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Inverted Forms and Heterotopian Homonymy:

Althusser, Mamardashvili, and the Problem of “Man”

Miglena Nikolchina

The mostly long-­distance friendship between Louis Althusser and

Merab Mamardashvili will provide here a focusing lens that sharpens but
also delimits a vast issue which seems to be gathering momentum once
again today: the issue concerning “man,” vis-­à-­vis the shifting boundaries
of the animal, the machine, and the divine. This issue—against the back-
ground of radical social emancipatory projects—played a crucial role in
French theoretical debates in the 1960s and took a turn to which Althus-
ser contributed and which has been widely recognized as “antihuman-
ist.” Under dissimilar economic, political, social, cultural, and ideological
circumstances,1 concurrent developments in Eastern Europe followed a

Mamardachvili is the spelling used in Merab’s publications in French; Mamardashvili is

the spelling used in English. If one followed the rules for transliteration, Mamardašvili
would be the proper spelling. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. From abolishing private ownership of the “means of production” to (more or less suc-
cessfully) reorganizing all spheres of life in accordance with radical theoretical premises,
Eastern Europe staged a mass experiment whose scope, thoroughness, and sheer dura-
tion cannot be overestimated. With its initial emphasis on the collective rather than the
individual and on the inexorable machine of history rather than human will, this project
could fairly accurately claim to be described as antihumanist.

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different logic. Politically, this logic surfaced in the events of the Prague
Spring in 1968, with its slogan for “socialism with a human face.” Philo-
sophically, but also in broader cultural terms, it brought up the notion of the
human as its central concern. This tendency, for which the young Karl Marx
ensured the necessary alibi, was shared and appropriated on a variety
of levels, including reform-­minded nomenclature. Overtly with, but in sub-
stance against, nomenclature appropriations, the tendency was seized
upon by critically minded East European intellectuals and artists as a plat-
form for undermining and opposing the repressive ideological machine of
the regime.
It thus came to pass that, by the end of the 1960s, critical and projec-
tive thinking in the West (as represented by French theory) was taken up by
antihumanist trends, while in Eastern Europe it began to unfold under the
aegis of “man.” This East European inversion could easily be perceived—
and dismissed—as déjà vu, a sort of “restoration,” a counterrevolutionary
return to “bourgeois humanism.” Althusser, to be sure, did so. He even went
so far as to claim that the “humanist ravings” of the liberalization in Eastern
Europe, which he saw as a betrayal of both theory and the revolutionary
project, were the reason he wrote his books at all.2 Bringing into consider-
ation his encounters, biographical and philosophical, with Mamardashvili
might shed a different light on the Eastern side of this theoretical deviation
and reveal the complex and ambiguous nature of the very division it presup-
poses between humanism and antihumanism.
Althusser is sufficiently well known both East and West for his influ-
ential work on Marx and ideology. Russian Georgian philosopher Mamar-
dashvili is little known, if at all, in the West but is a fairly big name in at least
some of the former Eastern bloc countries.3 Meeting Althusser had dire

2. As he put it in retrospect, “I would never have written anything were it not for the Twen-
tieth Congress and Khrushchev’s critique of Stalinism and the subsequent liberalization.
But I would never have written these books if I had not seen this affair as a bungled
de-­Stalinization, a right-­wing de-­Stalinization which instead of analyses offered us only
incantations; which instead of Marxist concepts had available only the poverty of bour-
geois ideology. My target was therefore clear: these humanist ravings, these feeble dis-
sertations on liberty, labor, or alienation, which were the effects of all this among French
Party intellectuals. And my aim was equally clear: to make a start on the first left-­wing cri-
tique of Stalinism, a critique that would make it possible to reflect not only on Khrushchev
and Stalin but also on Prague and Lin Piao: that would above all help put some substance
back into the revolutionary project here in the West.” Louis Althusser, “Les communistes
et la philosophie,” L’Humanité, July 5, 1975. Quoted in Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The
Detour of Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 1.
3. So far as I know, the only book to appear in the West is Merab Mamardachvili, Médi-

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consequences for Mamardashvili. The two philosophers met in 1966, when,

without asking the Soviet authorities for permission, Mamardashvili made a
detour from Italy, which he visited at the invitation of the Italian Communist
Party, to Paris. This was to be Mamardashvili’s last trip outside the Soviet
Union until Gorbachev’s time (the second half of the 1980s, when the ban
on his traveling outside the country was finally lifted). The meeting obvi-
ously went well, as the two men stayed in contact through letters—which
had to be delivered by friends rather than the mail—and met again in 1974,
when Althusser attended a conference in Moscow.4
It should be noted at this point that the decades since the 1960s
have also been accompanied, for reasons that still need to be analyzed
(they might be part of the more general tendency toward “lobbyization” in
the humanities), by an accelerating erosion of the shared East-­West intel-
lectual field. In the 1960s, older figures such as Alexandre Koyré, Alex-
andre Kojève, and Roman Jakobson, and fresh arrivals such as Tzvetan
Todorov and Julia Kristeva, among many others, provided a living intellec-
tual link. The intense reception of Russian formalism and Mikhail Bakhtin
(with his emphasis on dialogue) left its mark on the epoch. The early history
of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, whose presidents and
vice presidents included Jacobson, Kristeva, Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, Jurij M.
Lotman, and Aleksandr Ljudskanov (some of them expats, some not), pro-
vides an eloquent example for the East-­West openness of the theoretical
discussion in spite of ideological repression in Eastern Europe.5 Over the
course of the 1970s, things changed drastically, and when, in the 1980s,
George Soros began organizing his East-­ Meets-­ West conferences in
Dubrovnik, Western scholars no longer came with the intention to discuss
but to teach and collect empirical material.

tations cartésiennes, trans. Tanya Page and Luba Jurgenson (Arles: Solin–Actes Sud,
1997). Of course, efforts are being made to bring attention to his work. The task is not
easy for various reasons, one of which is the fact that a large part of Mamardashvili’s
work appeared (and keeps appearing) posthumously and is comprised of unfinished
manuscripts or recorded oral presentations. For more information on his reception East
and West, see Slobodanka Vladiv-­Glover, “Post-­structuralism in Georgia,” Angelaki 15,
no. 3 (2010): 27–39.
4. There is the view expressed by Annie Epelboin that the meeting between Althusser
and Mamardashvili did not result in a meaningful conversation (Vladiv-­Glover, “Post-­
structuralism in Georgia,” 36n4). Clearly, I cannot accept this. Whatever their theoretical
differences, I believe in this case one philosophical animal (as Mamardashvili called him-
self) recognized another: Althusser’s letter, from which I will quote later on, speaks vol-
umes of tacit empathy.
5. For a brief history of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, see iass-­ais.org/.

