It's the second version of a paper written about a year and a half ago. It was commissioned. I was asked to contribute to a volume, an edited volume, on the theme of the human. But the contribution had to be very short. There was a 3,000 word limit on it. Anyway, so I wrote kind of a text, which was actually longer, you know, about more than 3,000 words. And I sent an edited version of that to this volume, to the editor for this volume, which I'm not sure when it will be out, but it should be out at some point.
it has the same title as this talk or as this paper but I reworked it quite considerably in the intervening year so this is a second draft of this and it was prompted by well look I mean it's really prompted by debates about the the status of the human in contemporary philosophy, but also contemporary philosophy, critical theory, and the humanities more generally. And obviously the emergence of debates around post-humanism.
So it begins with a kind of a critical look at this post-human, or at least one kind of influential strain of post-humanism. I know that there's more than one and in a way part of the, I'm not entirely satisfied with the paper because it only deals with a kind of one strand. However, I mean the paper was written as a kind of, as a survey, so it begins as a kind of a, it really is an attempt to kind of to diagnose the underlying philosophical stakes of the crisis of the human, the crisis, the interrogation of the status of the human and of humanism, which has actually been ongoing for at least
50 years. It's not a new development. I mean, already, you know, Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault are all kind of critics of what they call, you know, humanism. And in a way, it's part of the paper is an attempt to kind of, to do a critical genealogy of contemporary post-humanism, but also to mark the shifts of discontinuities, how this, the brand of post-humanism, which seems to be kind of ascendant in the humanities and social sciences is significantly different from the versions from the critiques of metaphysical
humanism proposed by a figure like derrida which is why and he plays you know a significant role in this text the second section is is an examination of his the ends of man which is itself a kind of a critical dialogue with heidegger and look the points In a way, my kind of diagnosis or my hunch, a philosopher who first paradigmatically seeks to displace humanism and anthropocentrism in from in the the post-cantian european tradition is
heidegger okay so i think all the critiques the post-structuralist critiques of humanism are have a kind of a complex tributary relation to heidegger heidegger's kind of critique of humanism in a sense even a figure like Althusser although he's you know by no means a Heideggerian but even Althusser's kind of rejection of what he calls humanism which he identifies with a kind of a philosophical anthropology which sees man as the subject of history and Althusser's text on humanism that give this kind of humanism is the claim that history is a process with a subject and that subject is like self-consciousness or Geist in the idealist tradition
and it's labor in the kind of, you know, the initial Marxist tradition. And in a way, it's the destitution of the subject and the destitution of kind of self-consciousness in the kind of the Hegelian and Post-Hegelian tradition, which is Heidegger's kind of, you know, crucial gesture, which sets the stage for the attempts to kind of, you know, to somehow to move beyond humanism in 60s French philosophy. So, and I think I'm interested, I was interested, I think Derrida's in a way, I found Derrida's in a way the most interesting and the most sophisticated critical engagement, precisely because, you know, his, he's profoundly indebted to Heidegger,
but also there are points when he kind of seems to query, you know, certain, you know, Heidegger's claims about humanism's, you know, humanism's connection to the metaphysics of the subject. Okay. And look, also like the point I make, you know, the point is that I really think that, you know, Heidegger's project and Heidegger's philosophical legacy is a direct kind of, you know, rebuttal or rejection of the line that leads from Hegel to Marx.
which is why Marx is the kind of attacks on, in these debates about the human and humanism, it's Marx who is fundamentally interpolated. And I think that the attempts to align post-humanism, as it's called, anti-humanism is the Al-Tus-Erian kind of moniker, but in a way the political, the attempt to kind of align post-humanism with emancipatory politics, I think that this kind of alliance is rooted in a confusion and equivocation, which is actually dangerous. So that's why I was trying to interrogate the conditions under which the category of human,
or in a way the reduction of the human to a category, to something like a metaphysical category, becomes the condition for a gesture that proclaims itself as emancipatory. And that's what I was trying to examine and call into question in the text by suggesting that ultimately the kind of, that Marx's relationship to Hegel and Marx's kind of critique of Hegel is a kind of an ineluctable philosophical, you know, condition for understanding
the horizon of emancipatory politics. In other words, I think, and the connection with last week is that you ontologize, it's a rejection of political ontology, of the ontologization of politics, which is the other gesture that I see, you know, kind of, which is kind of, you know, proclaimed in a sophisticated form in Deleuze and Guattari. You know, the ontologization of ethics is also the ontologization of politics. And I think that that's re-inscribing of emancipatory politics into this frame of ontological naturalism is really problematic. And that's what the paper is, you know, critically examining. But it seems to me that Marx's whole
point is the kind of is a systematic kind of rejection of every naturalization. And Derrida is particularly interesting because he, you know, he himself is very kind of sensitive to these questions about the political valences of naturalization. But what's weird is how, you know, He also, I think uncritically, he mortgages his own kind of deconstructed project to this Heideggerian premise about the reactivation of the question of being.
I think my point is that if you kind of once you if you kind of try to purge the question of being of its Heideggerian kind of residues as arguably kind of Derrida is trying to do and with deconstruction turning it into you know a kind of a concern with you know alterity and you know, there's, you know, there's nothing left of being and of ontology. And then it seems to me that you have to go back to kind of this post, you know, this post-Hegelian tradition, especially the kind of the Marx-Hegel tradition, to understand why, you know, the questions, you know, why Marx,
puts the question of social form and social practice at the heart of both epistemological questions about meaning and of objectivation, but also of any concern with human emancipation. So yeah, so that's basically what the paper is about. But I'm reworking it, actually, because there's a couple of things I'm not satisfied, or I'm unsatisfied by. So I'm actually, yes, in the process of reworking it. And it will be part of a book that I'm working on.
Thank you so much. that's a basic overview of the uh um how the paper came to be written so i have a question is my voice okay by the way um i'm unsure yes okay okay thank you um so you have talked about this um the ontologization of politics and on several occasions throughout your whole philosophical life i guess what I wanted to quite what I don't quite understand and what I wanted to ask is this so what exactly what issue do you see with this move also I mean is it sort of this sort of this destruction of the
is out gap so is that exactly your argument or is it also is this also the case is your disliking also the case for the ontologization of politics, sorry politicization of ontology, vice versa. And is the Deleuze and Guattri's project in Capitalism and Schizophrenia a case of politicization of ontology? Okay, there's two, you just distinguished two kind of, you know, two articulations. One, the ontologization of politics, which I think is something that Deleuze and Guattari kind of,
you know, undertake, you know, quite explicitly. But also the politicization of ontology, okay, So in there, and they say, like, I think in somewhere in a thousand plateaus, every, you know, every ontology is political. You can't, the political and the ontological are woven together. Now, the question is, obviously, it wants you, if you, you know, explicitly self-consciously kind of, you know, ontologize politics, then it stands to reason that you will politicize ontology. So ontological disputes become politicized. Okay. but then in a way that's you know it's the first that's a Marxist okay or any
critical theorist can happily kind of you know accept the second articulation say yes of course every ontology is political but that's precisely because It is, you know, freighted with kind of substantive kind of, you know, normative or categorical assumptions, which are socially and historically kind of determined. but um but the gesture of so i want to reject the ontologization of politics because in a way i also have i also think ontology the philosophical discourse of ontology
is in a way is not possible actually um and in heidegger heidegger reacted with the question of the meaning of being. And I see the kind of the critical gesture as being the decoupling of, you know, meaning and being. Or Kant's critical gesture saying that, you know, meaning is not part of, or meaning can't be, you know, simply, you know, excavated from or kind of, you know, retrieved from an account of being,
of what is. Now, it's different, of course, you can say then that any account of what is, you know, presupposes meaning, presupposes kind of, you know, semantic normative categories, And in a way, I guess a philosopher like Sellers will kind of say something like this. But to say that to understand what is presupposes a horizon of sense and a kind of certain normative structures, conditions of intelligibility, which are indispensable, doesn't mean that you can therefore kind of, you know, that what is or being as such determines or generates intelligibility.
