Ray Brassier The Human From Subversion to Compulsion Part 1

Okay, so this, thanks again Sepity for inviting me. This has been very productive. So this is the final session. So this time, instead of having a handout that simply kind of, you know, recapitulates, you know, the main points of the paper, which I think everyone's had a chance to read. I'm just going to quickly summarize, or try to summarize, you know, the arguments of the paper, and then point to the direction, because this is work in progress,

and it's under revision, in a way, and discuss, you know, ways in which I'm, you know, I'm trying to develop the line of thought sketched in this paper. So the material on the handout is directly an extrapolation from the themes addressed in the text of the paper you've read. So what is the paper? It simply begins with you know, a critical examination of so-called critical post-humanism, which is one, a variety of post-humanism. There's not, there are more than one. There's also speculative

post-humanism, which David Wartes represents. But in a way, this is the examination of this critical posthumanism is to query the credibility of the prefix critical, with which it kind of, you know, baptizes itself. This is, you know, the paper, the representative of this stance, whose work is examined, is Rosie Braidotti, who's, you know, kind of, I guess, the foremost exponent of this position. And in a way, in the course of the analysis, I'm interested in, you

know, foregrounding the significance of Deleuze and Guattari's work in particular, and specifically their engagement with Marx as the background for the characterization of capital proposed by Rydotti's version of critical post-humanism. And it's this characterization I want to revisit in the latter half of this presentation. It basically, you know, the claim is simply that the human is not a natural kind.

And that's the, in a way, philosophical, the peculiarity of, say, kind of Marxian humanism is precisely to propose that what mediates biological and technological processes of production is social production. and that there is no shortcuts from the biological to the technological or even the techno-cultural domain. And I take the significance of Marx's work to be to get Marx's analysis of the social forms which condition, you know, reproduction under capital, provides the indispensable

mediating links for understanding how it's articulated. So in other words, it's the alternative to a kind of, to a kind of an uncritical metaphysical shortcutting or fusing of culture and nature. And in a way, Deleuze and Guattari exemplify the most sophisticated attempt to challenge and to subvert this kind of post-Kantian demarcation of, let's say, the normative from the natural. But as I tried to show in the discussion of Deleuze and Guattari last week, I'm not, I think the way in which they do so reinstates a fusion,

a kind of a fusion of the normative and the natural in a way which is, I think, questionable. So that's the basis upon which the critique of critical post-human is carried out. And then I take that to exemplify what I call humanism's subversion from below, In other words, the collapsing of the distinction between nature and culture, or nature and civilization from below. And then I can contrast this to what I call its decapitation from above, which I think is exemplified by Derrida's work.

and the second part of the essay is an examination of Derrida's The Ends of Man which is 1968 I think it was written in 1968 but published in Margins of Philosophy in 1972 this I think is an attempt you know to deconstruct the complicity between metaphysics and humanism In other words, it doesn't simply, you know, re-inscribe the human within, you know, the domain of nature, understood as a kind of domain of processes, flux of becoming, etc. But it tries to kind of show how metaphysics itself, you know, and metaphysical ontology,

however is always carried out in a secret compact with humanism and the data's claim is that the you know any the proclamations of the end of the human which were very much in there you know 50 years ago when Derrida was writing this, actually hinges on, you know, the termination or the supersession of the human, you know, is conditioned by its culmination. So that, you know, there are two senses of end at work in the trope of, you know, the end of the human, you know, the end of

man, such that the supersession secretly invites a conditioning by a completion, and every completion also implies a kind of a supersession. And it's this interplay between the two. you know, it's a way in which completion supplements termination that Derrida critically analyzes, and he traces this back to kind of, you know, the metaphysics of presence and the privileging of self-consciousness as self-presence, even in the kind of the allegedly kind of,

you know, non-metaphysical critical tradition initiated by Kant. So the claim is that Kant and Hegel, the primacy or the privileging of self-consciousness in Kant, Hegel, and arguably even Marx, is itself tributary to this kind of metaphysical privileging of self-presence, which Derrida following Heidegger understands as the determination of presence in term of the present in terms of the temporal modality of the present and what is very interesting about Derrida's account is that he both kind of in a way seems to endorse Heidegger's you know kind of

relegation of Hegelian dialectics and therefore of the line leading from Hegel to Marx to the problematic of the subordination of presence to the present. And yet at the same time he also pinpoints a significance, a divergence between Hegel's concept of presence and the Heideggerian concept of presence, or rather he says that there's something in Hegel's account of presence and the coming to presence of self-consciousness that can't simply or can't so easily