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The connection between Althusser and Mamardashvili cuts across

this history. Foregrounding the East-­West divergence between humanist
and antihumanist trends, their encounter brings into focus the processes
that ultimately led to the political changes in Eastern Europe at the end of
the 1980s: Althusser was right in his fears and the Prague Spring was right in
its hopes. However, it could also be argued that the historical events, the way
they happened, obscured the precise conceptual and political stakes of the
divergence and that this divergence has a bearing on contemporary philo-
sophical debates and, beyond them, on the new dilemmas facing the world.
Today, the field of the controversy surrounding the human appears to
be split between what Alain Badiou has aptly termed “animal humanism”6
and the “anti-­humanist programme,” which prevails and persists since the
end of the 1960s because “it is the bearer of the coupled ideas of the void
and the beginning.”7 “Animal humanism” regards the human as one organic
species among others and, one might argue, is subtended by anxieties
concerning the identity of the human with respect to technological change.8
Antihumanism, whether it cares about some beginning or not, declares the
end of man, who, to quote Michel Foucault’s famous concluding phrase in
The Order of Things, will be “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge
of the sea.”9
At the time Althusser and Mamardashvili first met, they were both
the authors of rigorously antihumanist Marxian analyses; in subsequent
years, however, while antihumanism became ever more stringently pro-
claimed in the context of French poststructuralism (Althusser’s uneasy
positioning in this process being part of it), Mamardashvili’s philosophical
stance underwent a series of shifts apparently in the opposite direction.
My wager here will be that the perspective exemplified by Mamardashvili is
not simply a matter of historical reconstruction but might provide a viable
reshuffling of the various facets that go into present-­day humanism/anti-
humanism divisions.

6. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. A. Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 175.
7. Badiou, The Century, 173.
8. I explore these anxieties in Miglena Nikolchina, Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions:
Heterotopias of the Seminar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), in the chapter
“Аn Unfinished Project: Man as Comedy,” 88–108, which also deals with Mamardash-
vili’s views on the human. See also my “The Concave Mirror: Notes on the Parahuman
in Kleist and Rilke,” in “Justice and Communicative Freedom: The Recognition Paradigm
in a Post-­socialist Context,” special bilingual issue, Kritika i humanism 22 (2006): 75–92.
9. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2001), 423.

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Heterotopian Homonymy

The personal rapport between the two philosophers—in conjunction

with the distances and the risks involved, the philosophical drifting apart,
and individual drama, be it psychological or professional—is especially
interesting as a sort of biographical endorsement to a phenomenon I have
come to describe as “heterotopian homonymy.” Heterotopian homonymy
designates a reversal in the meaning of key theoretical and political con-
cepts due to geopolitical divisions and the traffic of fantasies of the Other
that such divisions involve. In the context of the Cold War, the reversal took
a specular turn in the spirit of Foucault’s definition of heterotopia: as if look-
ing at a mirror image, heterotopian homonyms represent, invert, and chal-
lenge each other. The concepts of the human and, by an always problematic
extension, the problem of humanism provide examples for such homonymy.
It is perhaps worth remembering at this point that vertical reversal
or inversion, in the sense of putting something that was upside down on its
feet or, in case you did it wrongly, on its head, became a recurring metaphor
and a legendary (since its precise origin or genealogy is seldom remem-
bered) reference point in Marxist thought. The most popular reference, per-
haps, is Friedrich Engels’s claim that, with Marx, “the dialectic of Hegel was
placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing
before, and placed upon its feet again.”10 Before that, the image appears in
Marx’s own afterword to the second German edition of Capital, where he
notes, apropos of Hegel’s dialectic, that it is standing on its head and that
it must be turned up on its feet again in order to reach the rational kernel
within the mystical shell.11 However, even before that, in The Holy Family
(coauthored with Engels), Marx already states that Hegel “stands the world
on its head.”12 The Holy Family was the first book by Marx or Engels that
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ever read: he was quick to grasp the hint and became
especially fond of the idea of correcting Hegel’s improper standing.13

10. Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philoso-
phy, trans. and ed. C. P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1941), 44.
11. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Das Kapital, vol. 23, Werke (Berlin/DDR: Dietz
Verlag, 1968), 25.
12. “He stands the world on its head and can therefore in his head also dissolve all limi-
tations, which nevertheless remain in existence for bad sensuousness, for real man”
(chap. 8, the part entitled “Revealed Mystery of the Standpoint”). See Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik: gegen Bruno Bauer
und Kunsorten, vol. 2, Werke (Berlin/DDR: Dietz Verlag, 1972), 203.
13. V. I. Lenin, Filosofskie tetrady, vol. 2, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij (Moscow: Idatel’stvo
političeskoj literatury, 1969), 37. See also p. 93.

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Adequate or not, the image proved to be very tenacious. It makes

its appearance in both Althusser’s and Mamardashvili’s writing. I will return
to Mamardashvili later. As for Althusser, in an early text, he expounds this
claim referring to Marx, Engels, and Lenin.14 In a text on Ludwig Feuerbach,
the reference to this image as used by Engels is still positive, breathing an
“echo of relief and enthusiasm.”15 In a later text on Lenin, however, Althus-
ser’s central claim is that Lenin did not read Hegel in terms of inversion
but, rather, of “laying bare,” which of course takes us back to Marx’s taking
to task the “mystical shell” of dialectics. Althusser’s observation that “for
his reading of Hegel [Lenin] adopted a new philosophical practice” might
be more to the point if we remember that the Bolshevik Revolution came
to be this new philosophical practice.16 “Down with Heaven: materialism”
reads one of Lenin’s cryptic notes on Hegelian dialectics in his Philosophi-
cal Notebooks.17
And down it went. We might posit the myth of origins of hetero-
topian homonymy in the divergence of translations of the central concept
of Hegel’s dialectics, Aufhebung, which illustrates the mysterious cross-
ing point of vertical and horizontal inversion. Down it went in the Russian
translation (as snytie), and up in the French relever or in the English sub-
lation. In the inverted translations, the vertical struggle between material-
ism and idealism took an additional, horizontal geopolitical twist. It should
be stressed that heterotopian homonymy denotes a linguistic occurrence,
which, once we are on the lookout for it, is not that difficult to observe. It
is not necessary (although this would be the true challenge) to attempt
unpacking the node of materiality and fantasy that produces the inversion
in heterotopian homonyms in order to notice its confounding operations.18
The very term transition, which had to name the metamorphosis
of former communist societies into liberal democracies, is an astonishing
example of homonymous inversions—in its genealogy from Marx via the
Soviet ideologues of Joseph Stalin’s epoch to the post-­Stalinist aporias of

14. Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans.
G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1997), 241–47.
15. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 41.
16. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (Lon-
don: New Left Books, 1971), 114.
17. Lenin, Filosofskie tetrady, 330.
18. See my Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions, the chapter “The West as Intellectual
Utopia,” where I address the traffic of fantasies, and “Between Irony and Revolution: The
Case of Aufhebung,” which deals with the translations of Hegel’s term, 43–87.

