of a paradigm that will replace
the modern one coincides with the disappearance of “the human being” as epistemological foundation,

23
Louis Althusser, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1997), 135-140; 170-173.
24
Althusser, Reading Capital, 172.
25
Althusser, Reading Capital, 140.

15
inasmuch as modern thought and science are organized on the basis of the transcendental model of a
human being that is both the constituting, transcendental subject and the most eminent object of
knowledge. The human being in question is precisely the one that is the subject of praxis: a being
connected to the world in different, transcendental ways, who is able to reflexively know itself on the
basis of the knowledge it can gain of the world through these diverse modes of relating to it. This model
is precisely the work model we have been describing in the previous section. It is not by chance that
Foucault begins the description of the classical episteme with language but introduces the rupture to
modernity with work. For if the central ground from which the modern episteme arises is the human
being, if the “anthropological assumption”, the relating of all problems of knowledge to aspects of
human essence, is at the core of the modern episteme, it is in the new economy that this constellation is
most eminently realized.26 And it is precisely this constellation that the new episteme supersedes, when
language becomes once again the central field within which words and things are connected.

Foucault’s grand archaeological reconstructions in the late 1960s represent the most sustained,
systematic attempt to self-reflectively theorise the “epistemological rupture” in which the structuralist
thinkers thought they were themselves engaged. In this narrative, Husserl, the phenomenological
method, are things of the past, just the latest attempt now made obsolete by the tectonic shift in the
“historical epistemological a priori”, to ground knowledge in reference to constitutive transcendental
subjectivity. Similar views are shared by many of the other thinkers aligned with structuralism, whether
they simply reject Husserl’s method outright, or seek to overcome it from within, as did Derrida. In this
respect, Heidegger provided for many a key, positive reference on the other side of the “rupture” as it
were, as the thinker who had undertaken the shift from subjectivity to being and its disclosure in
subjectless discourse from within the phenomenological tradition.27

On Hegel and Marx judgments were more divergent. For Foucault in 1966, Marx’s mode of thinking is
typical of, and remains stuck in, the “modern”, since this thinking is organized precisely in a constellation
in which “history, anthropology and the suspension of becoming (a vision of the end of history, in Marx’s
case, of emancipation - jpd) belong to each other, in a figure of thought that defines for 19th century
thought one of its main threads”.28 Althusser and his school of course hold the opposite conviction, but
a large part of Althusser’s intellectual effort consists precisely in wrenching Marx away from such an
alliance of history and anthropology, and to make Marx consistent with the assumptions underlying the

26
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2002), 275-287.
27
Althusser, Reading Capital, 53. Foucault, The Order of Things, 269-270; 355-356.
28
Foucault, The Order of Things, 285.

16
new paradigm. A key stake in the structuralists’ objections to the phenomenological materialism of their
predecessors was to advance alternative accounts of anthropology and history which would no longer
be thought on the model of “human production”. The core anthropological reality becomes the symbolic
function, and history is now conceptualized as being indeed the ultimate background in which structures
deploy themselves in relation to each other, but in complete rupture to other historical contexts. There
are only discrete “totalities”, constituted by incommensurable codes, no longer any grand “totalisation”
effected by humanity as a whole in the overall work of its own self-production.

In relation to Hegel as well, assessments depend on whether Hegel is read as harking back to the praxis-
and work-paradigm, or as providing conceptual tools to escape it. For Althusser, Hegelian dialectic is the
archetype of the old way of thinking against which Marx’s “immense theoretical revolution” was waged.
Althusser consistently pitches the “expressive”, Hegelian conception of history against Marx’s. According
to this expressivist conception, history consists in the empirical unfolding of a conceptual content at the
core of “effective reality”, an unfolding that is “produced” as a result of “the work of the concept” and
through human actions and intentions. But Lacan continued to lean on Hegel right until the early 1960s,
to formalise the way in which structures of the unconscious are constituted. Dialectic in Lacan is no
longer the scheme that makes it possible to establish mediations explaining forms of “totalisation”
within which are linked without discontinuity the individual and the collective, the subjective and the
objective. Rather, dialectic , notably in the figures of the “beautiful soul” and the master/slave, makes it
possible to formalize the way in which a lost object can act as an absent cause from which a whole
structured field can paradoxically emerge.29 In this model, individual psychic structures and with them
meaningful expressions and actions are indeed “produced”, but production no longer designates the
output of human projects. Rather it is the unintended consequence, the symptom, of unconscious
mechanisms. The “work of the unconscious”, based on unconscious chains of signifiers and psychic
ruptures, is the opposite of a “praxis”, it is no longer a form of work in the proper sense of the term.