be identified with the subordination of presence to the present. Okay. And he points this out, but only, and then just leaves it kind of hanging. He doesn't follow up on this thought. And it's a fascinating moment in Derrida's text, because I think, you know, Derrida's, you know, most acute critical insights with regard to Heidegger, and especially the pathos of propriety and of proximity in Heidegger and Derrida's, you know, really kind of, you know, brilliant exposition of the, you know, the interplay of kind of proximity and distance, how this conditions his whole kind of, you know, his allegedly critical diagnosis

of the metaphysics of presence is, you know, the interdependence of proximity and distance. I think Derrida shows a kind of a dialectical interplay between those two concepts. So I think that there's a kind of a subterranean kind of dialectical critique of Heideggerian deconstruction, which animates what Derrida still proclaims as a kind of a still a radical accentuation of deconstruction or attempt to go further than Heidegger by trying to kind of to show that even

Heidegger himself is not entirely free of the you know the the pathos of self-presence and the claim is that ultimately because you know Derrida's attempt you know to kind of to you know to distance himself from Heidegger using Heideggerian resources ends up with the recourse to kind of an absolute alterity okay an absolute alterity which Derrida knows full well can't be kind of uncritically affirmed or proclaimed but has also to be re-inscribed within the text of metaphysics so that this alterity or this kind of pure transcendence can only be kind of tentatively put to work in thinking

in the program of Derrida and deconstruction. But I think that Derrida is caught in a double bind in a way because the only alternative to the closure, the self-enclosure of presence and of self-consciousness, etc., is something like this radical alterity, this exteriority. But as Derrida knows full well, every kind of proclamation of exteriority presupposes an interiority. So the exterior has to somehow be inscribed within the interior. And I think this is the kind of, you know, the problematic or, you know, that is at the heart of Derrida's critical extension of Heidegger's program.

But in a way, it leaves, I think ultimately kind of, it disarms deconstruction. and in a way I think that had Derrida pursued or kind of pursued the intimation that he himself gives that there's something in the about the kind of in the Hegelian conception of self-consciousness, self-consciousness as kind of as a relation to self through the other, that in a way is perfectly consonant with this problem about the negotiation between inside and outside,

but can be developed in a, you know, is kind of unpacked in a materialist register by Marx through the whole, you know, the, well, first of all, through the kind of, you know, the transplanting of self-consciousness, of the dynamic of self-exteriorizing consciousness in in labor, but then in the mature Marx, in the Marx of capital, in the analysis of the way in which labor and capital become interdependent and co-constitutive. so that in a way the radical exteriority

sought for by Derrida and in a way the kind of the supersession of the kind of of the philosophical trope the philosophical kind of understanding of humanity as kind of merely in a way the in terms of you know propriety or proximity or neighborhood these kind of you know implicitly you know kind of xenophobic tropes which kind of vitiate metaphysical humanism are successfully kind of you know overcome or can only be successfully

overcomes in you know through an engagement with marx's work and marx's and basically through a an appreciation of the way in which the critique of political economy in a way is the um the materialist alternative to the critique of metaphysics um and um so the and also so that's the conclusion of the paper, is that there's something that has to be, that ought to be revisited. The claim, the relegation of Marx to the history of metaphysics, the claim that the figure of the human in Marx can be straightforwardly aligned with familiar

metaphysical conceptions of the human is actually mistaken and needs to be kind of, you know, I think rejected. And that's, so that's, you know, the work I'm currently engaged in. So there's, okay, now the next, okay, it's, I think I've been talking for about 15 or just over 15 minutes. Okay, so what's on the handout here is a kind of, there's a couple of, you know, points in the paper that I'm, you know, revisiting or wanted to expand. And one is in a way, the, as I said, because, you know, I take Deleuze and Guattari's work to be in a way

the most sophisticated exemplar of this kind of the attempt to, you know, the metaphysical subversion of humanism, I wanted to examine their accounts of capital, especially in Antioedipus, and show how or, you know, kind of point out bits that, in a way, by way of kind of, you know, ratifying the critical account provided in the paper, which doesn't, you know, go into detail, but actually the, I think the details are important. But I'll just go through quickly these four pages on this handout. So one,

The first, here's a quotation from Adorno, which is the idea that the claim that humanity already exists, okay, the presumption of kind of bourgeois positivism is precisely, you know, the claim in a way that Marx, I think, or that a kind of a philosophical reading of Marx should should reject, and it's the one that Benjamin and Adorno rejected. They write, so this is from Adorno's 1962 essay on progress, included in the Critical Models collection. So it's a really, I'll read out the whole quote because I think it's really important.