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Nikolchina / Althusser, Mamardashvili, and the Problem of “Man” 85

the transition to communism.19 The net result was that, after the Berlin Wall
fell, Eastern Europe’s march away from communism was designated by
an (unwitting) Marxist term, which used to designate a march in quite the
opposite direction. While it is obvious that this confusion was not the fruit
of ingenious machinations, it does demonstrate one of the mechanisms
through which Eastern Europe was deprived of the language of any spe-
cific worldview that would have been bound up with the experience of living
in (anti)utopia.20 And yet, theoretical narratives, like the one about the for-
tunes of transition, or philosophical drama, like the one I conjure up here,
might provide the chance to retrieve a missed turn for thinking.

“Man”: Constantly Reborn

The heterotopian divergence in the concept of “man” appears plainly

in a talk entitled “The European Responsibility,” which Mamardashvili deliv-
ered at an international symposium in Paris, in 1988, on the eve of the
political changes in Eastern Europe.21 Before I proceed with this story of
seduction and betrayal, however, an aside on two adjacent linguistic issues.
First, there is the problem of the word man, central to Mamardashvili’s talk.
In Russian, there exists a regular word for human being (čelovek), in which

19. Nicolas Guilhot, “‘The Transition to the Human World of Democracy’: Notes for a His-
tory of the Concept of Transition, from Early Marxism to 1989,” European Journal of Social
Theory 5, no. 2 (May 2002): 219–43.
20. A comparatively simple case that nevertheless posed insurmountable difficulties con-
cerned gender equality. The equality of women was instituted overnight and inscribed in
the constitution from the inception of the communist regimes. This solution “from above”
produced problems of its own, but they were neither the problems of Western women, who
had to fight “from below,” at grass roots level, through movements, et cetera, nor the prob-
lems of Third World women. Explaining this proved to be a tough task. Some years ago, I
took part in a European Commission project, which had to study the political representa-
tion of women in eight accession countries. The scholars from these eight countries spent
quite some time trying to articulate to our Western partners the specific problems facing
women in Eastern Europe. We thought we were making progress when, at some point,
there were local elections in one of the Eastern European countries. Our partners were
in shock. “Please, explain the high percentage of women who were elected,” they asked.
Well, we thought we did! The book that came out of this study was coauthored by the West-
ern partners. See Yvonne Galligan, Sara Clavero, and Marina Calloni, Gender Politics and
Democracy in Post-­Socialist Europe (Farmington Hills, MI: Barbara Budrich, 2007).
21. Merab Mamardachvili, “La responsabilité européenne,” in Europe sans rivage: De
l’identité culturelle européenne; Symposium international Paris 1988 (Paris: Albin Michel,
1988), 201–5.

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the traditional humanist values of “man” have been invested without pro-
ducing, at least on a linguistic level, the exclusion of woman.22 For Mamar-
dashvili, then, there would be no discrepancy between the historical con-
notations invested in man and the twentieth-­century gender troubles that
transferred to human being the generic pretensions ascribed traditionally
to man. In this text, I will use predominantly human being, noting, never-
theless, that while this phrase gains in terms of getting rid of sexism, it also
loses in terms of the historical memory and philosophical debates that went
into the making of the concept of “man.” Still worse, human evokes in more
immediate ways the derivative humanism and the notion of one species
among the others: it is as if the linguistic shift from man to human already
contains the kernel of “animal humanism.”
Another awkward designation is the term Europe. In one of his texts
dealing with the problem of the human, Mamardashvili notes that Europe
is not a geographical concept and that it might very well be found in Tokyo
and not the places where Mamardashvili usually taught and met his audi-
ences, Moscow or Tbilisi.23 So what is Europe if not a geographical con-
cept? Europe is shorthand for human being, čelovek. It comprises, to begin
with, two major legacies: the state of rightful rule (l’État de droit) inherited
from Roman law; and the inner voice that was discovered with the Gospels
(in fact, Saint Paul seems to be Mamardashvili’s more obvious reference)
and that allows one to walk without external support and without guaran-
tees, thus opening the way for an unsettling element, the element that cre-
ates history.24 Mamardashvili explicitly points out that the idea of law and
rights inherited from Roman law was never properly assimilated in his own
country, which thus remains on the fringe of Europe. Yet, he also opposes
the external law and the inner voice in favor of interiority so that, he claims,
“European culture is antimoralizing and antilegalist, because the power of
the language, which comes from the inner principle, is more important, it is
the thing that leads the human effort and struggle.”25

22. Mamardashvili’s native language is Georgian, yet much of his writing as well as his
immediate philosophical milieu is Russian. Here I will simply point out that in Georgian,
with some interesting complications, the linguistic situation with regard to man/woman/
human seems to be closer to the situation in Russian than what we have in English or
French.
23. Merab Mamardashvili, Neobkhodimost’ sebya: Lektsii; Stat’i; Filosofskiye zametki
(Moscow: Labirint, 1996), 358.
24. Mamardachvili, “La responsabilité européenne,” 202–3.
25. Mamardachvili, “La responsabilité européenne,” 203.