That's the claim I have a problem with, okay? And it's the, so it's one thing to kind of, you know, to bring out, you know, the latent political presuppositions and political implications of different ontologies. But I think to do that, I mean, or to do that properly, you should refuse the, you know, the ontologization of politics. and the reason why I think that actually Adorno has the best critique I think of this of the ontological discourse of the resurgence of ontological discourse and it's in his essay on
you know the idea of natural history in the in the 30s where he says that you know by nature I mean what contemporary ontologists call being. In a way, you could say that like, you know, every ontology is a naturalization because to say, because nature is simply what is, okay? It's not a kind of a specific object domain. It doesn't have a kind of, the most kind of, you know, general and abstract definition of nature you can give is simply is that what is okay and this is why you know capital you know social structures become oppressive and pernicious to the extent that they are taken as as they are naturalized they're taken as second nature and it's the fact
in a way it's it it's really the the articulation of you know i mean mystification is the presentation of something made as something given, you know, substituting or, you know, the, the, or presenting the, the made as something given. And that's the gesture that Marx is always kind of denouncing. And in a way, that's what, you know, any, I guess, a kind of a a philosophical discourse that is informed by Marxian critique, in a way entails the suspicion, once you, if you simply kind of say, well, nature is in the kind of
generic philosophical sense of the domain of what is, then it means that, not that you, not that you can disregard what is, you know, simply ignore it, but understand how its substantive characterization is never innocent. So, I mean, the point is that kind of, you know, there's no kind of, you know, originally unmediated relation to nature. There's no kind of intuition, pure intuition of the structure of nature or the qualities and properties of natural phenomena, that means that, you know, what we know of nature, how we understand nature,
is always kind of, you know, mediated. And yes, that's why, and it's this kind of insistence on this critical negotiation with anything that presents itself as a kind of, you know, as nature or as natural. Okay, is that a kind of a response? Yeah, that was a very elaborate response and I'm thankful for it. I could ask a question. So I just wanted to ask you, and hi, Ben Ray. I just wanted to ask you, I know you've written a little bit about, you know,
Son Rathel's notion of real abstraction. You've touched on it a little bit. And I guess you have some precedent for this engagement going back to even the Speculative Realist Conference of 2007, where Alberto Siscano was moderating, for example. um but you know i think it's interesting in intellectual and manual labor because in that text uh son rothel writes a little bit about haggle um and he says that uh you know in a way haggle's dialectics can only function as a kind of social mystification um because of the way that kantian dualism um is a consequence of the structure of the commodity form right which sort of grips the structure of social reality. And I wonder, you know, if you think of, I'm
thinking about, you know, certain forms of, I guess, what's called neorationalism, like Nicaristani's notion of the inhuman, which is not, as he says, it's not the, it's decidedly not the anti-human, right? It's a way of working within, I think, a context of discussing human commitments without reifying, right, what the human is. But I'm wondering if, in a way, you know, if you look at Hegelian thought, right, you know, I think in a sense, and this actually, it's interesting in the piece, The Ends of Man, because Derrida discusses this, and he discusses how in a sense there's, if I understand it correctly, in a sense there's still a sort of originary status, which is described to the human in Hagel's system, but then it's codified,
right, through the phenomenology. And he draws an analogy with Husserl, I think, and then acquires a different kind of expression in the logic, right, which isn't reducible to phenomenology. But I wonder if you see there as being a contradiction between, for instance, the program of someone like Son Rathal who tries to set out the way that if I understand it properly thinking from the standpoint of the human or presupposing reason or consciousness as the basis of reality is already conditioned by the commodity form in a certain sense and I'm wondering if you see if you think there could be a possible tension
between that and something like the notion of the human as inhuman as it's been defined by Negaristani, for example. Okay. I'm very interested in Son Rattle, and I want to write a chapter of this book will be on his work and his account of real abstraction. It strikes me, I'm still trying to figure out where I agree and disagree with his analysis, but I think there is a, it seems to me that there is a worry in Son Retel's account, and precisely it kind of, it's about his Kantianism, his kind of,
you know, his, you know, the fact that he is a kind of a Kantian Marxist as opposed to a Hegelian Marxist, is the question is whether, you know, he, everything hinges on the exchange abstraction. is the exchange is exchange the condition of real abstraction or is real abstraction already the condition for exchange and i think that there's an issue with son rettle about the the role of abstract labor in you know understanding exchange and one i'm not sure about this, but kind of one worry in kind of Son Rettel's account is that it seems, you know,
Marx writes in the Grundrisse that labor itself is a real abstraction, okay? And he says it's only in a kind of, you know, in capital, in a society, kind of a society kind of, of a certain kind of complexity and with a kind of a determinate structure, that's in a way something that has always been, you know, social reproduction involves kind of labor. But in a way, labor only becomes a kind of a category, a fundamental kind of category of social self-understanding under capitalism. And that's because labor itself has become a real abstraction. Labor, you know,
as a vision for social existence for a majority of the population, it becomes a kind of the site of social reproduction. And that means, therefore, that the abstraction, that the distinction between exchange value and use value in the commodity form, okay, is in one sense, you know, indissociably linked to the distinction between concrete and abstract labor. And as I understand Marx. Marx is not saying that concrete labor, first you have concrete labor, and then you have abstract labor. No, just as use and exchange are the two indissociable facets of
the commodity form, okay? It's not as if you use commodities and then they become, that use is abstracted into exchange. Use and exchange are the two sides of the commodity. So labor is simultaneously concrete and abstract in capital. So labor as real abstraction is at once concrete and abstract. It has a use value and an exchange value. And that's the condition for the extraction of surplus value. It's through the capitalist consumption of the wage laborers, concrete labor. labor is exchanged abstractly but consumed concretely and it's through this kind of
discrepancy between concrete and abstract that you know surplus value is extracted but this happens one labor is exchanged in the sphere of you know those two kind of it happens in labor is consumed in the sphere of production whereas it's bought and sold in the sphere of exchange. And I think that that means that you can't simply establish exchange itself as the source of real abstraction understood as the kind of, you know, the dissociation of quantity from quality, okay,
or of homogenous kind of quantity from heterogeneous quality. And it seems to me there's a problem, because in Sonretel's account, it's almost as if the risk is always that he reinstates a pre-Hegelian opposition between the concrete and the abstract, as if you have concrete use values, You had concrete labor and concrete use values. And then all of a sudden, you get an abstraction from the concrete, which is a completely undialectical and pre-Hegelian understanding of the difference between the abstract and the concrete, and one which I think is simply not Marxian. And that also is why there's a weird kind of ahistoricity
to Son Reto's account of the exchange abstraction. He projects it back to exchange abstraction begins with money, with coin, which is why intellectual abstraction, through the division of intellectual and manual labor, you get the kind of abstract kind of philosophical category come into play with the coin form. And I think that methodologically, that analysis is, you know, dysfunctional. It doesn't, you know, precisely because of the interdependence of these, of all these kinds of, of the commodity form, the value form, exchange use value, and labor as such in Marx's analysis. Okay. So I think that's why it's implausible to see exchange itself as the source of real abstraction.
For Marx, real abstraction is a consequence of a system of the capital relation, a system of social relations, and those social relations are both conditioned by and conditioning of real abstraction. So I think Sainte-Retel's account is too unilinear and weirdly, actually, you could almost say anachronistic in which it kind of it takes the structure of the commodity form to be already operative in coinage okay whereas money says that kind of you know money and commodities are merely two aspects of value okay they're kind of manifestations of value and value itself
you know implies the capital relation so you can't take one you can't take the commodity form extract it from the capital relation and put it back in you know and then see it as a kind of as a source of real abstraction I think so now there's others I mean that's a bit you know I think so in a way that's why I see that the danger of simply juxtaposing use and exchange and as if there's a kind of the danger is reifying use values and in a way that's a a re-naturalization because if you simply kind of say that use values you know use use values as generated by concrete concretely heterogeneous labor is the kind of this
pre-capitalist kind of you know condition then that's another kind of naturalization because you re-naturalize use values and the qualities of concrete labor that generates kind of discrete use values as if they could simply be kind of, you know, read off any kind of, you know, system of social production. And the philosopher, the philosopher who naturalizes use value is Aristotle. That's what you get, okay, if you re-naturalize use value. If you think that there is concrete use, you know, that, you know, that use values exist in nature, it's Aristotle,
you know, and it seems to me that kind of Aristotelianism is also a kind of a, you know, I think that Marx admires Aristotle, and, you know, but I think that he is absolutely not an Aristotelian. Okay, I haven't answered the, I'm sorry, I've gone off. I haven't answered what you were asking me about humanism and about whether there's a kind of humanism implied in Son Rettel's kind of account of the, or critique of real abstraction. Oh, you're not, sorry, I was talking about haggle uh and and neorationalism and humanism okay yeah continue i just make sure
yeah uh yes and just so can you just restate the question you were asking me about um sure my question was that um for for saan rethel um you know haggle doesn't really arrive like as a you know it's a kind of there's a mystification to it because it overlooks the fact, that we are, you know, the binary thinking of Kant, for example, is characteristic of the commodity form, which is kind of the moment we're in. And so he, but I guess what I was wondering here is if you look at, of course, for, for Son Rathel, he goes into this kind of excavation, and he's trying to, you know, situate dualism, you know, and I think the genesis of the subject position within modern philosophy, within sort of economic structures. But it's interesting here,
like if you look at Derrida's piece, The Ends of Man, he does allude to a certain kind of humanism, which is already latent, you know, in the Hegelian perspective, right, in terms of, well, okay, he draws an analogy with Husserl and the phenomenology, and it's superseded in the logic, but there's still a kind of originary humanism. And he talks about Heidegger as well. Marx criticizes this as well. So again, it's the question, if we look at Negristani, he says, well, okay, inhumanism. Well, that's not anti-humanism, as he's clear about. So the question is, is it possible that from a Marxist standpoint, the risk here is that one, by making that perspective sort of originary, right, that one reifies a certain kind of subjectivistic or humanistic
thinking even as they you know purport to be uh uh you know functioning functioning within a structure that can give rise to like the rational as opposed to the real or challenge existing notions of what the human is okay well i mean the category yes i mean the the category of subjectivity is uh you know is indissociable from you know um for metaphysical humanism for it's It's the bedrock of metaphysical humanism, according to kind of, you know, this, well, Heidegger, it's Heidegger. Derrida's, that point is Heideggerian, not particularly Derridaean. Now, the question then is whether, you know, Marx is, is there a theory of the subject in Marx?
No, there isn't, because the only subject that there is in capital is self-valorizing value. The capital itself is an automatic subject. And if one, I think, sees that labor itself is kind of at least, you know, has one foot in the capital relation, you know, then I think, you know, people assume that kind of Marx is committed to the claim that labor is a subject. and I don't think that labor is the kind of the revolutionary agent and you know these posts kind of you know the value critique people have called that into question I think if one distinguishes the proletariat from labor if one sees labor or the working class
as a kind of a subset of the proletariat or to be a proletarian is simply to be reduced to one's labor power, to be a bearer of labor power, regardless of whether or not one is actually employed, and because capital kind of, you know, increases unemployment. The question then is whether the proletariat is, you know, the revolutionary subject. And what's interesting here is that, obviously, wage labor, you know, capital reproduces itself through wage labor. So the wage labor is, you know, in a way is contributing to kind of to capital's reproductions through their activity, which is also their, you know, they have to kind
of keep alive and reproduce themselves by saying that they're wage labor. But there isn't yet the sense in which kind of, you know, labor is this kind of support, you know, or kind of basis for kind of capital reproduction doesn't, you know, I think mean that it can be understood as a subject. In other words, you have to be careful about an equivocation in the term subject, okay? Subject can mean both self-consciousness, like the Kantian subject. It can also mean agent, okay?
Or like active, you know, practical generator. And I think that, in a way, yeah, I think those two terms are not equivalent. and I think that Marx in a way the proletariat is not a subject in either sense, it's not a subject in either of those senses and that's why it doesn't actually, in a way this is why I don't think Marx can be accused of humanism or the kind of metaphysical humanism
which Derrida and Althusser find problematic. In terms of Reza's work, I don't think what he calls the labor of the inhuman, which is this work of constantly revising our understanding of the capacities and potencies of the human is, I don't think that implies this kind of, again, this metaphysical subject as rejected by Derrida
and Heidegger and others, because the subject here is, again, the subject in this metaphysical, objectionable metaphysical sense is supposed to be the coincidence of self-consciousness and self-determination. So it's supposed to be this, it's both where thinking and the pure coincidence of thinking and doing. And I don't see that presupposition operative in Reza's work.
So yeah, I think it's, I mean, look, just to be very clear, I just don't think that this account, this Heideggerian account of the metaphysics of subjectivity and what's supposedly why it's about this myth of self-presence or of pure identity or of pure autonomy or of pure self-positing, etc. I just don't think that those are adequate to the theory of the subject developed by Hegel. And Marx complicates things further because of his critique of Hegel.
but even the Hegelian subject isn't guilty of all those bad things that Heidegger attributes to it so basically I'm rejecting the claim that there is a philosophy of the subject which assumes that consciousness is transparent to itself, that subjectivity is self-positing, that it's rooted in domination and the subjugation of every kind of variety of objects, etc., etc. I just don't believe that, actually.
I just think that that is not true. So that's why I don't think that the category of subjectivity is, you know, simply to be, can be junked or kind of dispensed with. Could I interrupt here for a second? Yes. So I think we could reframe this question by linking it to your original issue earlier in our session on the politics of ontology and the ontology of politics.