In Benjamin, progress obtains legitimation in the doctrine that the idea of the happiness of unborn generations, without which one cannot speak of progress, inalienably includes the idea of redemption. This confirms the concentration of progress on the survival of the species. No progress is to be assumed that would imply that humanity in general already existed and therefore could progress. Rather, progress would be the very establishment of humanity in the first place, whose prospect opens up in the face of its extinction. And this entails, as Benjamin further teaches, that the concept of universal history cannot be saved. It is plausible only as long as one can believe

in the illusion of an already existing humanity coherent in itself and moving upward as a unity. If humanity remains entrapped by the totality it itself fashions, then as Kafka said, no progress has taken place at all, while mere totality nevertheless allows progress to be entertained in thought. And this can be elucidated most simply by the definition of humanity as that which excludes absolutely nothing. If humanity were totality that no longer held within it any limiting principle, then it would also be free of the coercion that subjects all its members to such a principle, and thereby would no longer be

a totality, no forced unity. So this is an extremely interesting claim, because I think what, I take Adorno to be saying that in a way the capital as the integrating universal history only becomes possible with the advent of capital, the integration of the entirety of humanity into the capitalist mode of production.

So in other words, all these otherwise disparate cultures, traditions, ways of life are now violently kind of subordinated to the reproduction of capital and, you know, the whole of, you know, vast, you know, as empirical research shows, there are no more human beings who, you know, depend on selling their labor power for survival than ever before in history. And the key claim being that Marx's concept of the proletariat is not the concept of actually employed wage labor of the working class. It's precisely simply the proletariat for Marx is simply the class of all those who are reduced to being mere bearers of labor power.

In other words, all those humans whose condition of existence is that of managing to sell their labor power to capital. And Marx's whole point is that this capital, the dynamic of capital, in reproducing itself and in kind of maximizing surplus value, capital creates this reserve army of the unemployed. It creates unemployment. so that as more and more human beings become dependent on selling their labor power, fewer and fewer human beings are able to do so.

Hence, you know, kind of intensifying immiseration. So this totality, in other words, the totality, humanity is constituted humankind is constituted through the capital relation through its kind of forcible conscription into the you know the this kind of reserve reserve army of of labor and this means that human beings can only reproduce themselves and identify themselves you know as human through this you know by through their incorporation into the reproduction

of this totality, of capital as totality. And it's this that is the, so in other words, all the kind of the antagonisms, every form of kind of social, anthropological, political antagonism is, at this kind of level, abstraction can be seen to be rooted in the, you know, the compulsion to reproduce oneself under the capital relation. And it's this in a way that, you know, the boundary between the human and the non-human

is in a way effectively enforced by capital, yet at the same time it forces human beings to self-identify by contributing to this reproduction of the totality that forces them to, in a way, that also kind of turns them into selves, because I think that one of the arguments that, sorry, I don't know how I'm going to make in Dialect of Enlightenment is that, you know, the

condition of subjectivity as self-preservation, you know, the identity principle is this self-preservation as condition of harmonization is this negative image of humanity which cast by the reign, the sovereignty of capital. So only by abolishing this bad totality, this bad mode of integration and homogenization of the human, can humanity be instituted?

Hence, this is why human history has not yet begun on this account. And so then this resonates, I think. So this resonates with the claim made by people, by Bredotti, that humanism, at least bourgeois humanism, is necessarily exclusionary and the divisions between human castes are simply kind of exacerbations of the fundamental division between the human and the animal. but the claim would be that the only proper way of overcoming this compulsory kind of separation or division between the human and the non-human, in other words,

the division that is compelled by the imperative of self-preservation, is the abolishing of the antagonistic totality. And here, although Adorno can be interpreted in different ways, but I think that this still means the abolishing capital so as to bring about a mode of... So to abolish the conditions under which human beings can only live, can only exist together as egos or as subjects, you know, pitted against one another in antagonistic relations.