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This bifurcation between the law and the inner voice does not end
here; it is the prerequisite for further developments. First, the human implies
a history: not just any history but the history of creating history as the organ
of the human (and vice versa, the human being is the creature whose spe-
cific organ is history). Second, it implies language, where language is not
just any system of communication but is equivalent to the political. Lan-
guage is the humming and the shouting of the agora, of discussing the mat-
ters of the polis: outside of this, there can be only barbarians in the original
Old Greek sense of the word qua people without language. Third, although
the human being is the creature whose organ is history, the human has no
past and no future, as it always happens now. It is, hence, an apocalyptic
dimension to the now and is anything but the “natural” human being studied
by anthropology. This apocalyptic dimension—this kairos, we might say,
with a view of more recent writing by Giorgio Agamben—happens, when
and if it happens, only through thinking in the space of the possible human
being. The human being is always a possible human being that unpredict-
ably appears in an act of thought now. The human is, hence, the object of
a negative ontology. It is an absence. It never is but is always becoming,26
always being reborn, which gives the human its fourth major aspect, effort.
The human is the effort and the labor to be human, a failing effort in most
cases, a frequently abortive effort, to be sure, but an effort nonetheless.
And finally, when and if it happens, the human is artificial, it is born “at the
second step,” it has nothing to do with some natural man or human nature.
Now, whatever we may think of Mamardashvili’s definition of the
human, we may not like its being synonymous with European. This might
take us into deliberations of the type that Jacques Lacan’s phallus elicits:
if it is not the male anatomical organ, why call it that? If European might
refer to Tokyo rather than Europe, why call it that? Why insist that Europe

26. “Becoming” (devenir) human is the word that appears in “The European Responsi-
bility”: its gloss is that the human is “a creature in the state of making itself” and that it is
a “very long effort.” On the other hand, in his more rigorous philosophical texts, Mamar-
dashvili prefers “happening”: man is impossible but he happens. This is precisely the way
that the possible man should be understood: as an impossibility that happens through
the uncertainty of a continuous effort. See Mamardashvili, Neobkhodimost’ sebya, 7–154.
Another interesting point in this context is the appearance of an “apocalyptic” dimension,
which, apropos of Sartre, Mamardashvili criticizes in his early works. See Merab Mamar-
dashvili, “Kategorija social’nogo bytija i metod ego analiza v èkzistencializme Sartra”
[The category of social being and its analysis in Sartre’s existentialism], in Sovremennyj
èkzistencializm: Krit. Očerki, ed. T. I. Oyzernan (Moscow: Mysl’, 1966), 149–204.

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offers the only acceptable answer to the question of whether change is still
possible in the world? What interests me at this point, however—this point
rather late in the moribund East European communist system and, as it
would turn out to be, in Mamardasvhili’s life27—is Mamardashvili’s claim
that Europeans have disavowed their responsibility to be European in this
very specific sense he invests in the word:

You Europeans take too many things for granted. You never stop to
think about what is the very essence of your existence, and you also
lack the keen awareness that the human being is, in the first place,
an effort spread out in time, a constant effort to become a human
being. The human being is not a natural given, it is not a natural state
but a state that is continually created . . . a creature, which is always
in the process of becoming, so that history can be defined as history
of the human effort to become human. The human being does not
exist: she or he is becoming. . . . [But] there may be a fatigue and
a forgetfulness of one’s beginnings; one might no longer be able to
sustain this effort. Herein resides the danger for Europe: the fatigue
with the historical effort, the incapacity to sustain the effort to found
it, to make it be reborn in each instant, to be suspended in the air
without guarantees and without hierarchies.28

“Man”: Dead End(s)

While Mamardashvili never stops to tell us who, precisely, are those

Europeans who are forgetful of the effort to be human, there is little doubt
that he is challenging the trend, exemplified by Foucault’s concluding lines
in The Order of Things or by Jacques Derrida’s terse formulation in “The
Ends of Man”: “Man is that which is relative to his end, in the fundamentally
equivocal sense of the word.”29 By the mid-­1960s, this trend, positing man
as finished, had acquired the name “antihumanism” and “had become an
almost official face of French thought.”30 One usually finds enlisted among
the texts that played a pivotal role in this trend Martin Heidegger’s 1947
27. Mamardashvili died suddenly on November 25, 1990, in the Moscow airport, about a
month after Althusser.
28. Mamardachvili, “La responsabilité européenne,” 203.
29. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 123.
30. Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 2.

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“Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Kojève’s second note on “the end of history,” writ-

ten in 1961 and published in 1968, Althusser’s contributions to the humanist
controversy in Marxism, as well as Foucault’s and Derrida’s texts referred
to above. In a recent study, which illustrates both the newly rising interest
in the problem of the human and the confusion surrounding it, Stefanos
Geroulanos takes the trend further back in time, to the 1930s and even the
1920s, bringing together various philosophers and writers in whose works
he observes the emergence of a “negative anthropology.” While most inter-
esting in terms of its scope and in terms of revisiting figures rarely evoked
now in such contexts (as is the case with Koyré), Geroulanos’s study also
exemplifies and magnifies some of the major problems of the antihuman-
ism debate, most notably the vagueness and multifariousness of the “man”
and the “humanism” that are being bashed and declared dead. His own
approach is divided between, on the one hand, the reduction of humanism
to “conceptions in which man was based on a human ‘nature’ or ‘essence’
that is given or immutable, or served as his own highest being and ideal,”31
and, on the other hand, the claim, which Geroulanos would justifiably make
every now and then, that his frequent refusal to offer a rigorous concep-
tual framework corresponds to the lack of rigorousness in the authors and
the controversies that he explores. He works, consequently, either with a
rather general concept of “human nature,” as if there ever were an uncon-
tested consensus about what this means, or with no defined concept at
all. As a result, Geroulanos enlists in the ranks of antihumanism authors
who explicitly conceived their task as elaborating the right sort of human-
ism against improper humanisms or who envisioned various projects for
the “New Man.” Merely contesting the meaning of the human is already,
according to Geroulanos, an indication of antihumanism.
Such an account would clearly go against the grain of “The Ends
of Man”: where Derrida deconstructs the surreptitious returns of “human-
ist metaphysics” in outlooks ostensibly pursuing the critique of such meta-
physics, Geroulanos sees a massive, already accomplished de(con)struc-
tion of humanism in cases where it is still actually being upheld. To put
it differently, while Derrida laments the end of man as never sufficiently
ending, Geroulanos takes Derrida’s formulation of the end of man to be
the late fruition of a process that had been long in the making. Jean-­Paul
Sartre’s work, especially “Existentialism Is Humanism,” provides another

31. Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist, 12, 14, and throughout the whole
study.