If we look to one particular moment, for example, Maimon's critique of Kantian subjectivity, in particularly with reference to the manifold and the status of time as a category arising from the imagination or from the judgment. At one point, do we have to stop talking about the politics of ontology and talk instead about the politics of onto theology because it seems to me that that particular moment
represents a clash of onto theologies and that it's maimans subject position as a jew for example trained in kabbalism which enables him to have the framing capacity to think outside the system that Kant is constructing and to demonstrate that time and space as a relational grid is not a natural phenomenon, but a social phenomenon, or what we could say not a universal
phenomenon, but an epistemic phenomenon based on Kant's worldview. and that Maimon's critique of Kant represents a moment where one could see two ontotheologies basically clashing. So given that you have a very well worked out system for yourself, how do you look at that moment from the perspective of an ontology of politics versus a
politics of ontology i mean how how would you interpret that um and let me let me stop there so let me see how you think through that that foundational clash that occurs so you mean the Maimon's claim that space time is not natural but social that it is not universal but epistemic hmm I mean in a sense you know in a kind of trivial sense
I think I agree because I think that what we've discovered what space and time really are is becoming more and more mysterious in that there's as physics advances it's clear that these phenomena are profoundly, all our intuitions about the structure of space, the nature of time are superficial and unreliable. And therefore, it's very plausible to say that, yeah,
we, you know, our understanding of space and time is conditioned by, you know, an experience we have of it, which is socially conditioned. So, in a way, that's why I think that, you know, I mean, I'm Kantian precisely because I think that it's, in a way, the more parsimonious you are with your ontological presupposition. In other words, the more you can say, this is just our way, you know, these are just conditions of experience or conditions of intelligibility,
as opposed to constitutive features of things or of reality, in a way, the more you leave room for discovery and change and transformation. Whereas as soon as you claim to be able to kind of to deduce something about the nature of being qua being, which is the definition of metaphysics, the danger is always anthropomorphism, the illicit projection of local categories onto
things in themselves. So in a way, look, I think that if Kant's critical revolution is the claim that human beings don't have a God's eye view. If the claim about epistemic finitude, and that we don't know things in themselves, we can think them, but we can't know them. However, we can know objects, empirically real objects, is that we don't have access to the intellectual intuition that would allow us to kind of, that would make judgment unnecessary, because the distinction between subject and predicate would be irrelevant for a creature endowed with intellectual intuition.
And I think Kant's framing of the problem is, you know, is kind of uncircumvencible. I think that any kind of, in a way, this is, I mean, use the term onto theology. That's why I think Kant shows the complicity between metaphysics or dogmatic metaphysics and ontotheology. It assumes a kind of a... It not only assumes that there is a... It assumes... It doesn't just assume a supreme being, or a kind of a pivot or kind of anchor for the structure of being. It also assumes a kind of homology between the divine understanding and human understanding,
but then simply say that there's a limitation. Ours is finite, his is infinite. But then Kant shows that it's the other way around, that actually our, you know, our concept of the divine, the concept of the divine understanding, which is the precondition for rationalist metaphysics, is an illicit projection or extrapolation from the features of the human understanding. And once you make that move, then already kind of, you know, you can already, Feuerbach is already kind of visible in this move, the claim that the divine, the transcendent perspective,
the divine understanding of creation is simply kind of an estranged manifestation of our own kind of capacity for understanding and experiencing. and that means that ontotheology is domesticated everything we say about God or about what the world would be like for a deity are simply kind of extrapolations from our own understanding and experience
But the fact that he does not de-center time and space in a relational grid, which must necessarily presuppose transcendence behind it, suggests that the task was not completed, which was… Ah, I see. Okay, okay. You see where I'm going here. Yes. But then, look, you could, I mean, okay, I mean, this is just all that's off my head. In other words, Maimon is pointing back in some ways to Spinoza in a very real sense, in part perhaps because Spinoza and Maimon share an ontotheology.
I mean, you know, I take your point about the decent, I mean, how the decentering of time and space would be also kind of a consequence, but Kant is not willing to go there. He's not willing to go there. I mean, but he recognizes, while still alive, that Maimon basically confronts him on one of the fundamental underpinnings to his entire project. okay there's two things i would say is that one is that um a lot of post-cantian philosophy was about kind of you know overcoming and obviously hegel most famously kind of the uh the alleged
dualism of concepts and intuitions and you know in a way if you reintegrate sensibility into you know reason and the understanding then the claim is that time and space become conceptualized, become conceptually tractable. And that means, and if time and space are conceptually tractable, that means that, you know, they don't need to have, we can think structures of time and space, which might be unintuitable. And a lot of kind of 19th century kind of, you know, mathematics and physics kind of, you know, proved that. But then this just shows that then that in a way you know you can you know we can reinvestigate the structure and
you know yeah we can think and conceive unintuitable kind of structures of time and space and to do that we don't need the resort to intellectual intuition and the problem with I mean, I love Spinoza, but the problem is, if you begin with the suppos...if God is the presupposition, you know, this infinite kind of infinite substance with infinity of attributes, the problem is, you know, how do we think from God's vantage point? and in a way the kind of the dereliction of onto theology is that you know it's not possible to
think from God's vantage point and the claim is we don't need to you know why would we need to it's only if you thought that I mean Kant's point was that you don't need God for universality and objectivity. Okay. He shows how you can secure the conditions for, you know, universal objective knowledge without kind of having to, you know, prove God. It doesn't need to depend on God. So then it becomes, so the question is, what role is God playing in this I mean, if God just becomes synonymous with something like the absolute, but then if you think about, you know, the point is that the absolute itself is not simply a substance.
You know, after Hegel, you know, the absolute is, you know, the becoming subject of substance. The absolute is not, you know, a transcendent object. And in a way, what I see as crucial in Kant is the demystification of transcendence. God is just transcendence. Kant is a great demystifier. He says, look, the world's knowledge, our knowledge of reality can be secured without this anchoring in absolute transcendence. And, you know, he domesticates God, you know, he
relegates God to this, well, I mean, this is, I mean, I think, in one sense, God, you know, Kant relegates God to the status of a regulative ideal. He says, we need God to think, but he's useful you know we can instrument we can use god we can use god to know without thinking that we can ever know god and that's i think that's a kind of a beautiful domestic you know domestic domestication and demystification and the question is you know what people want I mean, it's connected to this stuff about, you know, the post-human. As I see, the problem is that people, it's another cipher for transcendence.
And the question is, why do people, this disenchantment with the human, the claim that the human is a kind of degraded, you know, pernicious category, It's not kind of, you know, we don't want to kind of, you know, to identify, to self-identify as human. It's a grubby, discredited category, etc. I think that it's important to understand the conditions under which this kind of disillusionment came about. Also to understand the dangers of the alternatives. because if the destitution of the human is the rehabilitation of transcendence,
which it often is, it is in Heidegger, well, transcendence is another name for, or not just another name, but transcendence can be an alibi for domination. Absolutely. That's Feuerbach's basic point. And people, this is why the divinity or absolute transcendence, the unknowable, the ineffable, can always be, you know, is always a kind of a pretext for mystifications which, you know, become sources of oppression. So, yeah, that's a very good question. Thanks. Hi. I would like to ask a question
if it's possible. Yes. I'm wondering about the theory of the subject. So I want to go back there. And I don't mean like a transhistoric subject, but human subjectivity, the self, the psyche. And I know in Neil Unbound, I think in the first chapter, you grapple with the work of Paul Churchland and where he takes Sellers and his myth of the given to critique folk psychology. And you say the critique is correct, but Paul Churchland's proposal, his very neurocognitive proposal
of another theory of the subject, it's not necessarily the best theory out there. And I know this book came out in, I think, 2009. and since then you've engaged with Lacanian psychoanalysis. And I wonder what you think is like the state of the art theory of the subject. Is it a set of functions? Is it some transhistoric entity? Or do you think that maybe artificial intelligence can give us an answer? So is AI something like for the subject like physics is to the world or how can we make sense of the subject? What how does it work in a way?
OK, I mean, it's also a difficult question. I mean, part of, you know, since writing, you know, that book was published in 2007, but actually written, like, in the, you know, couple of years before. So, yeah, I've changed, you know, I've rethought a lot of things. And about the category of the subject, I think it was, you know, reading, obviously, from a neurocomputational perspective, in a way, or actually, think of, like a thinker like Thomas Metzinger, okay, who gives you this extremely elegant and persuasive naturalization, this, you know, the self-model theory of subjectivity says that subjectivity is a, you know, tractable natural phenomenon, which can be understood in kind of, you know,
neurocomputational terms. Now that's, you know, but subject in that sense is precisely not what subject means in the post-Kantian tradition, where it's a subject of knowing, the knowing, the cognizing subject that is at stake. So the question is whether the cognizing subject, the Kantian, the subject whose knowing, whose capacity to know requires this spontaneity, the spontaneity of pure apperception, whether this subject is reducible to this neurocomputational subject.
And I think it's Sellers as the philosopher who shows that it's not. And the reason it's not is because, you know, human to be a person, you know, to be a partaker in the game of giving and asking for reasons, is to be endowed with, to be a concept monger, to be endowed with a capacity for a kind of conceptualization and conceptual responsiveness to concepts and also a kind of susceptibility to be motivated by concepts which cannot be accounted for in neurocomputational forms
because it involves a social dimension of rulishness, okay? It involves socially instituted norms, and that's that kind of, you know, this normative dimension is precisely what can't be correlated or identified with any kind of set of neurocomputational patterns, no matter how complex. It can be correlated with what Serge calls pattern-governed activity, but this pattern-governed activity is itself not simply kind of neurocomputational tractable.