The targeting of the work model achieved its most explicit and thorough exposition in Baudrillard’s
Mirror of Production, published in 1973. The book is an eminent example of a structuralist approach to
society, since it argues that social formations and their pathologies must be explained in terms of codes
and symbolic exchanges, that is, as systems of signs that define social meanings and, as a result of the
logic of codes, create specific forms of exclusion. The thesis however is presented mostly in negative
terms, by contrasting it critically with approaches based on the work-paradigm. The error of the

29
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (New York: Norton, 2006) 148; 671-703.

17
“productivist” paradigm, of the “unbridled romanticism of productivity”,30 is situated at the meta-level.
At a basic theoretical level, the paradigm is false as it ignores the symbolic basis of social life, something
that can be gleaned most clearly from anthropology. More importantly though, productivism as a
paradigm is false because it does not realize that it is the unreflective product of the specific code
modern capitalism imposes onto humanity and the world. Marx thought he would accomplish a radical
critique of political economy by showing how the apparently transhistorical concepts used by bourgeois
economics in fact reflected only a historically specific period. Baudrillard applies the same gesture to
Marx himself: Marx performs a form of unreflective naturalizing of social theory, by not seeing that the
discourse he develops to challenge classical political economy in fact uses the same basic conceptual
language, the language of work, labour and production. Marx remains trapped in the language he seeks
to denounce, historical materialism remains fooled by the cunning of capitalism. And this is true of any
other critical theory that continues to make use of the metaphorics of work and production. Only a
critique that reaches all the way down to the conceptual roots of the modern capitalistic code can be
truly radical and point to a genuine social alternative. This means totally abandoning the reference to
production, work and praxis as normative and epistemological guides. Indeed, if we take Baudrillard’s
argument as a reading guide, it is striking to see work continue to exert its conceptual pull in writings
post the structuralist wave, for instance in Derrida’s writings of the late 1960s, which consistently refer
to “the work of deconstruction” or in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, where the anti-Lacanian
model of the subconscious is developed on the basis of the fundamental idea that “desire produces”,
the unconscious is “desiring production”, that has to be thought of as “factory and workshop”, as an
“economy” in which the core categories are “work and investment”.31

5. The return of work?

Just as Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason was both the apex and the swan song of the praxis-
paradigm, Baudrillard’s attempt at a radical semiotic undercutting of the work reference was
immediately followed by a significant new shift in French thinking, in the form of Rancière’s polemic
against Althusser, his former master, in the 1974 Althusser’s Lesson. In this text, the young radical took
on the severing of theory and practice that forms the heart of structuralist and post-structuralist critical
philosophies, particularly structuralist readings of Marx. As he showed, in the name of emancipation,

30
Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (New York: Telos Press, 1975), 17.
31
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press,
1983), 26-35, 55.

18
critical philosophers operating with structuralist assumptions postulate the epistemic and, as a
consequence, the practical inferiority of the individuals they allegedly seek to help liberate. In the
struggle against domination, they posit the inherent cognitive and consequently the political immaturity
of the dominated. This political paradox however is only the symptom of a broader epistemological
problem. To be solved this conundrum requires a radical shift in the relationship between social theory
and social experience. Equality has to be more than just a political aim; it needs to be taken up as an
“axiom” in the very formation of theory and in terms of how theory is positioned in relation to
experience. Rancière thus performed his radical assertion of equality through an epistemological
reevaluation of collective and individual experiences and their expressions in proletarian discourse.
More specifically, the initial shape of Rancière’s anti-elitist gesture in theory was a return to individual
and collectives social experiences of and around work (notably workers’ organisations), as the main
avenues for social and political emancipation. As he wrote in 1976, in the preface to his edition of
proletarian writings, the theory of political emancipation had to take seriously again what workers were
actually saying, the crux of which was that “workers are fully capable of saying what is just and
reasonable, that their place has to be recognized, not because they are the strongest, but because this
place conforms to justice and history. This is not a cry coming from the lower, suffering layers of society,
but the voice of an intelligence that is also the voice of the new principle of the world, namely, work”.32
Only a decade after Althusser and Foucault had attempted to demonstrate the obsolescence of the work
paradigm, it resurfaced in the guise of a new kind of proletarian philosophy.

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