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eloquent example of this divergence: Sartre marks the point of departure

as, and forms a major target of, Derrida’s critique in “The Ends of Man”;
Geroulanos, for his part, includes Sartre’s work in the overall thrust toward
antihumanism.
The questions raised by this disparity—between a humanism that
never seems to go away and an antihumanism that seems always to have
already arrived—have been resolved by Badiou’s juxtaposing radical
humanism (represented by Sartre) and radical antihumanism (represented
by Foucault). However contrasting, both orientations treat the same ques-
tion (What becomes of man without God?), and they both “agree on the
theme of Godless man as opening, possibility, programme of thought.”32
There is, therefore, a unity of the two conflicting orientations: a unity in their
programmatic turn toward the possible. Of the two, nevertheless, Badiou
definitely gives his preference to Foucault’s solution: “a thinking which lets
an inhuman beginning arrive.” To put it differently—and by way of a confir-
mation of Geroulanos’s perspective—radical humanism is almost, although
not quite, as good as radical antihumanism. Says Badiou, “If, at the end of
the sixties, the anti-­humanist programme prevails (and, in my view, persists
as our starting point) it is because it is the bearer of the coupled ideas of
the void and the beginning.”33
Going back to Mamardashvili, we have to ask, therefore, why is “the
bearer of the coupled ideas of the void and the beginning” (which seem
to fit rather well Mamardashvili’s “negative ontology” of the human) called
human in the one case and inhuman in the other? Why is man, on the one
hand, finished, and, on the other, constantly reborn? Why does Mamar-
dashvili’s persistent emphasis on the artificiality of the human risk being
linguistically synonymous with “animal humanism”?
The mystery is further aggravated by the following details, which
will bring us back to Mamardashvili’s encounter with Althusser. At the time
when he made his detour to Paris in order to meet Althusser—a meet-
ing that would change his career and life for good—Mamardashvili had
recently published a critique34 of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason,
targeting Sartre’s inability to exit the “labyrinth of humanist ideology,”35 and

32. Badiou, The Century, 171.

33. Badiou, The Century, 173.
34. Merab Mamardashvili, “K kritike èkzistencialistskogo ponimanija dialektiki” [Toward
a critique of the existentialist understanding of dialectics], Voprosy filosofii, no. 6 (1963):
108–20.
35. Emil Grigorov, Dramata na cogito: edna săvremenna versija. Opit vărhu filosofijata na

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a second critique appeared in 1966, the year Mamardashvili and Althusser

met, charging Sartre with the anthropologization of “social being.”36 For his
part, Althusser had already published a large part of his major works by the
time of this meeting.37 He already had dealt, to quote Jean-­Claude Milner,
a “fatal blow” to “hegelo-­marxism” by radically disconnecting Marx from
Hegel and by passing a split across Marx’s works separating the young
from the mature Marx.38 More pertinent to the Mamardashvili case, in texts
such as “On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions”39 and “Marxism and
Humanism,”40 Althusser had addressed critically the turn to “bourgeois
humanism”—to the ideas of young Marx on “man” and “human nature”—in
the official line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Mamardash-
vili’s adventure, hence, so ripe with risk and heavy consequences, was
clearly indicative of a choice against Sartre’s “radical humanism” (which,
as events would show, and as Badiou does not fail to note, appealed to
the Soviet authorities) and in favor of (Althusser’s) no less radical anti-
humanism. And yet, by the end of the 1980s, Mamardashvili appears as a

Merab Mamardašvili [The drama of cogito: A contemporary version; An essay on Merab

Mamardashvili’s philosophy] (Sofia: Sofia University, 2009), 52.
36. Mamardashvili, “Kategorija social’nogo bytija,” 149–204.
37. According to Gregory Elliott, Althusser failed “to produce anything comparable to For
Marx and Reading ‘Capital’ after 1965” (Althusser: The Detour of Theory [Leiden: Brill,
2006], xx).
38. Jean-­Claude Milner, “La petite bourgeoisie intellectuelle en France: d’un rêve l’autre,”
in Le Moment philosophique des années 1960 en France, ed. Patrice Maniglier (Paris:
PUF, 2011), 187.
39. Althusser, For Marx, 49–86 and 219–41. Pierre Macherey observes that “On the
Young Marx: Theoretical Questions” is the first important text by Althusser (apart from his
book on Montesquieu, which appeared the previous year) and that its subtitle, Questions
de théorie (theoretical questions) is a parody of Question de method (methodological
question), which appears as the subtitle of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. See
Pierre Macherey, “Althusser et le jeune Marx,” Actuel Marx, no. 31 (March 2002): 159–75.
In this text, Althusser approaches critically an issue of Recherches Internationales dedi-
cated to the young Marx. A number of the studies in this issue were by Soviet scholars.
Althusser remarks in a footnote, “The interest shown in the study of Marx’s early works
by young Soviet scholars is particularly noteworthy. It is an important sign of the present
direction of cultural development in the U.S.S.R.” Althusser singles out favorably the text
by Nikolaj Lapin, a classmate of Mamardashvili from Moscow State University since 1949
with whom he worked in a variety of contexts. See N. I. Lapin, “Rannij Mamardashvili”
[The early Mamardashvili], in Byt’ filosofom—eto sud’ba [Being a philosopher], ed. Neli
Motroshilova (Moscow: Progress, 2011), 50–63.
40. Louis Althusser, “Marxism and Humanism,” Cahiers de l’Institut de science écono-
mique appliquée, no. 20 (June 1964): 9–33.

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spokesperson for the human. The question is—to put it in Mamardashvili’s

words—how did this happen?

Event and Actuality

I will say it once again, in case the realities of Mamardashvili’s con-

text have become too obscure: Mamardashvili’s meeting with Althusser
involved at least two transgressions with respect to the Soviet regime.
Not only was he not supposed to travel without official permission, but his
detour to Paris was in order to meet someone who had explicitly criticized
the official ideological standing of the regime. The fact that Althusser was
a member of the French Communist Party made things even worse.41 That
part of the drama involved philosophical subtleties—like the question of
whether there was a break or continuity between the young and the mature
Marx—speaks volumes of the nature of the regime itself and the theoretical
constraints with which thinkers in Eastern Europe had to grapple. So if the
turn to “man” and humanism was undertaken by the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union, could it be possible that Mamardashvili came somehow
in agreement or gave in to the party line? Did he turn to the young Marx in
congruence with the party’s turn?
In concrete practical and biographical terms, this question is easy
to answer: whatever efforts Mamardashvili committed to making his philo-
sophical investigations acceptable to the authorities, he was not very suc-
cessful; and whatever overlapping there was between official humanism
and the philosophical, literary, and artistic tackling of the problem of the
human during the later decades of the regime, it did not work too well for
many intellectuals, Mamardashvili included.42 In fact, the focus on the