So I think there's something about the sociality of rational self-consciousness that can't be adequately accounted for at these lower levels of explanation. Not that they should be ignored, but that you can't understand what it is that's going on using these neurocomputational resources. and then the question is whether subjectivity in this kind of
you know Szilagian Kantian sense is whether it depends on whether it's tied to a kind of an understanding of the nature of rationality, this inferentialist account of meaning. And I also think that's only part of the story. So I think that's another kind of layer of analysis. But it seems to me that the sociality of reason thesis that is implied by this kind of Kantian Szilagyi, you know, explanation,
already has to kind of, you know, give some account of how our, you know, meaning-making practices are, you know, embedded in social structures, and more specifically kind of social forms. And that's the third layer, which I think can only be, in a way, that's the third layer where you can't objectivate social form in the way in which you could, you can even kind of
objectivate, you know, phenomena in the world or objects in the world. So in other words, there's something about the structure of rational subjectivity, which is kind of, socially instantiated, but which can't be objectivated using the ordinary resources of kind of empirical science. It's not an object domain in the way in which kind of neurobiology or computational neuroscience might be an object domain. And that's why I think
there's and that's the sense in which I think that there's something about the structure of subjectivity that you know eludes objectivation not because of you know again not because it doesn't transcend it you know it doesn't transcend it vertically or metaphysically but it transcends it horizontally because it's involves this kind of these patterns of social forms upon which are kind of reason-giving practices supervene. So I think the theory of the subject is very enormous, is perhaps the most difficult
philosophical problem. And I think that the phenomenon of subjectivity has these kind of different layers. I think there's no doubt the kind of human subjectivity at one level, you know, I think Metzinger beautifully explains kind of, you know, why we experience the world from a situated embodied point of view, etc, etc. But he, it seems that I don't think that says enough about the, how we are concept mongers, how we, you know, we understand things conceptually and are motivated by concepts and then i think you need different resources to explain that um and then
the the third layer would be the kind of uh the social historical layer and that's where i think you know hegel and marx are important um because they you know they want to say that um that there's I mean what is it you're trying to explain when you're trying to explain subjectivity and I think once you realize that it's not a kind of it's a multi-dimensional phenomenon then you realize that there's not just kind of it's perhaps a mistake it's a cognitive error
to try to account for it in one dimension, exclusively in one dimension. I've got a question sort of following on from this. And it's nice to talk to you again. So concerning social reproduction. So this is sort of the term which really jumped out at me in this essay. So most of my own Marxist theory that I've published has been concerned primarily with social reproduction although I suppose I'm not I'm not a social reproduction theorist in the sense of um Tithi Bhattacharya or scholars like that uh but I think it's one of my concerns and what um my reading of your essay it does is that there are these two appearances of the term or the process in this essay and each sort of round off
these two sections um which you've written I suppose one thing that this does is sort of links them together and shows us why these two sections belong in the same as I'm sort of wondering about but the other thing that they do I think is they sort of pull you back from an otherwise foregone outcome so in the first section you make these very striking and I think very convincing critiques of post-humanism's critique the focus on exclusion and so on and I'm quite convinced by that but the reason I'm convinced by it is that I'm a humanist so I see these are the obvious reposts to those positions. But what you do with social reproduction is you're talking about, what's this phrase, you say the mutability and the reshaping of the human by the interaction, the interplay of social reproduction and value reproduction, which you say will get into another
point. So I suppose this is what I wanted to hear more about. But then in the second appearance, I found this even more interesting, because in the second half, you've introduced negativity, hegelian negativity and you're defending it so you're saying this is this this makes more sense than the heideggerian uh position which again i agree with um but at this point sort of how you reel it back to marx is you twin marx with freud so this is why the human is not only mutable but the source of mutability that is so generous but where hegel ties this negativity to self-conscious marx and freud extend it into the compulsions of social reproduction and libidinal repetition both of which operate behind the back of self-consciousness so social reproduction is that twin with libidin del repetition and marxist twin with freud and these are the two critics of hegel um but yeah i find this very interesting because i feel like a lot of
social reproduction theory has maybe um maybe been prone to a sort of parallel development where uh psychoanalytic insights and so on these are sort of separate options either you're a psychoanalytic uh marxist and you read jacqueline rose and and whatever or you're a social reproduction theorist and you read shinji oruza um so this is what what it seems to me to me is you're sort of reconnecting them in a way which i find very interesting so firstly value reproduction social reproduction and then twinning it with libidinal repetition so yeah i would be very interested to hear where you're going with this because clearly from what you say in the essay this is saying you're still extending and developing but i suppose also what i'd like to say is that this is to me this shows like a lot of potential for sort of getting us out of a kind of potential rut between systemic thinkers and psychonomistic ones.
Thank you. That's, again, a kind of a difficult question. And the truth, I mean, look, by social reproduction, I mean, I meant it. I mean, I know, I know I don't know enough about because I haven't read the vast literature about social reproduction. I just simply meant it in a sense in which Marx often uses it in a sense in which human beings have to reproduce themselves. They reproduce their own material conditions of existence. So that's... but obviously, then at the end, after the kind of the discussion of the revisitation of Hegel, after the kind of the discussion of kind of, you know, Derrida, the term desire kind of becomes crucial.
because in a way the first moment when self-consciousness emerges in the phenomenology, in the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness, the first thing, self-consciousness is defined as this relational structure, at the heart of which is desire. And self-consciousness desires itself. It desires itself in the form of another self-consciousness. So it relates to itself through another. So the category of desire is obviously important here. But then this is precisely the category that is, you know, at the heart of psychoanalysis, you know, that is fundamental for psychoanalysis.
And actually, what is really, and in fact, what I still haven't figured out and what I'm trying to kind of get to grips with is a relationship between desire and the drive. because that's the creation that's the lacanian distinction because you know there's and the first version of the essay um desire played little role it was all about the drive okay because you know i mean i have a lot of sympathy for kind of um uh the slovenian you know laden dollar um alenka zupanschik their work on um you know hegel and lakan um the um yeah the way in which they can you know their account of the the drive and why the drive is precisely kind of irreducible to instinct
and why it's um it's a form of um of negativity, which can't be straightforwardly kind of, which doesn't seem to kind of slot into the Hegelian dialectic, okay? So, not to say that it's, you know, you can think it dialectically, but in a way it's a kind of, it's a missing piece in the kind of the Hegelian jigsaw. so the points and look the reason what strikes me is like you can go once you've introduced self-consciousness like the way in which recognition theorists go and like you know I'm thinking of like Axel Harness they'll say well yes to be human is the humanity
humanity is designed for kind of recognition okay for social kind of you know social recognition you know and there's a politics that falls from that which i think is you know problematic and but what's striking is that in hegel the moment in which self-consciousness arises is also the moment in which this kind of the conflict the struggle to the death between the lord and bondsman arises so it's not you don't have this moment of kind of you know perfect mutual recognition you have conflict the first thing that happens is a struggle to the death and you know that's um so which is to say that in a way that can is a structure of desire isn't you know desire emerges but the structure of desire itself is not transparent to self-consciousness
self-consciousness is you know structured by and through desire yet does not kind of you know understand the nature of you know what this desire is um and what i need so it seems to me that what's crucial is to kind of to understand more about the structure of desire but also how desire can't be reduced to this kind of ideal of you know recognition commutative kind of recognition and i I think that's what's interesting about, obviously, Lacan in particular, is why he says, you know, desire is always desire of the other, but it's always, it's never, you know, it's incompatible with this account,
this smoothing of conflict and of confrontation, which seems to be, in other words you can't simply it's a critique of intersubjectivity the point is that the kind of the social recognition account says that you know the space of self-consciousness you know self-consciousness is this fear of mutual recognition of mutually recognizing subjects and I think that you know psychoanalysis says it absolutely not no it isn't you can't understand it that way. And so in a way, the dialectic of desire is necessarily structured by these antagonisms,
which can't simply be smoothed away or overcome through something like of you know, communicational consensus or recognition. Yeah, so in a way, and that's why I think that's, I mean, okay, this is, yeah, this is the stuff I'm still trying to work through, but I think one possibility is that Lukács' account of the standpoint of the proletariats, and in a way how the kind of the proletariat as self-conscious commodity is a reworking, is another kind of rewriting of this dialectic of Lord and Bondsman after Marx,
so that the capitalist class relation in a way is what blocks, you know, is why mutual recognition cannot be instituted on the basis of self-consciousness. and in Lukács there is a theory of the subject, of the becoming subject of substance, because ultimately the proletarian is simply a self-conscious commodity, he's a thing, a mere thing, he's been reduced to kind of a labor power, you know, he's been reduced to the status of a bearer of labor power, you know, and socially nullified, but that very kind of reduction is the condition for subjectivation. A subjectivation which is predicated
on the absence of recognition. It's your social eradication that is the condition for subjectivation. And, you know, so that's, so I think, so what I want to do is to kind of revisit this kind of Lukashian account and then see if, but try to understand how, in a way the proletarian desire is the desire to abolish, to destroy the bourgeoisie, abolish the class relation is what kind of desire is this? And it's as if there's a missing episode in the phenomenology
which requires in a way taking resources from Lukash, but also from kind of from a Kenyan psychoanalysis to work out. So, yeah, but this is stuff that I'm still completely just trying to, I haven't started writing this, but I'm in the dark about this. So I don't know how it's kind of going to play out. But yes, I think it's as soon as you start talking about you know self-consciousness as desire then you know it's not the desire it's not the desire for recognition um but then what is it that's the problem um i'm trying to figure out
hi ray um hi hi hi hi hi uh i will just to to um i first very shortly pitch in on this later subject of recognition. I agree with what you just said that the desire and the phenomenology, it's not about recognition in the way Hornet would put it or Habermas would put it. It's about reading the whole chapter in understanding that the relationship between the lords and bondsmen, it's one that traverses all the figures in that chapter, for example, stoicism and skepticism it's um if we take um the interpretation that what distinguishes
that certain aspect of a self-conscious desire which is a desire of a desire desire to be desired as a also like competent is that in certain sense is this um self-affirmation self-consciousness to be recognized as such as a thing in the world which would imply this kind of relation between lord and bondsman that in in skepticism it's uh it's a question about who does the work in skepticism uh the world does the work so that so that so that i can be a skeptic in stoicism i do all the work so that there is a world out there so that there is normativity that impinges on me and so on and so forth. So the ending of that chapter is more or less,
is what is to be real as a self-consciousness. It's not about the subjectivity. It's about the battle to have reality, to have a right to desire and be desired in the end. But my question was the following. Do you engage in this Marx and humanism debate with that part of the early Marx, I know early Marx is a bit controversial for purists, about alienation from a species being? I think, I know that it's very not well seen for the Apollos of the later Marx that they still have this anthropological existential Marxism or humanist Marxism of the 44
of the pre-48 revolutions but I think it offers a lot of possibilities in the end this this assertion that there is such a thing as alienation from a species being. First it clears this relationship that between anthropology and ontology as you put also in your text between why Heidegger refusing humanism, as Erida puts it, goes directly to ontology, of this accent of the character of experience of always being mine, not of the human, but mine. And that is a way to circumvent anthropology and jump in ontology in a certain sense. Mark would say that in capitalism, in alienation of labor,
where you cannot talk about human or all talk about the human is cringe in the end. It's either you accentuate this alienation from the species being, this valuation of the own experience as what there is. So you cannot talk about the human, but about my experience and all existentialisms and self-person literature and all this kind of stuff. It is an expression of this alienation from the species being. So all existentialism and so on. um on the other side all talks about the humanism understands human as a genre as a genera but not as a species so it it it uh has a concept of the human by way of denaturalizing it or taking it out from the natural order and pull it out making it as some sort of ontological animal something
