strange sameness
I think this interpretation is broadly correct.
But it is vitiated by an ambiguity in its invocation of potentiality. The dialectical cast of
Marx’s thinking requires that this potentiality
is at once generative of and generated by concrete social relations, including the divisions of
labour and class. But given this interdependence (the fact that social practices generate
social relations and are generated by them in
turn), how can the social relations generated
by money and value be reprehended for
impeding the generative potential of practice?
The question is not: why do these relations
determine the potencies of practice? Given
the feedback between practices and relations,
it is obvious why money and value (as social
forms) determine (just as they are determined
by) social practices. The question is rather: if
we grant this interdependence between social
practices, forms, and relations, on what
grounds can practices be said to harbour an
unrealized potential in excess of the actual
forms and relations with which they are codependent? What unrealized surplus do practices retain once we have subtracted their coconstitution by existing social forms and
relations? In other words: what allows us to
find the social practices concomitant with
capitalism wanting once we have de-substantialized human genus-being and reduced it to an
ensemble of historically variable social
relations? If we flatten genus-being onto the
historically variable ensemble of social
relations, there is no latency left in it which
could be said to be unactualized by actual
social practices. But if some aspect of genusbeing transcends the ensemble of social
relations and is held in reserve as an unactualized potential, we risk re-substantializing it as
an a-historical essence. Free conscious activity
is either completely or incompletely realized
in actual social relations: if completely, they
cannot be found wanting; if incompletely, it
cannot be wholly constituted by social
relations: genus-being must harbour a transcendent potential.
It may be tempting to terminate this line of
questioning with a terse rejoinder: what is
wrong with capitalist social relations is
exploitation, the extraction of surplus-labour
from wage-labour. Acknowledging the necessarily exploitative character of the wage relation,
and the mass immiseration which is its concomitant, requires no metaphysical perplexity. This
rejoinder is politically salutary, but it misses
the philosophical point (perhaps deliberately).
Exploitation is an analytical category that tells
us nothing about the nature of the potency
proper to unexploited labour, or why it harbours a greater transformative potential than
wage-labour. By what yardstick do we measure
the discrepancy between labour’s actual and
unactualized potential? It is this ambiguity in
the potentiality attributed to human genusbeing – the fact that it seems to be both immanent and transcendent vis-à-vis actual social
relations – that leads Marx’s detractors to
accuse him of invoking a transcendent conception of human essence even as he insists
that this essence is a function of historically
variable social relations. For empiricists, it is
hard to see what is materialist about Marx’s
insistence that human sociality need not be
founded upon the divisions of labour and
class, despite their prevalence through human
history. Given their historical predominance,
why not admit that these divisions are inevitable? Is it not idealist to reject their necessity
and maintain that society can be re-founded
upon their abolition? This objection targets
what it takes to be the secret idealism at the
heart of Marx’s materialism: the conviction
that what is, ought not to be, while what is
not, ought to be. If this charge is warranted,
communism is not a “real movement” immanent to history but an unrealized ideal, a pure
potential with respect to which actual history
is found wanting. I want to parry this objection
by suggesting that Marx’s materialism requires
Hegel’s self-estranging sameness in order to dissolve the apparent dichotomy between immanence and transcendence in the potency
ascribed to practice. Doing so is not merely a
scholastic indulgence; it is necessary if the communist imperative – the realization of free conscious activity in social relations – is not to be
mistaken for the fantasy of un-estranged
propriety.
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externalization and estrangement
Notoriously, both Hegel and Marx deploy two
terms for alienation, Entaeusserung and
Entfremdung, and seem to use them interchangeably. In his translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, A.V. Miller marks the
distinction by rendering Entaeusserung as
“externalization”
and
Entfremdung
as
“estrangement.” Of course, much ink has been
spilled by scholars debating whether this heteronymy masks an underlying synonymy. But Italo
Testa has argued compellingly that there is
indeed a logic to their distinction. While
Spirit’s self-externalization is constitutive,
Hegel distinguishes between those externalizations through which Spirit realizes its freedom
and those through which it becomes subjected
to a foreign agency or power, which is only
itself in estranged form. Thus all estrangement
is externalization; but not all externalization is
estrangement. At its most fundamental, Testa
sees this as a question of the dialectical interplay
between Spirit’s independence and its dependence. This interpretation is indebted to
Adorno: Spirit frees itself from its subjection
to nature (it achieves independence or autonomy), but in so doing generates culture as a
second nature to which it is subjected (it
becomes dependent on societal institutions,
customs, and norms in a way that diminishes
its freedom). As Testa puts it, naturalness or
instinct is repeated within Spirit and manifests
itself within it in an estranged form. Institutions, customs, and norms “start working as
if they were nature, with a sort of sui generis
causality, that is, as estranged, reified second
nature.”3
One way of encapsulating this idea is as
follows: every self-conscious de-naturalization
engenders an un-conscious re-naturalization.