So, in other words, the claim would be that there's a, what we need is a kind of a materialist, you know, a materialist kind of, you know, foundation, or rather a materialist underwriting for the claim that humanity would only begin once human beings were no longer compelled to differentiate themselves from the non-human or from the other but the conditions for the lifting of this injunction you know this injunction to self-preservation and to kind of uh you know self-differentiation

require a radical, a complete kind of reconfiguration of social relations. Okay, that's the kind of, so in other words, when I say, at the end of the essay, At the end of the paper, there's a kind of, you know, a re-examination of the claim that, you know, what Marx, you know, the communism for Marx entails the, or can only be the transition to communism, can only be brought about through the domination of domination.

because domination can't be abolished by fiat. And in a way, I take transcendence to be kind of a cipher for domination. Whatever is transcendent is whatever is the power to which human beings are subject and which they cannot and which they have to somehow accommodate themselves to. and the I take Marx's claim to be that this that transcendence once we understand the material and social mechanisms through which kind of transcendence is perpetrating the you know the

transcendence of capital just being the most you know with the most intimate but yet at the same time invisible placeholder for kind of divine transcendence, we have to learn, you know, we can only free ourselves by dominating domination. Now, Adorno, I think, rejects this because he thinks that the attempt to dominate domination, the dictatorship of the proletariat, leads to totalitarianism, reinstates the totality. And actually, Maurice Postone has a very interesting critical diagnosis of the, you know, the origin of this premise in the work of Friedrich Pollock,

Adorno's colleague in the Institute for Social Research. And Pollock famously, you know, Pollock's analysis of monopoly capitalism ultimately concluded that in the early 20th century, what happens is that both American-style capitalism and, to a lesser extent, kind of, you know, Soviet socialism were attempts to supersede distribution through the market by distribution by the state. And the state's commandeering of distribution

in a way cancelled the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production, which Marx took to be the kind of the dynamic propelling, you know, the historical, the unfolding of the historical dialectic. And so such that, according to Pollack, the management of the economy, state management of the economy, secured the primacy of politics over economics at the price of any kind of structural contradiction, at the price of the fundamental antagonism of class,

antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat. And this is why, and it's this, It's Pollock's account of the defanging or the neutralizing of the revolutionary potency of the proletariat, which is the condition for Adorno's kind of claim that capital is no longer a contradictory totality. It's a kind of, there are antagonisms, there are social antagonisms, there are antagonisms of power, but these antagonisms are being managed and assuaged in a way which precludes the possibility of any kind of revolutionary rupture or break.

and this is why you know the prospect of so you know domination is now kind of definitively installed and the traditional kind of schema according to which you know this domination could be you know overcome through the kind of proletariat's appropriation of the means of production no longer holds. So in other words there is no way to there's no kind of there's no way to dominate domination that doesn't kind of simply kind of perpetuate this bad totality. And one you know I think that's the reason I'm very interested in Lukács's work is that I think

that Lukács' account of the dynamic of the becoming subject of substance, the subjectivation of labor, still is the only way through which totality can be abolished, and this non-coercive, non-exclusionary humanity, this communist humanity, could be definitively instated. Actually, yes, and I'm just going to kind of skip to the end. I'm going to, there are passages on

to those in Guattari, but that just kind of, I think, lead us down a rabbit hole and probably not lead us to a kind of, I mean, I'm happy to kind of discuss them, but in a way, like, if I, I'm not going to kind of get out, if I start talking about that now, I won't get anywhere, and I'll just kind of get lost. So I'll just conclude what I'm saying now with this couple of quotations from Postone. Here's these two quotes from this 1982 essay by Postone and Barbara Brick, which is precisely about Pollock's influence on the Frankfurt School. Marx, in other words, did not treat labor as the substance of a subject prevented by capitalist

relations from realizing itself. Instead, he analyzed those relations themselves as constituting the subject, capital, whose substance is abstract labor, that is the specific character of labor as a medium of social interaction in capitalism. The notion that capital is the total subject indicates that for Marx, the end point of its development is not the realization, but the abolition of the totality. The character of its basic contradiction is therefore different than is the case with Hegel. It does not simply drive the unfolding of the totality forward, but points towards it.

So, Postone explicitly rejects the Lukashian account whereby once labor recognizes itself, once labor recognizes that it is the self-alienated subject, subject um you know which um you know stands against it uh which um which capital as object against which capital as object um is juxtaposed once labor realizes that it is the substance of value, and that value is nothing but objectified labor, in a way then labor can become subject

once again, can re-claim, in a way re-appropriate this expropriated kind of social wealth, such that communism would be the realization of the coming to itself of labor. This is like a familiar kind of metaphysical scheme, according to Postone's interpretation of Lukács. So here, in a way, because capital is the totality, the only way that totality can't be abolished, it's simply about overcoming the subject that animates the totality, the synthesizing principle that generates this kind of self-objectification of the totality, can recognize itself