like that so the question is how how would you engage with this i don't have a species being can this be a topic this talk about humanism okay you went on this critique of transcendence as posthumanism as a new uh modern way of putting the problem of transcendence but if you take this kind of um marxist well the initial species being you don't need that you can all see them as symptoms of this impossibility in kind of formulating a notion of a species being okay thanks um that's very good um actually can you and i might be wrong about this i suspect because it it struck me and um maybe i've it's interesting when you pointed out the distinction
between species being and the distinction you were insisting that it is species and not genus because the one I was, and this might just be a mistake on my part, but I thought, well, look, if Marx philosophically, it doesn't seem to make sense to translate Gatungswesen as species being, because then, you know, a species is subordinate to a genus, okay, and then you have to think the specific difference. And that's what metaphysics does. So like man is the rational animal, you know, the talking animal. But I thought it was perhaps more promising to kind of, you know,
to translate Gatunswesen as genus being, because a genus, interestingly for Aristotle, is not subsumed by anything higher, and generic differences are not kind of beholden to the logic of, you know, of opposition or contrarieties. Genera are not opposed to one another. They are unlike one another. In other words, what's interesting, at least on my kind of take on, you know, the genera species distinction is that, you know, you can only measure likeness and unlikeness within a genus in terms of species and individual, but genera are radically unlike
anything, you know, hence sui generis. And I took Marx to be suggesting that this is the kind of, that precisely, you know, talk about human genus being, is to say, simply to say that it's unlike, it's different it's unlike anything but this difference cannot be specified it cannot be specified because humans make are making themselves human beings are in the process because you know humanity is a process and human beings are making themselves through kind of you know the social reproduction now of course then the danger is to say is to attribute this capacity for kind of, you know, self-transformation to a transcendent, like to say that this is kind of,
you know, but I took what was, I mean, what would be philosophically interesting, and I mean, the way in which I read kind of Marx's critique of Feuerbach is when he says, you know, when he talks about the, you know, kind of the primacy of subjectivity as praxis, you know, as kind of social, uh, sensuous kind of productive activity, is that he means that this, uh, this reproductive, this productive and reproductive activity, um, is precisely, you know, in a sense, unconscious. It's not like we don't know what we're doing when we kind of reproduce ourselves. So in other words, we don't know what we are. That's what the point is. So
So we're not reproducing ourselves according to kind of, you know, we simply, we don't know what we are. And, you know, at least on the traditional humanist understanding of Marx would be that, you know, history begins once we kind of, you know, we start gaining kind of control of, you know, the process of social, you know, the ways in which we reproduce ourselves. And, you know, we determine our own, you know, ends. But I can see that that's, you know, I mean, maybe that's a classical kind of, you know, interpretation, which I think would be still, you know, I mean, is that, does that reinstate the transcendence that you think is, is unnecessary, actually, that you don't need, if you read, I mean,
can you say more about how you you take the the species genus why it's important to kind of to insist on on on human species as opposed to kind of uh genus and why this this is what avoids transcendence yes sure so um if you um if you take that marx criticizes the generality of having this that by his thesis on it that this form of atheism of Florebacher, you can see later in Korchev as well if you dethrone the transcendence of God and put
this self-actualized self-creating human individual in its place in that moment as also in the the text he sent of Berrida's text he sent that they'd also criticized that it didn't transcend ontopheology you just reverse the the boss just put it up and in this sense in this sense Marx would say that not only that you do not know what you do that you do know you do not know what enables you to think in this way, but also you do not understand the fact that you will always have this distinction between this generality that you call man,
that cannot ever apply to the plight of the proletarian or the lachro de bourgeois, and all these things on grounds of this very generality. which then it makes for us that indeed the human being is transforming and it has this ability to being practical. But it also, by this very being practical, the human being does not allow this kind of relationship to itself, to its own concept. and in this sense you can understand it as I think Adorno or whatever the value form theorists would put in this way
that this implies a certain kind of transhistorical concept of labor and I would say it's not about humans' negotiations with nature, which is the way you understand this practice but the very social character of that practice. So you should not ask the question in relation to nature, what the human species is, or what the human universal is, but the way it is defined and thus alienated in its own social world. This thesis is that labor and capital is social by nature and it's not well understood by its relation to nature. And in that sense, the notion of the human
is something that it should be looked on only in the social sphere, not in its difference to horses or cats or dogs and so on and so forth. And then the problem, the alienation, you can then put the question of the alienation as this is the problem between the I and the we or the I and the generality or the universality. And as that, what is then the problem with capitalism? The problem with capitalism is only to be seen the social world. It is a problem of mediation between what we call in the social world the human and me being me in this sense. Thanks. Okay, that's very helpful. And I mean, I
Yes, so I completely agree with the, in a way, the kind of the whole point is that the, you know, metaphysical kind of dispositions about, you know, the nature of the human or like, you know, in relation to kind of other, you know, the non-human as such is, you know, should be avoided, is unnecessary. and actually gets you into all sorts of problems. And I agree that this is why I think that Marx thinks that it's completely otios, so that there's a kind of, the point is a critique
of the way in which the ideological function of the category of the human. In a way, I completely agree with that. So why, you know, I guess the question is, it's because, in a way, it's a kind of, because of the rejection of the category. I mean, that's the good way, in a way, of neutralizing the kind of, you know, the metaphysical import of the category, okay? But it seems to me that, you know, in these so-called post-humanism, there's a claim that
the category, you know, not just that the kind, it's not just that the category serves a pernicious social role, it's that the category is just bad, and that it's, you know, It's repressive or exclusionary, you know, tukur. So it's like it's not a kind of, it's a metaphysical critique of a metaphysical category as opposed to a kind of a social critique of a metaphysical category. And in a way, that's why, you know, that's what motivates in a way the whole paper.
So the other thing is to be honest I'm not sure I've got a good answer to this is that freedom is Marx the critique of exploitation is tied to a critique of domination. And it seems that critical theorists agree that domination, capitalism is a system of social domination by real abstractions. It's abstract domination. And the question is, what does domination mean? And it seems that
if you want to have a non-naive understanding of domination, but non-naive, but a post-hegian understanding of domination, you can't just say, oh, particularity is dominated by generality, concrete singularity is dominated by, you know, abstract universal. I think those are really unhelpful and actually just vacuous kind of accounts of cashing out of domination. So actually, I think that the critique of domination does involve, I mean, well, I think that's why freedom is important, because what is
being dominated, domination is the kind of, you know, the suppression or the cancellation of something like, I don't know if the capacity for freedom, that's a kind of naive formulation. But it seems to me that, or, yeah, again, it's because of this, you know, what would liberate, you know, what would, what do we need to be liberated from and what would liberation be and i think that if you you know if it's the concept of freedom that turns out to be kind of it might not be but like
i kind of if one assumes that the concept of freedom is you know crucial to kind of uh Hegelian kind of, to post-Hegelian philosophical anthropology, that then Marx is a humanist to the extent to which he thinks that human beings ought to be free. And freedom isn't just defined in terms of, you know, and that, you know, the negative and positive freedoms available under capitalist social relations are inadequate, fail to do justice to the freedom that is proper to the human. Now, obviously, this is, in a way, this is where humanism comes back,
you know, if one makes those claims, then one is kind of a humanist. And this is why I think it's a link between, you know, the human and the concept of freedom in a way that, at least it seems to me, makes these questions, or at least kind of pressures, you know, one into kind of, into saying something about the human and not into simply saying, because I know that, you know, there are Marxists who say, who are, you know, who take themselves to be kind of anti you think you know the human is a bourgeois ideological category we don't need it etc etc but then yeah what does uh i mean you know you could say what does oppression mean like
you know there's a sinister i remember seeing a kind of a friend's you know sinister um portraits of uh you know a jackboot on a baby's head you know and you know with the caption what does oppressing you mean. Okay, so what are we talking about when we talk about oppression, domination? Exploitation is a different, exploitation is not kind of domination or oppression, it's a different analytical category for Marx, but it's to make sense of, you know, way of domination, I think that we need to say something about freedom, and it's hard to talk about freedom without saying something, or at least it's hard for me, I don't know, but to say something about the human. Now
this, I don't know, I'm not confident about this, this is just like, these are kind of, you know, hunches, and, but what do you think about this? Yeah, so to take this point, this point about freedom, so I get a very good point of Marx regarding like a post-humanist discussion will be if you if you don't like the notion of the human uh you need to look at a social world and not make plants think uh that would be that the general point regarding regarding freedom uh it would be that i am also a bit uneasy of the relationship between freedom and a notion of the
human because if you look at authors like schelling who i think is one of the first one who gives freedom to things uh is to is to say that uh as shilling frames the discussion on the one side you have systematic thinking you have systematic philosophy on the other side we have this evidence of freedom that every human being according to shilling has this um manifest evidence of feeling free or being free now the problem is is okay every one of us has maybe this idea that uh we are walking around and we take decisions that we feel free um the problem begins the moment when you try to put put that in concept so bring that in systematic philosophy which is what
shilling tries to do now the moment when you uh ascribe to that um immediate evidence of freedom you put directly on it categories like humanity and you make it in some sort of universal, transcendental, you give it transcendentality, you give it universal, it becomes difficult because it is the moment when you take it out of any kind of possibility to historize it. so it's it's i think it's it's a similar problem that you uh you have with this myth of the given forgiveness as such uh you can you can be as as heidegger would put it and take that
um feeling or immediate experience of freedom and try to circumvent any kind of anthropology and jump directly in this sort of fundamental ontology he puts it And by that, in my opinion, he circumvents the whole problem of history, or you try to make it the notion of the human itself, and then you have something that the problem of freedom pertains to our definition of the human, like the post-humanists do, and not as a history of struggle or history of humanity. where that notion of freedom, you see that experience being translated in different frameworks with different notions and so on and so forth. So I think Schelling puts it very correctly.
We have this experience and I need to systemize it, but the way you ascribe concepts to it, the way you integrate it in a system of philosophy is something that is what is historical in the end, in philosophy, how you translate that, how you put constantly, there's no necessity to put it in this way or in another way. It doesn't have ontological grounds, or it does not depend on the definition of the human, or stuff like this, I guess. Okay. No, I see. That's very helpful again. But then what would you think about those, I guess Hegelian Marxists who would say, no, freedom emerges as a key category of modernity.
Like in modernity, the concept of freedom only emerges. And initially, it's brandished by by bourgeois revolutionaries, but this is still a kind of a negative, it's freedom tied to property rights, et cetera, et cetera. But the claim would be that there is a concept of freedom which is fundamental to understanding kind of social modernity. It exists in truncated form in bourgeois capitalism. The task is to
kind of, is to realize it, and this is the kind of the revolutionary task. So the claim is that it's not this kind of ontological, it's not this pure ontological kind of abgrund or whatever. it has a it is historically specific but it is the kind of the category of modernity and the the realization of modernity is requires a kind of you know the actualization of of freedom i i disagree a bit so it's two arguments the first one is that the discussion of freedom is not specifically modern you have all these scholastic philosophers discussing free will and if you then look at the the birth of um social contract theory of thomas hobbes he had
his in leviathan his question is how can i argue for absolute monarchy without recurring to god and he writes a theory of the human will. So in a certain sense, I think modern political philosophy is not, it is about freedom, but not that kind of the freedom that I immediately experienced, me walking around and believing myself to be free. It becomes a political concept and it becomes something which legitimizes power. This is the difference between, let's say the absolute moral or a middle ages monarchy that is based on divine right of kings uh it becomes uh a disc so freedom there is not normative it's not the source of political power of legitimating power
so freedom becomes a source of legitimacy in modernity so it's about authority not about freedom if you if you um if you look at hegel's philosophy of right you do have um a notion of freedom is distinguished by from wilker from um contingent will uh in its way of uh legitimizing authority so you have abstract rights that are based on exactly this experience of me being free so my experience of being a free individual uh entitles me to certain rights of um and it has stages of a different analytic of freedom that has a number of understandings of it.