Testa cites two examples of this “return of
repressed nature” within Spirit from Hegel’s
Phenomenology:
[…] the natural character which acts according to the estranged dialectics of destiny
within immediate Sittlichkeit [i.e., ethical
life]; the fact that once personhood is
abstractly recognized in its spiritual form in
101
the Roman system of rights, then the individual is consigned to the confusion of the multiplicity of natural internal and external
forces and is exposed in its animal contingency; the fact that the concept of legal
person is here groundless, that is, dependent
for his positive recognition on the brute fact
of a social power which within the empire
manifests itself as a natural force of
devastation.4
What is interesting about these examples is that
they seem to be historical: the natural character
subjected to fate in the Greek world governed by
Divine Law; the legal entitlements of Roman
citizenship secured through lawless force.
These examples invite what I call a processual
interpretation of the movement of alienation:
first, there is subjection to necessity, then an
externalization through which Spirit emancipates itself from this subjection, but in a way
that is congenitally incomplete, generating
another form of subjection. Feuerbach’s critique of religion pivots upon this processual
paradigm of externalization-estrangement, or
double-alienation:
Man – this is the mystery of religion – projects his being into objectivity, and then
again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into
a subject; he thinks of himself as an object
to himself, but as the object of an object, of
another being than himself.5
Objectification yields the first object, to which
the objectifier is subjected, or objectified, in
turn. This double objectification is decisive for
the young Marx’s conception of alienation.
However, where Feuerbach construes double
objectification as unfolding within the ambit of
human self-consciousness, Marx roots it in
human practice, and specifically in social production. Human social relations become objectified as relations among commodities, which
become personified as agents to which humans
are in turn subjected. What is crucial here is
that for Marx as for Feuerbach, human genusbeing is necessarily self-externalizing, which is
to say, productive (practically for Marx, theoretically for Feuerbach), so that the termination
strange sameness
of subjection cannot be the reinstatement of
interiority. Since practice is essentially selfexternalizing, the negation of its estrangement
(its self-subjection) is the negation of estranged
externalization, not of externalization as such.
De-estrangement is the re-externalization of
estrangement, not its interiorization.
However, if, as Testa proposes, every externalization entails a concomitant estrangement,
then it is a mistake to separate these moments
as consecutive stages. Estrangement returns
because the externalization of estrangement is
also the re-estrangement of externalization.
The processual interpretation of alienation
encourages us to reify these moments and to
conceive of externalization as generating either
estrangement or non-estrangement. But
estrangement is externalization’s shadow. This
is not to say that they are indistinguishable.
Indeed, we are compelled to discriminate
those institutions, customs, or norms to which
we are subjected and which have become
mechanically compulsive for us, from those
through which we are able to exercise our free
conscious activity (our genus-being). The point
is that this discrimination is always historically
circumscribed such that successively discriminating subjection to the object (objective
estrangement) blinds us to our subjection to
the subject (the estrangement of externalization)
that makes this discrimination. But this is an
enabling subjection. Thus the distinction
between compulsion and freedom should not
be turned into a Manichean opposition
between
disablement
and
enablement.
However, before we can explore the further
ramifications of this claim, we must reconsider
the question raised earlier: if discriminating
between estrangement and de-estrangement
requires an appeal to genus-being, how do we
measure the discrepancy between realized and
unrealized degrees of free conscious activity?
essence and becoming
To attribute a historically unrealized potential
to human genus-being is to turn Marx’s materialization of Hegel into a reversion to the traditional (Aristotelian) articulation of essence
and becoming – the very articulation which is
shattered by Hegel’s self-estranging sameness.
For Aristotle, essence determines potentiality.
The ambit of becoming orbits around the fixed
point of essential identity. Essence thereby delimits the possible from the impossible. This
limit is circumscribed by the difference
between the contraries encompassed by substantial form and the contradictories it excludes.