and, you know, realize itself, realize itself as a good totality. Now, Postone's claim is rather that because subject, because capital as automatic subject entails that abstract labor is already, you know, subsumed by value, such that the abolition of value is the self-abolition of labor. And the self-abolition of labor is detotalizing, is also the abolition of the totality. So this is why the points, the communism for Postone,

is not about the kind of the accomplishment or the fulfillment or the returning to itself of labor, but simply about the self-abolition of labor and therefore the abolition of the identity of subject-object, you know, as compacted in capital. The problem, as I see it, is that there is no theory of the subject, or I might be wrong about this, but I think that it's not clear how this self-abolition can proceed, okay? How exactly does labor abolish itself? It's not, it's best known, I think that's a kind of, well, it seems to be a kind of

a problem or lacuna in kind of Postone's account. And in a way, if, I mean, just to conclude Postone's thought, this is why, according to Postone, Marx's analysis could paradoxically get beyond the limits of the existence of the present totality only by limiting itself historically. The indication of the ultimate historicity of the object of thought implies the historicity of the thought itself that grasped the object. In other words, according to Postone, it's precisely because once one, you know, once one understands that labor is a historically specific category, it's not a kind

of a trans-historical category, there is no critique of capital from the vantage of labor, but that labor itself is a shadow cast by value or internal to capital's self-reproduction, then the categories through which one diagnoses this process of reproduction, the entwined reproductions of labor and capital, means that the category of totality is also historically specific, along with the categories of subject, object, labor, and capital, and the successful abolition of the social relation

fueling those entwined cycles of reproduction would also abolish totality, but in ways in which we can't foresee from within the kind of circumscription of totality. So this is why it's precisely by the historicity of the object, I thought I kind of value or capital as totality and as self-reproducing subject. implies that the critical categories through which we diagnose and examine these mechanisms of capitals reproduction

point to a kind of possibility of a kind of a detotalization. The abolition of value would be the kind of the abolition of the social totality, but in ways which can't be project, no, which can't be programmatically determined, at least for the time being and with consequences also that are you know that can't be anticipated in advance in other words the the the non-exclusionary humanity the humanity the institution of humanity with the abolition of the capitalist totality the humanity that is

no longer compelled to reproduce itself competitively and according to the form of the self and of the subject, is uninvisitable from the current standpoint. And this means that although, weirdly, although I think Postone criticizes Adorno's critical pessimism, the claim that there is no, in a way that critical self-consciousness can only posit a transcendent exteriority in the form of something like redemption.

the right state of things which cannot be positively characterized but must be somehow salvaged as the possibility of things being otherwise. He thinks that we can concretely diagnose what it is that needs to be abolished. And we can understand the conditions, the specificity of, and in a way, the kind of definitude of the mode of production

that enforces this kind of, this coercive totalization on human beings. But still, again, there's no kind of route to the domination of domination. Or it's not clear how value can be abolished. And these are, so this is the, in a way these are, I take these to be the Marxian ramifications, you know, of the, you know, the, the problem,

you know, which is, which I was trying to kind of, you know, diagnose at the, in the conclusion of this, of this paper. So that's what the direction in which this work is moving is an attempt in a way to accept the claim that, you know, the critical claim that there's one, you know, there's a kind of a naive conception of the dialectic of labor and capital, which is not viable once one understands the significance of the role of abstract labor in Marx's account of social domination. And yet at the same time, there must be a way of, there must be an alternative mode of

subjectivation. Otherwise, it's very difficult to see how anything can be abolished. So, yeah, I'll stop there. and then you know there's you know I hope we can discuss like other issues about you know humanism and post-humanism but yeah I think yeah I think I've said enough so I'll just stop there. Yes thank you very much yes I'm also interested exactly about how you think this let's say abolition of totality Adorno is thinking about. I mean, when you read Marx strictly,

the basic thought would be there is not only labor included in the value form, there's also reproductive labor. And this reproductive labor is of course necessary in order to reproduce labor included in the value form, but it has not the shape of the value form. So this is what Nancy Fraser and also Luxembourg already addressed very, very strictly in saying if we want to think social totality through the value form, we have to think something which is not fully integrated in the value form. And of course, Marx in this later chapters

in the first book of the Capital says that this reproductive labor, not included in the value form, is more and more destructed. He says destructed. And this is very interesting because this would mean that this reproductive work, work, which is a constitutive element for the reproduction of the labor as an abstract labor in the value form, is in a certain way, yes, there is at least a tension destructing also the labor, the reproduction for the labor included in the value form. And maybe this is at least the form or point of crisis where we are not sure whether labor can reproduce through the value form or not.