So in the end, modernity is about how you legitimate power, you legitimate power. It's not of evidence of freedom that is, I don't think it's bourgeois or proletariat or anything, or human. Okay. Okay, no, that's very good. That's very helpful. That's definitely, that's actually, yeah, I'm going to have to, you know, think about this. Thanks, Sandrine. I think there's a bunch of questions I should probably try to address in the chat. Okay, I'll just read them in order. The first question was, is there any way of having an explanation? It's from
Lissero. And it's, is there any way of having an explanation of beings constitution without using some kind of metaphysical given, e.g. the most basic relations like difference or similarity seem necessarily preconceptual and necessary for the concepts themselves to be. I'm not sure I agree that basic relations of difference and similarity would be preconceptual. I mean, I think, you know, I mean, already I think that, you know, to kind of, you know, the relation of identity and difference seems to be kind of, you know, conceptual.
or at least I don't see how one could distinguish between identity and difference without resorting to concepts. So perhaps, I'm not sure if I'm understanding the question. Would you like to, could you clarify or? yeah i can try to clarify what i mean is that for concepts to for us to hold concepts or understand concepts before concepts things must be either identical or not identical but the difference or identity must be there for concept to be applied
simply without understanding a different from b there is no concept of relations the structures of the world between a and b first i should quote unquote understand the difference between two a and b and this understanding of the difference seems like a bit of a given a cognitive neural actually neurobiologic biologic given and that that makes it difficult for any systematic understanding of how logical epistemological subject comes to be to be get rid of the myth of the given as long as it is based on the this on the question of is it first experience that becomes knowledge or is it the mind that makes the experience what it is as long as this
question is the question, it seems to be we are always in this contradiction. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Okay. I guess, yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, if I think of, it seems to me that you're saying that, you know, the kind of the law of identity, you know, A equals A, is the, you know, is itself, is not just a logical law. It's this kind of necessary metaphysical, you know, this necessary metaphysical premise. Is that what you're saying? Everything is necessarily self-identical?
For the law of identity or principle of non-contradiction to be applied both to objects and to thought, right? The law of thought to be similar to the law of nature. There are these, you said that there is, we cannot say that there is a correspondence between these kind of normative practices and what are material inference. There is not a, if I understand you correctly, there is not a straight bridge between them. But what is interesting is that then how laws of thought, which are basically the constraint and abilities that makes us what we are, makes any sapiens what it is, are in us or works in us.
works in for actually maybe that's the most fundamental question of philosophy maybe it's written maybe it's like like asking nothing i i don't know okay i mean this is you know a very difficult question but i'll say one thing i mean aristotle famously insists in a way it seems to me that you know aristotle you know makes a similar claim uh by saying that you know the kind of the law of these three logical laws, identity, excluded, middle, and non-contradiction, are kind of, in a way, necessary to think about, to do metaphysics, to think about what is, our thinking must be constrained by these laws.
However, it seems to me that Aristotle's articulation of logic and ontology, of the laws of saying and the laws of being is already kind of, you know, premised on a claim that to be is to be one. To be is to be a substance. And it's because to be is to be a substance, and substance is necessarily self-identical, although it can admit of contrary predicates. it's that in a way it's the it's the unity of substance okay that guarantees the kind of
you know the the exclusion you know the non-coincidence of contraries and therefore the law of non-contradiction so here I think and the problem is that this would be a form of the myth of the given and so not an empiricist form of the myth of the given but a logist a rationalist because you're saying that to be is to be one, but oneness is a concept. That's basically Spinoza, right? Sorry to cut you off, but that's basically Spinoza, no? No, because Spinoza says everything is one, and Aristotle says, no, like being, you know, what is consists of, you know, distinct, discrete, discontinuous, separate substances. Everything that is is one, you know,
but everything is not one, if you see what I mean, because being is discrete. There are many substances, not one. But that claim itself about the oneness of substance, but the claim also that there are many substances against kind of Parmenides and others, that is itself not, that's the condition then for insisting that therefore our discourse is governed by, you know, the law of identity and, you know, contradiction, et cetera. I mean, that would be a, you know, a metaphysical premise, which is not, which Aristotle just says, you know, you can't, he says you can't think if you don't take
these laws for granted. But it seems to me that his thinking of the oneness of being, or more accurately that substance is the primary or the focal sense of being, although there are different ways of being, that is precisely not something that can be kind of, well, that is a form of the given, but it's a metaphysical given in a way which is debatable because the whole problem in metaphysics is what makes one thing the thing it is. What is the principle of individuation? What is oneness? How do you count one?
Can we eliminate this understanding of individuation or is it impossible? Well, we can't. The problem is that it's difficult. well, I was going to say, you know, it's difficult to think without it, but at the same time, it's difficult, you know, it's objectionable to turn it into a principle. There are a type, okay, Badiou is a contemporary philosopher who tries to think, you know, being without oneness, okay? And he resorts to kind of, you know, to mathematics to do so. So yes, you can do without it, but you still need, you know, being is not one, but you still need what he calls a countervot, a principle.
You need to understand unification as a result, if not as a kind of initial premise. But then that means that there isn't... Well. Can you understand as a practice, not as a result, not as an axiom, not as a starting axiom, but as a practice, as in you make unification of concept to be able to do something, what is that something else, what that something is, is up to the rates, random and stuff. But do you understand what I'm saying? I'm not sure. Not sure? Okay. Maybe I'm not able to articulate it. I will think about it. Thank you for your
answer. It was very beautiful. Thanks for the question. I think I should move on. So the next question is from from Kirill Potapov. Kirill writes, in the proudly humanist Hegelian Marxist tradition of Vygotsky and Ilyankov, there is a critique of the gerrymandering of the demarcation of the human, which he agrees with, but seems to be re-inscribed in race-privileging of what we can't know, as between the unconscious and conscious and the manifest and scientific. would you deny that they are interdependent but why treat a view from nowhere as higher I don't mean nowhere but independent of the ideal in which we are at home
okay well first thing again I'm not sure I don't think the view from nowhere in a way the opposition between nowhere and somewhere is perhaps unhelpful for kind of trying to understand for these debates about the kind of you know the kind of the particular and the universal etc and again could you I'm not sure I'm kind of grasping the
question could you maybe kind of just you know jump in to kind of elaborate the you know the fundamental points you're you're getting at um um yeah sure thanks ray hi um yeah i i i only mean that um in quite a few of your essays you um really focus on what we um sort of um fail to grasp within our practice and you you sort of talk about um the ways in which we sort of are kind of um not not appreciating um the conditions for our practice and i guess that sort of follows
um uh your recent engagement with the can etc um what the um cultural historical tradition that i'm speaking of kind of suggests is that the way in which we're kind of experiencing our everyday ideal experience is already kind of scientific so we wouldn't necessarily cut off what is manifest from us um and kind of progressively so from um uh what we're sort of uh failing to get uh given uh kind of a some some if if there were a god's eye view watching our practices um
that okay thanks okay now um again uh that's a very interesting i hadn't thought of it in that way, and I need to read more, Ilyenkov and Vygotsky. The claim, I think this is very, I mean, I now think maybe it's kind of the opposition of, you know, the dualism of manifest and scientific is perhaps, I mean, Sellers says more about the kind of, the different explanatory strategies, you know, that they that each image involves he says um one is postulational the scientific image is postulational whereas the manifest is correlational um but um i think in a way that's um
in a way i don't want to say that we never know what we're doing that there's kind of um you know that it's uh you know it's impossible for us to kind of uh you know, to ever grasp what it is we're really engaged in doing. And I think, you know, the Marxian point that there are, you know, for instance, commodity exchange, you know, the practices that we engage in on a daily basis are precisely ones that we can't, you know, immediately understand unless we kind of, you know, we take this detour through kind of the resources of, you know, reflexive conceptualization um but then so yes so you know so i wouldn't want to say that like you
know there's something it's too perhaps yeah the term unconscious is too strong it's not like um actually i think this is a uh you know part of this is that son rattle insists that in the exchange abstraction when you're engaged in exchanging commodities the unconsciousness is that you can't it's a condition of the exchange relation that you not be conscious of what it is you are doing. So for instance the fact that you assume you kind of necessarily the condition of exchangeability is that the thing will be absolutely unchanged. Its qualities
days remain kind of identical and invariant in the exchange. I said this is a presupposition, but it's something that you can't consciously think when you're engaged in exchanging. And he mentions a couple of others. And it's those kind of determinations are precisely the ones that fuel kind of conceptual abstraction or logical abstraction. but I think that this is too strong and you know in a way this idea so for Son Rettel's account there is a sense in which you can't think what you're doing you know in a way the kind of the you could the condition for you doing what you're doing is that you don't think or that you not be
conscious of it. And that is something that, you know, in his first book, Zizek, in The Swamy Object of Ideology, there's a really interesting discussion of Sardin Ertel. And this is where he says that this is, you know, he aligns this with kind of, with repression, saying that this is a kind of a structural blockage. You cannot be conscious. but I think in a way that was influencing my thinking and I mean that's a very powerful idea but now the more I kind of rethink you know the plausibility of Stonewriters I can't maybe that is again implausible so maybe yeah so maybe it's too strong
to simply to disconnect kind of you know, practice and comprehension. But what is important is to insist against, I think, you know, for instance, against, you know, the resort to, you know, to pre-ontological understanding in Heidegger or simply to kind of, you know, to implicitness is that it can't, I don't think, you know, that what is implicit in your practice can, you know, automatically be deciphered or comprehended using your, you know, extant conceptual resources. So in other words, it may be that you need, there's a kind of, you know, a theoretical dislocation is required
to be able to grasp what it is you were actually doing. So I guess, because otherwise you get the kind of the Wittgensteinian quietest account. It's exactly that, you know, there's a way, ordinary practices have a kind of, you know, have a kind of rationality to them. But this rationality, in a way, is only kind of legitimate it so long as it's not as you don't try to theoretically articulate it because as soon as you took a theory cannot but distort and misrepresent you know the the logic of these practices and that's the view that I kind of um you know want to resist on the other hand so in a
way I'm it's like avoiding both extremes on the one hand you know um um okay um I thanks very much Thanks. I think there's a bunch of questions. So I think I need to kind of to move on. There's a question from David W. Could I discuss my position on engagement as it relates to subjectivity in my current work? I am thinking in particular of Badiou's conception of subjectivity as arising from within the inventive site as from an engaged position? Yes, well, I mean, again, without kind of repeating, you know, what I said about, you know, subjectivity before, but yes, I think
in a way, in a way, subjectivity cannot but be engaged. So I don't think that kind of, in a way, the, it's the assumption that there could be a disengaged or disinterested or purely contemplative subjectivity, which is, you know, pretty implausible, you know, to begin with. But if you think of subjectivity as kind of, you know, as necessarily practical, even in its kind of, you know, in its rationality, as always doing something, and if thinking itself as a kind of doing, then, you know, rationality is always engaged, and it's engaged in doing something. And, but then, obviously you mean political engagement, you mean a stronger sense of engagement, and here, but in a way I think this follows, I mean, there's this phrase from Sellers, which I really, you know, love.
thinking thinking is a doing because inferring is an act so if inference is like you know the substructure of material inference is the kind of the substructure of rationality then you know you're always you know thinking is necessarily doing and you know to say that To say that something is true is to indicate that something is to be done. So if you think that something is true, you also think that something needs to be done. And in that sense, political engagement follows ineluctably from understanding the more you try to, if rationality compels you to try to understand social reality,
you know there's you know it's like uh you philosophize it's it's implausible to kind of to screen certain kind of areas of reality off from kind of philosophical reflection and analysis so if social reality if reflection upon social reality leads you to believe you know that there are you know for instance that marx's analysis is true um then then there's something to be done I think the difference would be that where Badiou thinks that truth is the result or the consequence of militant engagement, you know, you have to, you decide that, you know, an event, something happened, and on the basis of that decision, you commit yourself to kind of, you know, an investigation of the consequences of this kind of thing.
and this kind of commitment, this practice, this is what generates truth. Truth comes at the end of commitment. And I think that's the, I think, yeah, I'm not sure that it's necessary. Again, there's a concept of truth, which immediately, which is more prosaic, but also means that you can connect thinking and doing. It means that you don't need the disconnection between truth and knowledge, which is fundamental for Badiou, because nothing you know will tell you what has to be done.