Socrates can be young or old, standing or
sitting, happy or sad, but since he is essentially
a rational animal he cannot become irrational or
inanimate without ceasing to be Socrates. Substantial form (e.g., rational animal) fixes in
advance the limits of becoming, which is channelled through the furrows of generic division.
But essence as self-estranging sameness subverts these divisions and dissolves the fixity of
substantial form, thereby rendering contradictoriness constitutive of what is actual. Where,
for Aristotle, the identity of essence entails
that actualization is substantialization, i.e., the
consummation of potentiality and the exhaustion of essential possibility, for Hegel, the selfestrangement of essence deformalizes substance
and the essential contradictoriness of the actual
turns actualization into de-substantialization.
The subordination of becoming to substantial
form is undone and the possible and impossible
are desegregated. Only what has become can be
retrospectively considered essential. And what
has become essential retroactively determines
what will be possible. Every becoming re-establishes the limit between the possible and the
impossible as a division set to be undone by
the practical actualization of the essential difference that underlies it.
Thus history is not the processual estrangement and de-estrangement of free conscious
activity. Moreover, the possibilities commensurate with free conscious activity as what is essentially or generically human are not fixed by some
supposedly originary, un-estranged essence.
Marx’s insistence on historical immanence
entails that we cannot essentialize a criterion
of non-estranged activity by generalizing the
way we currently distinguish estrangement
from de-estrangement: in every instance, the criterion will be immanent to forms of activity
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grounded in specific modes of production. But if
history is not a processual development, neither
is it empirically given as a ready-made sequence
of facts. To historicize is not a matter of stringing
together pre-existing facts into a linear progression unfolding from past to present. As
Marx puts it, “the anatomy of the human is the
key to the anatomy of the ape.”6 To historicize
is to unfold the past from the present, not the
present from the past. It requires self-consciously projecting the retrospective preconditions that determine our current possibilities.
We must retroject a previous un-freedom, or
estrangement, in order to discern our current
measure of freedom, not as a positive, substantial
attribute, but as the estranging of estrangement.
estranging estrangement
If Marx succeeds in materializing dialectics, it is
precisely to the extent that he refrains from positivizing the potentiality he construes as generically human. This is to say that he does not
characterize it as a positive essence but as what
Simon Skempton calls “undetermined determinability”: “this is a negative and contentless universality; the overcoming of all specific
determinacy; thus it is not the universalization
of any determination.”7 It is precisely the negative universality of being-human that is
estranged in money and value. Thus Marx writes:
The inversion and confusion of all human
and natural qualities, the fraternization of
impossibilities, this divine power of money
lies in its being the externalized and selfexternalizing genus-being of man. It is the
externalized capacities of humanity.8
Skempton glosses this as follows:
This alienation involves universal determinability taking the form of the “spectrality”
of money and exchange value. For Marx,
humanity’s “generic being” is an insubstantial unessential universality, not tied to specificity, which is the basis of its social
relationality, but which is alienated from
the individual through capitalist social
relations and the division of labour, which
in turn tie her to specific determinacy.9
103
The question is whether this universal determinability has become estranged, or whether it
is (retroactively) generated through this
estrangement. If humanity’s generic being is
“insubstantial, unessential universality” then
the alienation at issue cannot be that of the
generic determinable’s estrangement in its
specific determination (as when theologians
describe human power and wisdom as limited
manifestations of God’s limitless power and
wisdom). For in this case the determinable’s
undeterminedness would be a subtraction
from the determination of its species and its
negativity would follow from the negation of
determination, not the negation of negation. In
other words, its negativity would remain positively haloed by specific determinacy: it would
be a relative rather than a self-relating negativity. But to endow humanity with a generic
transformative potential that has become
estranged in the course of actual history is to
construe this determinability as a distinct
moment that pre-exists its self-estrangement.
Essence is substantialized as one of the
estranged moments – which it is – but without
also being grasped as the splitting or estrangement as such. This is to construe negative universality as proper to the human: the human is
not a difference in kind, but another kind of
difference. Interestingly, this is Heidegger’s
characterization of Dasein as seinkönnen or
pure-potentiality-to-be. In the case of Heidegger, it is instructive to note the conceptual
link between the purity of potentiality and the
pathos of propriety (eigentlichkeit or authenticity). Heidegger’s fascism is prefigured by
this entwinement of potency, transcendence,
and propriety.