41. In Althusser: The Detour of Theory, Gregory Elliott provides the contemporaneous
political background to the theoretical dissent, including in his analysis the positions of
various communist parties, the Soviet Union–China divergence, and the like.
42. Beginning with the mid-­1950s, there is a complicated history of informal circles with
which Mamardashvili was involved (such as the Gnoseology Group and the Moscow
Circle of Logic [later Methodology]). Such intellectual activities were ripe with risk, and
many of their members sooner or later ran into trouble with the authorities. To give an
example of two of Mamardashvili’s close friends: by the end of the 1970s, Alexander Piati-
gorsky (1929–2009) had defected to the West, and Evald Ilyenkov (1924–79) had com-
mitted suicide. Here, it is impossible to follow the philosophical and theoretical facets of
their dissent, the role that Marx’s early writing played as inspiration and justification, or,
indeed, the infiltration of ideas from stranger sources, such as Russian cosmism. Andrei
Tarkovsky’s films Solaris and Stalker are very much imbued with the radical questioning

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human brought about a theoretical fracture in the ideological monolith of

the system, which allowed its internal erosion. This was, no doubt, due to
the mythologization of Marx—a paradox, since a critical thinker was sub-
jected to ideological mummification, and a fatal weakness, which internal
opponents of the system were quick to exploit. In purely theoretical terms,
therefore, as well as in terms of the traffic of ideas between independently
thinking intellectuals and the efforts of the nomenclature to adjust,43 the
situation might turn out to be more complicated, with the young Marx play-
ing the role of a Trojan horse in the citadel of official Marxism. In late inter-
views, Mamardashvili asserts his involvement with Marx rather than Marx-
ism44 and the influence of Marx, as early as the 1950s, in his own struggle
for internal freedom because, in his youth, Marx “tried to craft a proce-
dure for exorcising the social ghosts from thinking and from the study of
society.”45
Mamardashvili calls Marx a tragic thinker because he did not live
up to his own philosophical standards: he created a fundamental method-
ology for removing “the poison from the poisoned, socially determined and
alienated consciousness” but, later on, fell victim to a poison of his own
making.46 Marx thus seems to have stayed with Mamardashvili ever since
his youth, in a manner that implies a break in Marx’s own work (thus agree-
ing with Althusser’s rigorous separation of the young from the mature Marx)
but also a break from the mature Marx in Mamardashvili’s thinking.
This thinking, as already suggested, initially unfolded in the concep-
tual framework of Capital and very much in the vein of Althusser’s claim that
“any thought that appeals to Marx for any kind of restoration of a theoreti-
cal anthropology or humanism is no more than ashes.”47 Mamardashvili’s
1963 critique of Sartre’s humanism states that Sartre reversed Marx’s per-
spective, putting it—and here we are back to inversion and standing things

of human cognition and will, which characterized this philosophical agenda (as is the writ-
ing of Polish writer and philosopher Stanislaw Lem, who is comparatively well known in
the West, an indication that the agenda I am talking about was not confined to Moscow
or the Soviet Union).
43. It matters little whether in good or bad faith. See Merab Mamardashvili, “Moj opyt
netipičen” [My experience is not typical], in Soznaniye i tsivilizatsiya (Moskva: Azbuka,
2011), 87–98.
44. Mamardashvili, “Moj opyt netipičen.”
45. Merab Mamardashvili, “Mysl’ pod zapretom (Besedy s A. Èpel’buèn)” [Thinking under
a ban: Interviews with Annie Epelboin], Voprosy filosofii, no. 5 (May 1992): 102.
46. Mamardashvili, “Mysl’ pod zapretom,” 102.
47. Althusser, For Marx, 230.

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up and down—on its head.48 Marx, Mamardashvili points out, “explicitly

expounds the fact that, on the surface of capitalist life processes, the real
social connections between people take on inverted, irrational forms, which
often ‘say exactly the opposite of what actually is.’”49 A few years later, the
idea of saying exactly the opposite, never so simple even in the earlier text,
is transformed in Mamardashvili’s conceptualization of inverted forms—
Marx’s verwandelte Form—as not only irrational but also totally nontrans-
parent and cleanly cut off from the connections and processes that pro-
duced them. Inverted forms erase the processes that bring them forth.
True, we are once again dealing here with “an enchanted world, placed on
its head and densely populated with ghosts and miracles” (my emphasis).
However, these ghosts and miracles are immune to a reversal, a backward
inversion, so to speak, that would reveal their truth. The arguments as to
what lies “behind” them is irrelevant: “the inverted form exemplifies the
workings of the system from the inside and is the objectified orientation of
the cohesion of atomic conscious acts in the system; it is an object really
posited outside of subjects, determined by the relationships in the system
as a whole, and drawing its life from them—and not from the act of the com-
prehending individual.” For the latter, this objectified orientation “induces a
field of comprehension and of a possible movement of thought; it creates
a space devoid of horizon, which in principle can be traversed by the gaze,
while, on the other hand, it throws something like a shadow over various
regions of the system inducing zones of non-­comprehension, ‘dead space,’
impenetrable to the ray of consciousness.”50
We are dealing, therefore, with a seamless imprisonment of the
“comprehending individual” in the matrix of inverted forms. In this perspec-
tive, Mamardashvili’s later preoccupation with the happening of the human
(akin to the young Marx’s procedure for taking out the poison from the
“poisoned, socially determined and alienated consciousness”) raises yet
another question. If his turn to “man” was not dictated by a political compro-
mise and a surrender to the official party line, and if, in fact, “man” acted like
a virus in the communist ideological system, might Mamardashvili’s resort
to this problematic have been the fruit of an inverse compromise, a theo-

48. The image of turning something on its head appears three times in this text. See
Mamardašvili, “K kritike èkzistencialistskogo ponimanija dialektiki,” 6, 109, 111, 114.
49. Mamardašvili, “K kritike èkzistencialistskogo ponimanija dialektiki,” 114.
50. Merab Mamardashvili, “Prevraŝennye formy: O neobhodimosti irracional’nyh vyra-
ženij” [Inverted forms: On the necessity of irrational expressions], in Formy i soderzha-
niye myshleniya (Moscow: Azbuka, 2011), 248.