But again, once again, I think this is a consequence. Badiou's prognosis here is conditioned by a specific historical conjuncture, which is to say the perceived kind of inability of a certain type of kind of Marxian analysis to prescribe militant intervention. So I use that political economy won't help you kind of decide what needs to be done. and again I think that this is you know I understand why that kind of diagnosis might have been compelling you know in 1970 and afterwards
but I think it's I think it's impossible I think it's just it's not that the very kind of specific doctrinaire kind of application of the critique of political economy and the nefarious politics that followed from it, i.e. the French Communist Party. So, okay. And then the second part of the question is, engagement also played a crucial role in the conclusion of Nihil Unbound, a conversation with extension. Yeah, this is, again, there's a, in a way, there was a theory of the subject, you know the the account of binding extinction implies an account of subjectivation which i
simply didn't have the resources to deliver and part of you know what i'm trying to do is to figure out you know to kind of to think about you know subjectivation um but that's why you know i you know the my inability to do so in that book was tied to the resources you know to you know the limited resources I was using this is why I think Hegel and Marx are kind of crucial you know for generating a theory of the subject but the question of engagement is yes because I think it's the point about binding extinction is that extinction is I mean just to be very simple it's supposed to be something that grabs you by the throat
and not something, it doesn't allow you the luxury of contemplative resignation. And the idea of resisting the lure of resignation because that's what I'm trying to kind of, that's why I'm interested in kind of connecting thinking and doing and not simply kind of opposing them to one another. Okay, I'll move on. Okay, there's a note. Andrew Chitty, yep, I'll definitely check that out. Okay, there's a quote from Iggy Choban.
Marxism is either a theory of liberation or it is nothing. it lays the basis for achieving a new human dimension without which no society is truly viable as a marxist humanist this appears to me the whole truth of marxist human that's but from maria dunyavs guys excuse my pronunciation um um thanks that's uh that's in relationship to the uh discussion with andre about you know marx and freedom um which i think yeah but i think andre is yeah this is a very complicated issue which i need to um to kind of uh to go back to uh um okay there's another question from or remark from kiro um in did you want me to read this out kiro this um okay sorry no that's fine i was just indulging
myself. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Kyle, a question from Kyle. Do I differentiate, do you differentiate your ideas regarding social reproduction and naturalization of capitalist ideologies? Are you value, et cetera, from Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony? If so, where and how do you differ? Is recognition as you're calling it related to love and is love distinct from desire? it seems this conversation could benefit from an acknowledgement about how the subject object commodity of the enslaved body undermines the antagonistic and oppositional framework of much of our thinking and the ways in which critical analysis of power is denaturalized from the
humanist, post-humanist debate in favor of a kind of rebranding or continued naturalization of long-standing essentialist, identitarian, religious, and nationalistic ideologies inherent to the self-other transcendental belief structure? Is desire for freedom-singularity-power individuality other than otherness a naturalized desire it was a regard to the first part of the question about Gramsci and cultural
hegemony Well, yes, it seems that there is a capitalist ideology that depends on naturalizing social relations. And I think, I mean, I've really, you know, I'm sorry to say I know very little about Gramsci. but yes it seems to me that there's you know there's a one sense in which bourgeois intellectuals you know naturalize certain you know social relations through but
you know by you know or create categories that can be used to naturalize capitalist social relations and this becomes hegemonic when it simply shapes a way of thinking and feeling when people internalize these assumptions and start to kind of you know understand reality through this optic so but I think that's a very loose sense of hegemony I'm not sure it's it's a precise kind of sense of cultural hegemony. So, I mean, I would just say, yeah, there's a, okay, liberalism is a hegemonic discourse because there's assumptions
about individuality, about freedom, about recognition, um etc etc which are hegemonic in you know intellectual you know academic discourse and you know culture more generally so um i'm not sure where i differ from granite because i don't know him well enough so um the next is recognition related to love again I'm not sure how to I'm sure it's related but I'd be hard put to kind of explain you know where it's you know it's degree of difference
okay it's not the same and recognition for well you know I think you know, recognition precisely is not, it's a mistake to simply kind of reduce, you know, self-consciousness's desire to the desire for recognition. So in a way, that's why, you know, I think it's, recognition is not kind of fundamental to desire. Is love distinct from desire? yes but again i can't you know say much more because i you know my knowledge of psychoanalysis is kind of too um schematic to make you know to kind of to explain how exactly it differs
and then acknowledging the um how the subject object commodity of the enslaved body undermines the antagonistic and oppositional framework. I mean, I would have thought an enslaved body, you know, I mean, surely enslavement wouldn't, you know, would seem to me to kind of, you know, to require an antagonistic and oppositional perspective. I mean, you know I mean even using the word like you know to I mean unless one does not even recognize one's enslavement and kind of has been you know convinced to accept it in some way surely just
recognizing that one is enslaved would entail that one kind of has an antagonistic and oppositional relationship to, you know, whoever is enslaving, is doing the enslaving. So I'm not sure. Yeah. If I could clarify, I, yes, the, perhaps it was a word, a word use problem with antagonistic, but I meant more in relation to a dialectic or uh uh an oppositional framework in terms of uh an object slash subject or or commodity uh one one
uh embodying all three of these seemingly discrete categories of subject object and commodity Okay, I see. Thanks. Yes, okay. In a sense, but then, so you mean in a way like the, you know, someone who is enslaved is at once a kind of, you know, subject, object, and, you They become Marx's commodity who speaks, right? Yes, although the distinction between wage labor and slave is also important. I mean, there's some interesting, there's a very good paper by John Clegg about this.
It's been published about the role of slave labor in a capitalist economy, because I think you know there's there's debates about you know if capitalism only uses kind of wage labor um how do you how do you account for the persistence of slavery uh in advanced capitalist kind of societies like america and and um you know this paper is john clegg explains very clearly that um The conceptual distinction between the slave and the wage laborer is fundamental. In a way, because the difference being that whereas the wage laborer hires their labor power to the employer,
the slave just is bought and sold, is itself a commodity. So it's the difference between wage labor, you know, the worker, the wage laborer owns a commodity, his labor power, her labor power that she sells to the capitalist. Okay. Or more exactly that she, you know, she rents to the capitalist for the duration of the working day. Whereas a slave is a commodity that is owned by the capitalist. and there's also I mean just going back so conceptually I think the distinction is fundamental which is not to say I don't think Marx and John Clegg explains very well it's not the case Marx doesn't say and nowhere does his account imply that capitalism is incompatible
with slave labor. On the contrary, capitalism will happily kind of use slave labor as part of the circuit of, you know, kind of commodity production. So in a way, labor power is a commodity producing commodity, but so is slave labor, okay? But they play different, you know, different roles. there's a very very interesting discussion of the difference between proletarian wage labor and slave in Lukács's reification consciousness of the proletariat and it's very interesting about the subject-object distinction because Lukács says look the slave is an object is it kind of a
talking tool. And when the slave is being used, you know, by the master in the labor process, they are effectively reduced to the kind of, you know, the status of an object. They are kind of socially annihilated, okay? They don't exist as persons. So they are completely, they are socially reduced to the object level. However, you know, the slave, as we know, a slave can also kind of assume, a freed slave can assume the status, the social status of a subject, where subject and object here are social statuses, not kind of metaphysical distinctions. And Lukács points out
that, of course, a slave can understand that they have been reduced to the level of an object, and they can understand their own objectivation from a subjective vantage point. But here the subject and object poles are separated by a distance. So in a way, the slave is treated as as an object, but they can relate to themselves, you know, they can adopt the subject stance towards themselves, you know, and see themselves, you know, understand their own reduction to the status of an object, okay. He says with the wage labor, the proletarian, it's different, there's a kind of,
there's a coincidence of subject and object, precisely because it's just, you know, you are a bearer of labor power, okay? So, in a way, you have to kind of, and there's a self-objectification. It's in the slave relation, the slave is objectified by the master, whereas the proletarian has to objectify themselves in selling their labor power. And that's crucial because it's this kind of self-objectification in the kind of reduction in when, you know, you simply kind of sell your labor power to the employer that, you know, allows for the reversal,
the kind of the becoming subject of substance. The object can then be turned back into a subject, but only by destroying the social relations, which necessitate their constant self-objectification. So that's a very, yeah, I mean, I think, yes, Lukács is a person who has very interesting things to say about this. um um and then um okay then the question of dna and the wind which critical is of what is denaturalized from the humanist post-humanist debate in favor of a kind of rebranding or continued naturalization of long-standing essentialist identity and religious and
nationalistic ideologies inherent to the self other transcendental belief structure um is designed for freedom singularity power individuality others and naturalism Can you help me a bit with that, the last part of the question? Yeah, and full disclosure, it's probably the least crystallized in my thinking. But I can't help but be suspicious of the debate of the post-human being more about a rhetorical turn than a conceptual one, in some cases. about sort of shifting language while still kind of maintaining an enlightenment idea.
I guess, I mean, no non-humans or post-humans were invited to today's conversation, for instance. We haven't asked Zoom what it thinks about this whole thing. Yes, I mean, yes, I would kind of agree. And that's, you know, there's good, I mean, I think the key question is, what motivates this, you know, desire for the non-human or post-human? I mean, it's very, I think that's, you know, why, what is the investment in the post-human? Why do people, you know, this, you know, why, what is it about, you know, that why is, you know, the category of the human so kind of, you know, seen to be kind of not of interest?
It's not just that it's not of interest. It's kind of, you know, problematic and objectionable. And that's, I think that's the question I'm interested in. And also it's striking that, you know, in, you know, it's very interesting amongst, you know, with some post-humanists, you know, they're very kind of selective about what forms of the non-human, there's a kind of a hierarchy of the non-human. And for instance, you know, people, you know, post-humanists, when they talk about it, it seems that you can be more or less kind of non-human. So, you know, kind of gerbils and rabbits are not supposed to be kind of glamorous examples of, you know, the inhuman. But things like squids and reptiles and bacteria are.