And maybe this would be the turning point. So I think if you stress so much with Adorno to this point where something cannot be included in the totality anymore, And I think that you're right. You have to describe this in this tension between reproductive labor and labor included in the value form, I guess. Yes. No, thanks. That's very helpful. I agree. I guess, I mean, look, I mean, I think, you know, in a way, one of the things that I'm, you know,

my hunches or kind of inclination is to think that there's something about the distinction between living and dead labor in Marx, which has to be, which can be salvaged, or that it's really important to salvage and it can be salvaged without kind of in a way you know hypostatizing living labor as this trans historical constant or force you know or like you know living labor as you know as the human essence and you know so Marx in a way so what I want to examine or consider is if

and I think this is like again this I think what is really powerful I think or kind of in Lukács and it's it's it's a thought that is I think implicit it's not maybe fully unpacked, but it's implicit in Lukács' account, that, you know, living labor is, you know, mortifies itself as dead labor kind of, you know, exchanges its labor power, you know, is constantly kind of selling its labor power to the capitalists in order to stay alive, in order to kind of, you know, to reproduce itself. But I think there's an

ambiguity between what is it that, or at least I don't, you know, I need to kind of read more Marx to get a firm to understand this, is that it seems that it can be understood in two senses. There's the reproduction of labor power and the reproduction of living labor. And on the one hand, you know, it's not clear whether... In a way, I take it that the problem is that living labor can only reproduce itself by reproducing its labor power, okay, which is, you know, it's kind of its dead, objectified kind of form. But the question is whether it's possible to kind of to positively characterize

the you know the characteristics of of living labor, you know, as modes of activity that don't, in a way, that don't simply reduce to, you know, to simple reproduction, okay? Because if so long as living labor is just reproducing itself, you know, through the auspices of reproducing its labor power, then it is still kind of, it still exists as this mere bearer,

this kind of life support system for labor power. And that's the condition of degradation, you know, that Marx is kind of attacking. So, I guess the, I think there's something, yeah, this is what I'm trying to kind of, there's something that is, you know, there's a condition for the whole kind of, you know, valorization process for the kind of the creation of surplus value that remains um you know that is necessarily kind of omitted or excluded um but the problem is that any kind of preemptive positive characterization of living labor as this as a kind of um as a force a power an energy

I think draws one back into a kind of metaphysics of labor, okay, which is I think precisely the kind of the naive kind of positivization of labor that kind of Bastogne and others are attacking. So yeah, so I think, I mean, so what you just, what you asked is crucial. um i see look i mean it's the point is that human beings you know you know the value form can be you know can obviously be destroyed like if if uh a meteorite kind of you know crashes into the planet like you know and wipes out you know most of humanity like yeah that would that would end

the value form, okay? But that's not, you know, the abolition of the value form can't just take this kind of, you know, some kind of pestilence, you know, could wipe it out, you know, but that's not the end of capital that kind of Marx has in mind. So the question is, like, if human beings end it on their own terms, collectively, they can't just do it because under the negative constraints that it's, as you say, that it's killing them because it's making it, you know, more and more impossible for them to kind of, you know, to stay alive, okay?

And I think that the, you know, this is why I think that the kind of, this is why I think it's a mistake to, you know, if you just understand living labor as just kind of, you know, biological kind of survival, that would be a terrible kind of, you know, a dangerous kind of, you know, reduction, I think. So, yeah, so this is what, I mean, I don't know what to say about this, but this is kind of what I'm trying to kind of figure out. In other words, to find a way to salvage some kind of agency in living labor, capable of kind of, you know, of carrying out

this kind of the abolition, capable of executing the self-abolition, but in ways which don't, you know, in a way which wouldn't involve a kind of some, which wouldn't positively valorize kind of, you know, anthropological attributes, you know, talk about kind of these kind of anthropological invariants that are kind of, you know, that are, you know, that humanity must kind of continue or must kind of extend into the future or simply kind of or resorting to some kind of negative mystical residue so some ineffable kind of you know creative force

so yeah so i don't really know what's you know i haven't gotten any further with this um thanks a lot right um so yeah there seems to be also a problem that um you're still kind of um struggling with in your incredibly um illuminating and rich um concrete and door um concrete and act as well um and yeah the the value ideas specifically um i know you um mentioned the um you've written about the essay when brandon first introduces that idea of um magnanimity um which