But the dialectical torsion consists in the
claim that the negativity of this universality is
not proper to the human because self-estranging
negativity is the impropriety (or accidentality)
upon which the determinability proper to the
human depends. This is to say that the undetermined determinability ascribed to being human
does not pre-exist its estrangement in the social
forms of money and exchange; it becomes possible through them. The determinable is undetermined through its estrangement. Because
strange sameness
what is supposed to be selfsame is already one of
the estranged moments, any potentiality harboured by it must be subsequent and not antecedent to its estrangement. Potentiality is
determined ex post not ex ante. What is materialist in Marx is the suggestion that the negative
universality of human sociality becomes actual
as a real (rather than merely ideal) possibility
in and through the social forms that seem to
negate it. Communism does not release social
activity in order to recover an estranged
essence; a pure potentiality flattened by
exchange and subordinated to capital’s selfvalorization. Rather, it perceives in the autotelic
finality of money the estrangement of an estranging activity: the exchange abstraction is the
appearance of an essence, human sociality,
whose actuality it contradicts; yet this contradictoriness, and the political practice consequent
upon it, provides the ground for re-founding
the actuality of sociality. What we see in
money and exchange is the potentiality of our
externalizing activity given tangible form in its
sheer determinability. Money and exchange are
generated by our activities, but it is not until
these activities appear as estranged in the illusory autonomy of money and exchange that
these activities, and the possibilities generated
by our perceiving their estrangement, become
appropriable as our own.
estranging freedom
We are never in complete possession of the
resources through which we could definitively
distinguish between alienating and non-alienating automatisms among contemporary institutions, customs, and norms. Acquiring those
resources is a task of retrospective construction.
The processual model suggests a movement
from externalization to estrangement, and
from estrangement to further externalization
(de-estrangement). But the processual model
reifies and separates the moments in what is
for Hegel an indivisible movement wherein
estrangement and de-estrangement, compulsion
and freedom, coincide. Estrangement is not
simply the return of repressed nature within
free conscious activity – the repetition of
compulsion within the undoing of compulsion
– if this return or repetition is understood as
the reiteration of an initial or preceding state.
Rather, externalization is de-estrangement as
estrangement. The prospect of de-estrangement
emerges only by retrospecting an enabling
estrangement. Objectification and subjection
are facets of a single indivisible movement.
This is why there can be no narrative about overcoming the need to overcome; no history in
which the compulsion to repeat would be
undone by the rememoration of compulsion.
There is no self-relation uncontaminated by
estrangement. Only retrospectively do we
become able to distinguish between what frees
us from compulsion and what compels us to
be free. But this retrospection is compelled by
history. Indeed, it is the way in which history
is at once something we make and something
that happens to us. The originary estrangement
is the estrangement of history as this rift
between our externalizing activity and its objective estrangement. To insist that estrangement
has already taken place is to realize that the
recurrence of originary dispossession is what
enables us to take possession of ourselves and
to affirm the necessity of this
possession knowing that it
entails further dispossession.
History dispossesses us even as
it provides us with the sole
resource for becoming free.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by
the author.
notes
1 Hegel 98–99, §162; translation modified.
2 Marx, Theses on Feuerbach in McLellan 172.
3 Testa 25.
4 Ibid.
5 Feuerbach 98.
6 Marx, Grundrisse in McLellan 390.
7 Skempton 200.
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8 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in
McLellan 118.
9 Skempton 126.
bibliography
Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity.
Trans. George Eliot. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2008.
Print.
Hegel,
Georg
Wilhelm
Friedrich.
The
Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Terry Pinkard.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018. Print.
McLellan, David, ed. Karl Marx: Selected Writings.
2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.
Skempton, Simon. Alienation after Derrida. London
and New York: Continuum, 2010. Print.
Testa, Italo. “Spirit and Alienation in Brandom’s A
Spirit of Trust: Entfremdung, Entaeusserung, and the
Causal Entropy of Normativity.” 2014. Web. 13
Dec. 2018. <http://www.academia.edu/8867525/
Spirit_and_Alienation_in_Brandoms_A_Spirit_of_
Trust._Entfremdung_Entaeusserung_and_the_
causal_entropy_of_normativity>.
Ray Brassier
American University of Beirut
PO Box 11-0236
Riad El-Solh
Beirut 1107 2020
Lebanon
E-mail: rb60@aub.edu.lb