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retical compromise, dictated by the exigency to use any possible means

for undermining the regime? If this were the case, the very risk that such
thinking involved would serve as an indicator of its adequacy. One might be
reminded at this point of Foucault’s late writing on parrhesia, where “truth”
is guaranteed with one’s body and one’s life, or of the manner in which, in
The Samurai, Julia Kristeva’s character Dan (representing Bulgarian theo-
retician Tzvetan Stoyanov) tries to convince Olga (Kristeva’s youthful alter
ego, freshly arrived in Paris) to go back to her despotic motherland rather
than defect to the West, where intellectual turmoil is “just a game. They
protest because they’re quite safe. You’ve lost the sense of death—both
as a threat and as a motivating force.”51 Staying in the East would hence
amount to keeping death as a “threat and a motivating force,” or, as Althus-
ser comments in his letter to Mamardashvili from 1978, “a duty of the intel-
lect, but one that must come at a high price.”52
And yet, the stakes for Mamardashvili’s swerve to the human were
not exactly parrhesiastic; he was certainly not concerned with a coinci-
dence between truth and risking one’s life. In the same letter from 1978,
Althusser quotes Mamardashvili as saying, “I’m staying put, because it’s
here that one sees things bare, and right to the bottom” (PE, 2). It would
seem that Mamardashvili’s decision not to defect to the West as many of
his friends and colleagues did (to be exhibited, Althusser comments, “like
the ‘wolf-­children’ who can tell us a thing or two about the woods” [PE, 2])
was subtended by a philosophical impulse, which might be unraveled in the
following way: a repressive regime with its blunt recourse to power allows
a more transparent—naked—access to truth. Rather than distort thinking
one way or another, through this or that compromise, tyranny seems to
facilitate it. It is conducive to “seeing”; its cracks and crevices reveal “things
bare, and right to the bottom.”
Now, the idea of such access, the idea that it is possible to “see
things bare, and right to the bottom,” is clearly a paradox in the face of the
irrevocable irrationality of inverted forms and the positioning of the “com-
prehending individual” within their horizonless space. In his letter, Althus-
ser mentions a couple of times the phrase “metaphysical depths”—“so as

51. Julia Kristeva, The Samurai, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1992), 45.
52. Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87, trans. G. M.
Goshgarian, ed. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet (London: Verso, 2006), 2. Here-
after, this work is cited parenthetically as PE. Sadly, in the same letter, Althusser notes
that Mamardashvili, unlike him, has people to talk with.

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to know how you do it and in order to guess from the answers you seek the
questions that are troubling you,” but also in conjunction with the tempta-
tion to, like Marx in 1852, “begin again from the very beginning” (PE, 4–5).
For him, he adds, “it’s very late, given my age, fatigue, lassitude, and, also,
my isolation” (PE, 5). The implication seems to be that Mamardashvili did
“begin again from the beginning,” which amounts to a division between an
early and a late Mamardashvili. Not unlike the issues we face with Foucault
or, indeed, Marx, we will have to juxtapose Mamardashvili’s writing from
the 1960s and early 1970s—his critique of Sartre, his unorthodox Marxian
analyses, and especially his article on the inverted forms—to his later work,
written and oral, with an unfinished 1970s manuscript called The Arrow
of Knowledge occupying the uneasy period of transition. The problem of
“man” in Mamardashvili’s later writing would then appear out of a return
to the young Marx and then abandoning Marx altogether for a “metaphysi-
cal turn”—the “belated flowers of metaphysics.”53 This turn, moreover, was
accompanied by a refusal to publish, or a decision to give up on publish-
ing, which is also discussed in Althusser’s letter: “The only answer I find for
the moment is silence. And despite all the differences, I understand yours,
which has quite other reasons.” Between the answer of silence and the
resignation to age, fatigue, lassitude, and solitude, Althusser nevertheless
mentions the temptation to publish something on Machiavelli: such a book
did appear posthumously and is, according to Étienne Balibar, “probably
his great book,” where Althusser tries to explain what it means to act politi-
cally in the space of ideology.54 For his part, Mamardashvili’s “silence” in
the aftermath of this letter took the form of a veritable political acting out,
which left behind the complexities of his written work and took the form of
a series of lectures and oral communications, a tremendous output that
coincided with the turbulent 1980s in Eastern Europe. Much of this has
been published posthumously, but more keeps appearing. Its impact at the
time was so powerful that it imposed Mamardashvili’s image as an “oral”
philosopher, a sort of modern Socrates, and all but erased the memory of
his former writing.
The idea of a “metaphysical turn” in Mamardashvili’s work, however,

53. There is an anecdote that Derrida was asked to write a foreword to the French edi-
tion of Mamardashvili’s Cartesian Meditations. Derrida’s answer is supposed to have
been, “He stands for everything that I am against.” See Mamardachvili, Méditations
cartésiennes.
54. Étienne Balibar, “La philosophie et l’actualité: au-­delá de l’événement?,” in Le Moment
philosophique des années 1960 en France, ed. Patrice Maniglier (Paris: PUF, 2011), 215.

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and his image as a charismatic but inconsistent Socratic thinker, cannot

take into consideration his continuous effort—to use the word he empha-
sizes so heavily in “The European Responsibility”—to retrieve the “human”
from the enchanted realm of the verwandelte Form without falling back
to the anthropologism he criticized in his early work. This means thinking
the horizonless realm of objectified “atomic conscious acts” not simply as
impenetrable and poisoned obscurity but also as a “creating created.”55
How does the created create? In view of this circularity, how is change at
all possible? How does this impossible thing—the human being, čelovek—
happen? Whatever his steps in this direction are, there is the certainty
that Mamardashvili never went back to the idea of human “nature” (be it
of the kind we find in the young Marx or elsewhere). The human being is
an unnatural, artificial being: it is born “at the second step,” it is the unfore-
seeable product of its own effort. Or, as Mamardashvili puts it, “All philo-
sophical claims containing the term ‘man’ cannot be resolved on the basis
of some anthropological attributes, of some concrete image of man, insofar
as they always speak of the possible man, which is never some sort of prior
or future state but is always an actual state, although one that cannot be
reduced to what exists.”56
This “event-­al” approach to the human opens up a third possibility
for understanding Mamardashvili’s oeuvre, one that sets aside consider-
ations of break versus continuity. Such a possibility emerges from a recent
study by Balibar. Balibar takes as his point of departure the “stunning way”
in which, in The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler uncovers, through the
pragmatic category of “performative contradiction,” a formal similarity in
the treatment of the “paradox of the event” in Althusser and Foucault.57
In Butler’s analysis,58 Balibar points out, this paradox involves a circularity
where the subject is both produced and presupposed by the conditions
that produce it. She studies this circularity not as a weakness and not as
an error but as the very object of the philosophical inquiry regarding ide-
ology in the case of Althusser and power in the case of Foucault. For Bali-
bar, Butler’s analysis foregrounds the question of knowing how one can

55. Merab Mamardashvili, Strela poznaniya: Nabrosok yestestvenoistoricheskoy gnoseo-

logii [The arrow of knowledge: Toward the gnoseology of natural history] (Moscow:
Shkola, 1996), 105.
56. Mamardashvili, Neobkhodimost’ sebya.
57. Balibar, “La philosophie et l’actualité,” 225.
58. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 1997), 106–31.