which you don't sort of directly write about. But yeah, I'm not sure if you had time to read Spirit of Trust, where he's sort of building up to his attempt to kind of think about this question. But sorry, to make it more concrete, there's a few words that you mentioned but don't flesh out too much which for me feel like some of the answers to this so one thing Brandon does really well is have this really impressive system that helps us to make sense of all kind of stuff but at the heart of that are theories of the social

and like without the social experience or nothing but he doesn't really explain what social practices are properly I again every time I'll cheerlead for them what's the school of Vygotsky and Nelyankov are focused on is precisely to lash out the social and every time like every time I see marks mentioning species being, we've got a few keywords, it seems, that they talk about that I don't really see within your account. And the way that we've got to get nearly ungoff separated between value and valorization,

value as in what we find in our experience and what we might find should we escape that is in terms of in them the related concepts of sociality imagination and universality So you've got a quote in Marx, like, so he's got some quite, there's this amusing one. I'm initially wholly abstract, completely indeterminate. I, thus standing open to all content whatever, insofar as I am this, I can make for myself

the emptiest representations. Take myself, for example, to be a dog In fairy tales Humans have indeed been transformed into dogs Or imagine I am To fly Only the human gets as far as grasping himself In this complete abstraction Of the eye I picked a simplistic one Because obviously I'm reading it out loud But yeah I feel like There's sort of dozens of quotes where he introduces speech as being, and then straight away we've got imagination, and we've got a particular definition of universality, and then we get sociality.

And I'm sort of getting to the synthesis of what you're writing and Vygotsky and Edienkov, but I'm surprised that I haven't seen in your own work, well, maybe I haven't read it carefully enough, talk about this. You obviously finished your piece on Prometheanism with the point that which is almost identical to Vygotsky, that reason structures imagination but can also remake its limits, like I feel like that's the crux of it. So yeah, that's all various things.

Sorry that was a bit fragmented. Again, it's... So I guess, I mean, so you're asking if, you know, why isn't there something more to be said about, I mean, don't we already have some resources to positively characterize, you know, human species being as you could, or genus being, you know, get things, and Yeah, this is okay. I mean in Marx, yes, there are, you know, and the kind of, you know, manuscripts from the 40s, you know, and yeah, mainly kind of the economic philosophical manuscripts.

when he's talking about, you know, when he's discussing human genus being, you know, he says we can, well, he talks about it at the level of self-consciousness and the way in which we, you know, human beings relate to themselves through the genus, okay, through this, I can't remember the exact, I need to reread it to remember the exact formulation, but that still sounds quite close to kind of, you know, to the Feuerbachian account of, you know, human genus being in terms of, you know, the kind of

universality, the unboundedness of human self-consciousness. The human beings, the human self-consciousness is, you know, this kind of, you know, this autonomous, you know, self, you know, or potentially self-determining, you know, creative potency. And in a way, all of which, you know, I'm inclined to kind of, you know, to embrace and endorse. But then, you know, the, you know, I take it that, you know, in Marx's critique of Feuerbach, he's saying that, look, the point is that the social relation, you know, and I might be wrong

about this, but like the way I, you know, I understood Marx's critique of Feuerbach was that Feuerbach unpacks the social relation at the level of self-consciousness, the relationship between two self-consciousnesses, you know, what he calls the absolute relation. And this is still to hegelian because it means that the social relation is still kind of it's not interested it's kind of interpersonal you know this a form of the kind of i-thou relation um i mean not unlike brandon you could say at the heart of kind of brandon's account of sociality is the i-thou relation um and marx says that this is um um no the the what conditions um this i thou relation

you know the uh direct you know the kind of the desire for mutual recognition that animates self-consciousness is determined by conditions of uh reproduction you know of collective interdependence and collective material reproduction, which operate in a way behind the back of self-consciousness. And that's why you can't, in a way, that's why sociality is opaque, or at least on this reading, it's opaque to self-consciousness, but also it's kind of its precondition.

And then the worry would be that if consciousness is determined by social being, that even any kind of identification of the positive capacities of human self-consciousness, imaginative capacities, rational capacities, etc., etc., still is in danger of ignoring the division of labor, the division of manual and intellectual labor,

because the risk is of segregating these positive anthropological characteristics within the dimension of self-consciousness, and therefore not being blind to, you know, kind of automated, you know, unselfconscious, you know, reflexes, habits automatisms um that's you know uh allow you know or condition this uh this self-consciousness um and okay i mean to which so i would say like i don't want to i think it's a mistake