But if you think about it, like, how is that kind of, you know, how is this continuity of kind of, you know, how can something be more or less kind of, you know, non-human? and of course it's completely kind of you know anthropocentric it's because you know like reptiles and squids um and so on are like you know they're because we're mammals so they are more unfamiliar so it's this there's a kind of exoticism at work here okay there's like you know that desire for like an even more exotic other um which is you know very visible in a lot of fetishizing of you know the uh the non-human um can i say something yes i think this this
popularization and this and this influence of the this discourse the certain discourse of post-humanism in continental philosophy must itself be historicized so like after the saturation of deconstructionism and deridian influences in literary theory than the saturation of all this delusian theory even cybernetic delusian theory new materialism yada yada it seems like some continental philosophers or continental influence philosophers have nowhere to go besides this this lane so it's it's i don't i don't try to conceive this phenomenon as as like uh something
coherent in and of itself but like maybe this is this is like the end point of a certain inherent problem uh in academia yeah i mean i yeah i actually complete in a way i think it's crucial to understand the historical context there's a social and historical context under which this this kind of move to the post-human becomes you know um you know um yeah i mean visible and i think yeah and it's uh part of what i was trying to do was kind of i mean at least part of what i was trying to do was trying to kind of point out the kind of i guess the genealogy of like you know what philosophical moves or what philosophical kind of presuppositions kind of, you know,
determine or orient this kind of predilection for the post-human. And it's, in that regard, it cannot but be political as well. You have to understand it as kind of, and the other thing is that it's, I mean, I don't want to kind of, you know, overstate this point, but it has a remarkable currency. Okay, this discourse has, you know, a remarkable kind of, you know, currency within academia, but also, interestingly enough, beyond academia in the kind of the domain of, you know, art and culture kind of more generally.
and that's I think significant and that's you know has to be kind of addressed I guess one thing I would just like to say as I say I found overall your your argument in the first half of this essay quite convincing but in this treatment of right Dotti where you say that she's missing this so this this notion that indigenous feminist queer disabled people otherwise enabled it says here right so this notion that these categories have been sort of acknowledged by capitalism and that's a sort of work in progress i think is it's true it's definitely true that there is this acknowledgement which is being attempted i suppose um the kind of thing i would flag up there is how successful we can ever expect this to be like whether there ever
will be a you know a full incorporation and a full recognition of uh black people or transgender people or whatever or whether this is like whether this is going to be the historical basis for continual um whether what i'm trying to say is the dehumanization people in those categories face um provides a historical and a continual um replenishment for sort of questioning of this of this avenue so like how can we have categories which are continuously dehumanized and not run into this this same set of problems the same set of back and forths between well um yeah at what point your dehumanization instead of interrupts or makes impossible forging yourself humanism and also one thing i think that's worth mentioning here is that obviously um this is something which
earlier humanistic anti-colonial thinkers um most obviously for none have sort of been struggling with exactly at this point so exactly the the humanism of people within these categories is sort of running into this problem in much the same way that the anti-humanism is trying to resolve i'm not satisfied with that attempted resolution but i can see how these are two sides and instead of communion. Thanks. Yeah, that's a very good point. Obviously, I would say, I mean, obviously the point is not to dismiss, you know, the injustices, you know, the perpetrated against these kind of these people, but simply to say that there's a way in which, in a way simply
there's a way of kind of there's a false there's a merely discursive integration so to speak. In other words you kind of you kind of you introduce them at a discursive level as you know the recognition kind of is kind of discursive and purely instrumental and does nothing to undermine the social relations, which necessitates exclusion, not just exclusion, but kind of, you know, destruction, you know, of people, of all sorts of people.
So the point is simply, you know, those categories are the ones used by Braidotti herself, you know. And the point is that if you don't destroy capitalist social relations, of course, capital can always kind of include and represent, can become more inclusive and more representative. but only by systematically excluding more and more people from the sphere of culture. And the other point is that the cynicism of... There's a very good piece by an African-American philosopher
who points out that, you know, if these debates about inclusion and privilege and representation only unfold within actually existing kind of capitalist institutions, then what remains uninterrogated, again, are the social relations whereby, you know, whole, you know, swathes of the population of the global population are necessarily kind of you know excluded from those spaces and that exclusion is based on class okay or based on a structural class as a structural category about you know the reduction to labor power not as class is not a sociological category
it is a structural category. So it has nothing to do with what you look like, with your appetites, your speech patterns, how you dress, et cetera. And I guess that's what is, in a way, the ontologizing of capitalism, or the metaphysics of capital, makes it seem as if capitalism itself, just operates again the point at the level of codes okay as if it's just about you know coding and decoding um and as if representation itself is only the problem um but if you just kind of
if you can kind of get rid of representation then you can you know solve the problem whereas The problem is that the oppression and exploitation operates independently of the machinery of representation and cannot be amended simply by kind of a cosmetic subversion or kind of enlargement of representation. Okay, there's another comment here, a question here from Virgilio Rivas.
Don't you think exchange makes the commodity acquire at least a partial social character? The other part is labor. In this sense, exchange is a social abstraction. We can relate this point to commodity fetishism. For Marx, fetishism lies in the commodity itself, which is derivative of labor. Therefore fetishism has an objective character. But also at the same time, fetishism obscures the sociality of the commodity through exchange in the sense that the materiality of the commodity is lost in it. My question here is don't you think it is in exchange that social abstraction really occurs? it is in exchange that commodity becomes an irreducible inconsistency.
And we need this framework, if only not to reduce commodity to a classical correspondence between labor and the product of labor. The problem here is you can't measure labor times through this correspondence. Okay. Again, this is a complicated question. Well, I completely agree that fetishism lies in the commodity. And fetishism is a relation amongst commodities and not just, you know, commodity fetishism is an objective structure and not just, you know, a subjective misrepresentation of an objective structure. So I completely agree.
but also fetishism obscures the sociality of the commodity through exchange in the sense that the materiality of the commodity is lost in it I'm not sure what you mean here when you say that the materiality of the commodity is lost in exchange because can you say more actually about what you mean here Virgilio? I think it's very clear in Marx that the materiality of commodity itself dissolves into exchange such that you can make out of any useful value of the commodity itself.
And so that's my understanding why, you know, exchange becomes an irreducible inconsistency. Okay, but doesn't Marx also say that, you know, not an atom of matter enters into, you know, the exchange value of the commodity? and it's for instance if you think of commodities like software you know or you know it's hard to see what would be or a program or a software what is the materiality of of the I mean I I know what the use value and I know what the
useful qualities and properties of a commodity would be. But I'm not sure in what sense, you know, they can be, you know, I'm not sure what material, in what sense commodities are material, as opposed to, you know, what does, in what, in what sense material as an adjective is kind of, kind of, it doesn't, it can't be usefully contrasted to ideal, because to say that commodities are, that commodity is a sensible, super sensible thing, is to say that its exchangeability and its usefulness are interdependent. And its usefulness can't be simply abstracted from its
exchangeability and juxtaposed to it and its usefulness is not simply a function of its of kind of you know evident material properties it it possesses you know independently of its commodity form um so that's why um i guess that's why i don't believe i think it's because commodity form is already a real abstraction. So I think real abstraction is already the condition of commodity exchange and not its consequence. Yeah, Marx gave us an example like 20 linens equal to one coat.
Oh no, that's the very materiality of the code. But the code itself gets lost into exchange, especially when you put a prize into it. And the code itself becomes a social destruction the moment it enters exchange. That's my understanding, forgive me. Well that point, but doesn't he say it's the body of the code, when he's talking about the about the relationship between the linen, the 20 yards of linen and the coat, he says in the simple form of exchange, he says it's the, you know, the body of one commodity embodies the, you know, the abstract, the exchange value of the other. So the use value of one commodity, the use value of
the coat comes to embody the exchange value of the linen. And that's why what he's talking about kind of equivalent kind of value. And he's talking about the asymmetry. Every commodity, a commodity can only express its value in another commodity, okay? And in this relation, it's the body of the equivalent is what expresses the value of the first commodity. So in a way, it's the body, the material qualities of the coat represents or embody, you know, the abstract value of the linen.
But then, but the point is that it's not, he uses the term body, I think, not matter. And I think it's important because he says value is necessarily embodied in a commodity, but the, you know, all commodities are necessarily kind of related to one another. so in order for a commodity to you know in order for the use value of a commodity to embody the exchange value of another it turns out that there's a whole you know what he calls the expanded and the general form of value are already kind of implicated in this kind of this relation which is
why the money form is already the precondition of the exchange relation and can't be, you know, again, can't, you know, as I understand his analysis of the commodity form in the first chapter, it's precisely that it's a structural analysis and not some kind of historical kind of or developmental analysis. And if it's a structural analysis, it means that use and exchange stand to one another in this kind of relationship of reciprocal presupposition. So that's the point is that the conditions under which something is useful presuppose a nexus of social relations, which is to say that there is no such thing as use value in
itself. You can't abstract use value from the totality of social relations, which bind commodities to one another. And it's in that sense that commodity, I mean, as you yourself put it, that's why commodity fetishism is entirely objective. You know, commodities represent, you know, a commodity represents the usefulness of one commodity, represents the exchangeability of another commodity. And that's kind of, that is a kind of an objective structural properties of of commodities, not simply of a representation of commodities. Just a second.
Thank you. Because I think this is interesting. I'm still thinking since I think, sorry if I butchered this, Ege Choban and Jules Sokot. That was perfect, actually. Thank you. we're talking about this historization of post-humanism. Yes. I think, I think, exactly, this notion of commodities here is crucial, because what we do have in commodity exchange is this reduction to formal equality, which I think it's, this post-humanist, they put a finger on a symptom.
The notion of formal equality itself, in an exchange, you do have two commodities that enter this relation of being formally equivalent, which then in the political realm expresses itself in this notion of the free subject, this formal notion of equality that you have in the law system, for example. Lukasz talks about this very well. The problem that you do have is this, what post-humanism do is instead of extending this kind of qualitative difference that they are looking for, this
incomparability that they are looking for, they just extend a notion of formal equality on all that there is without understanding exactly the notion, this very distinction between a use value and an exchange value, for example. So the extent ontology is based on missing this fundamental difference of something being this sphere of exchange or something, the sphere of use. Look at being and time between zuhanheit for Hanenheit in Heideberg. So extending the notion of formal equality in the realm of ontology means exactly this exchange that you do commodify in the end the whole world.
Exactly. And it's really interesting how they try to jump from this to a politics of ecology as well. And imagine commodifying the whole world in the context of this politics of ecology as well. Yes, the counter part of this is, in a certain sense, when you talk about different forms of discrimination, domination that exists, you know, gender or race and all this kind of stuff, the problem is that the moment when you have this reaction against formal equality, it means exactly this battle for recognition, who deserves more, who deserves less, and how you split the pie. The problem there is that you should not talk about the pie itself,
the pie is the problem. It's a critique of the pie, it's about a critique of the pie, of this kind of positive recognition, a pie that sadly tends always to get smaller in the kind of of neoliberalism. And I do understand this, this right to go beyond formal equality, go beyond formal representation, but it goes in this kind of mystifying it and either both extended in on the whole world by not seeing, by thinking that you are imposing on the wall qualitative difference. And then supposing that there is this kind of
qualitative difference where you try to impinge use value on the world again, a use value that is way gone for 200 years. And yes, the politics of recognition, which I think it's always a problem. Sorry about this. I think you should write an article called Critique of the Pie. Do you want to stop this session? We are almost at three hours. We can go on if you're okay. I'm afraid, yeah, I have to stop. I'm afraid I have to head home. Yes, okay. Thank you so much.
I really appreciated this a lot. This was really helpful. Yeah. Thanks for saying long enough, answering all the questions. Thanks for the questions. No, it was very, it was actually, you know, really helpful. But yeah, I'm afraid I really have to go now. So yeah. Thank you so much. See you guys next week. See you next time. Yeah. All right. Bye bye. Ciao. Ciao. Bye. Thank you.