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“actualize” (actualiser) the thinking of the event or think philosophically the

event as actuality (actualité).59 In this understanding, the notion of actuality
(actualité) is not another name for event but, rather, indicates a modality
in which philosophy could try to not so much think the event as such but,
rather, write in harmony (en rapport) with the event, in an oblique manner,
which is in itself event-­al (événementielle).60 The Butlerian performative
contradiction “allows placing the notion of actuality at the crossing point of
a certain historical situation, a certain ensemble of determined conditions
(subjected to the ‘process’ of their emergence and transformation), and
a certain intemporality, or transtemporality, or, still better, certain event-­al
repetition which is at the same time by definition a continuous variation or
an incessant reproduction of singularities.”61
My point is obvious. Balibar’s understanding of actuality as event-­al
repetition provides the key to understanding Mamardashvili’s philosophi-
cal effort. We might understand this effort to be a demand for, as the Bul-
garian Mamardashvili scholar Deyan Dyanov puts it, “positively enlightened
regress: regress not in the sense of renouncing modernity but in the sense
of back-­tracing the steps of modernity in order to resolve the contradictions
we inherited from it.”62 For, Mamardashvili insists, “dead knowledge is of
no importance to us—we turn to the past and we understand it only to the
degree that we can restore what used to be thought in our own capacity to
think and in what we can think now.”63
The question is, is there a point in actualizing “man” today?

Organic, Too Organic

By way of answering this question, I will present an example for a

contemporary aporia. Mass Effect is a huge, epic, three-­part (for the time
being) sci-­fi game, whose plot is structured by a conflict between the
so-­called organics—an assortment of various galactic races, more or less
bizarre in appearance, where humans struggle for interstellar recognition—

59. Balibar, “La philosophie et l’actualité,” 223.

60. Balibar, “La philosophie et l’actualité,” 215.
61. Balibar, “La philosophie et l’actualité,” 232.
62. Deyan Dyanov, “Mamardašvili i evropejskata filosofija na xx vek” [Mamardashvili and
twentieth-­
century European philosophy], afterword to Merab Mamardashvili, Izbrano
[Selected works], vol. 1 (Sofia: Iztok-­Zapad, 2004), 361.
63. Merab Mamardashvili, Lektsii po antichnoi filosofii [Lectures in ancient Greek philoso-
phy] (Moscow: Agraf, 1997), 8.

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and a mysterious and very evil artificial intelligence. For a number of messy
philosophical reasons with which the creators of the game struggle until
the end (a struggle that might also be seen as part of the history of a genre
somehow propelled into outgrowing its modest intellectual beginnings), this
artificial intelligence organizes the kidnapping of the populations of entire
planets in order to—in the second part of the game—construct a gigan-
tic golem out of their bodies. Apart from this evil power, called the Reap-
ers, there are, however, other kinds of artificial intelligence, notably the
Geth, who are not so completely evil and, in fact, might be (if the gamer so
chooses) recruited in the fight against the Reapers. Says a participant in
a Mass Effect forum, “The Geth might take a Nietzschean turn and decide
they’ve been betrayed/misled by their [Reaper] god(s), and need to destroy
them. And almost every interaction with the Geth shows they have inclina-
tions towards philosophical (Why do I exist?), artistic (they listen to opera),
and religious (praying at their altars) ideals, which the Reapers would con-
sider either inefficient or organic qualities.” To this, another forum partici-
pant sullenly responds, “The ME [Mass Effect] universe needs a Butlerian
Jihad.” Here, Butlerian Jihad (referring to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, where
machines are presented as the next step in evolution) alludes to the out-
lawing of thinking machines and all kinds of artificial intelligence in Frank
Herbert’s Dune.64
The game and this knowledgeable debate, with its casual references
to rebellious robots and organic jihads against them, reflect on a fictional
war that has been raging for about two hundred years now: at first in litera-
ture, then in film, and, most recently, as illustrated above, in video games.
The new twist in this war is foregrounded in Mass Effect through the fact
that the protagonist—who is given the bucolic surname of Shepard—is left
practically dead at the end of Mass Effect 1, and then again at the end of
Mass Effect 2, so at the beginning of every next part he or she is supposed
to have been brought back to life through advanced methods of biotechno-
logical montage. Shepard—whose name as the savior of humanity acquires
not only pastoral but also evangelical connotations—is to fight the Reapers,
whose harvesting of organic bodies evokes traditional representations of
death but whose name also refers to some of the newest developments in
unmanned military aircraft. Since the galactic confrontation is designed as

64. BioWare, Social Network Forums, “I Have This Theory (Geth/Organics/Reaper

Related),” accessed August 22, 2013, social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/103/index
/686723.

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100 boundary 2 / Spring 2014

a confrontation between the organic and the ar1tificial, however, the high-­
tech medium of the game, in conjunction with the high-­tech assumptions
of its plot, generates a conceptual knot that wreaks havoc across gamers’
forums. The impasse comes to a head after the third part of the game: con-
troversies are so heated that it is best to let them be. The aporia is already
sufficiently demonstrated by the fact that the Reapers’ monster, comprised
of recycled human parts, mimics and grotesquely reduplicates the engi-
neering bricolage that brings Shepard back to life. Just how do they differ?
In what way is Shepard organic and the Reapers’ monster artificial? Why
do gamers tend to rally organic Jihads?
The game articulates ever so clearly this problem without being able
to offer a conceptual resolution. What it achieves through the juxtaposition
of the hero and the monster amounts to eloquently laying bare the need
that mobilizes the term organic in the first place. Organic has to, and yet no
longer can, mark the difference between the human and the machine. I will
leave things at that for the time being by simply pointing out that regard-
ing the human as finished and investing the “coupling of the void and the
beginning” in the inhuman is precisely the move that turns “man” into a
conceptual prey to the animal and the machine.

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