to say that um you know i want to be able to say something positive about and you know when Marx, the young Marx talks about free conscious activity as being what, you know, must be realized in the human. I take it this cuts across the division between intellectual and manual labor. So free conscious activity could be any kind of activity, whether kind of, you know, kind of cognitive or rather i mean the point is that you wouldn't need to kind of to separate you know the kind of uh the cognitive and the practical anymore um and yeah you wouldn't

distinguish the contempt you know the contemplative from the um you know from the practical effective but it's difficult for us right now to kind of um you know to see how you know to positively characterize the possibilities of free conscious activity that would open up because our our catalog of these capacities is still kind of historically kind of you know constrained um i don't know maybe this is wrong maybe this is a kind of you know an excessive anxiety about kind of um you know transgressing the kind of you know the

prohibition on historical specificity that you know there's any kind of you know that all the categories even the abstract categories that you kind of you you deploy you know are still kind of, you know, specific, kind of historically specific. And in a way, I don't want to, again, I think that that's probably kind of going too far. But yeah, I can't figure, to be honest, like, I don't have a good answer because I don't know. I mean look if you're talking about imagination you know you're talking about a psychological

category and then the question is you know what's what allows us to be kind of you know to say that these these are the fundamental kind of modalities or you know capacities of the human mind and just super quick reply all of that is at the level of idealism and what if we put stuff back in I'm not sure and to stop if I stop going on about how Ilyankov and Vygotsky do it which they do if we put stuff back in as like um have you read john hoagland um truth and rule

following if we do the same but it's through the actual diuretic of the material conditions of the contour of the actual world rather than the sort of just um random um reasons reason the reasons thing and that feels like what um well as well i'm currently um reading you as saying or although you're um i'm not saying it but surely what what's missing from everything you've said is that it's materialism that's the difference between um the pitfalls that you mentioned and the reality sorry i i won't um interrupt this okay no that's that's that no that's uh that's

great i haven't read that haugel in peace but i will and uh no i mean it's um yeah no i mean it's uh it sounds like uh yeah um what you say sounds right so um yeah no i'll definitely kind of and I still haven't read, you know, Ilyenkov and Vygotsky, I'm afraid. I mean, I've got the Ilyenkov. I started, I've just started reading it, but I haven't gotten very far. And, but yeah, obviously I will follow up on this because it's, you know, it's really, well, from what you've just said, it's kind of crucial. So for what I'm trying to, to work out. So yeah, so thanks. Okay. I'll I'll take this recommendation on board. I've got a question about Derrida and Hegel.

I was fascinated, Ray, by your suggestion that, in a sense, And Derrida's reading of Hegel as, if you like, a presentist thinker leaves him in a kind of double bind, that is a sort of equivocation between absence and presence, or some kind of radical alterity that can't be, in a sense, unpacked. And I'm just interested in exploring, I guess, a different path out of that impasse.

And really, this is quite speculative. I really need to read. I'm kind of diving into Hegel a lot at the moment because it's a gap in my philosophical education. So this is super speculative. however it might go something like this I think you certainly can read deconstruction in terms of this sort of perpetual equivocation that you know I think as you rightly say is epistemologically unsatisfactory for all sorts of reasons a different way perhaps of taking Derrida would be to say that say his deconstruction of various kind of figures within the tradition, Husserl, whatever,

are in a way doing a bit like what Badiou is doing in the history of the philosophy. That is, in a sense, unbinding or untethering the kind of constitutive efficacy of these systems. So that, for example, according to Derrida, and this is kind of my reading, if it comes Derrida on Husserl, what Husserl tells us is that if phenomenology is anything like what phenomenology, what he says phenomenology is, then phenomenology can't tell us what phenomenology is. That is, it's constitutively incomplete. So that you can see what Derrida's doing is a kind of a kind of scolamization of philosophy.

That is, for any particular system, he's telling us he's giving us reasons why that system can't, in a sense, constrain the very thing that it's purporting to constrain. then it follows perhaps what how one could respond to your point about Hegel is that yeah for both Derrida and Hegel there's a kind of model of if you like self-differing difference or self-differing but Hegel's self-differing in a sense still operates within the space of reasons, in a sense between the tension between understanding and reason,

in this kind of perpetual process of rational belief fixation. Whereas the kind of Derridian infrastructures like difference, iterability, are kind of, if you like, they're the kind of opaque underside which in a sense can't be cashed out in terms of the space of reasons. So I think the Derridian response perhaps, at least if I'm going by way of Derrida here, which is I think it's kind of a post-humanist reading but it's not a critical post-humanist reading, is to suggest that what this suggests is actually a way of kind of blocking the kind

of ascent to the meta level that's always implicit in the kind of dialectical thinking that's characteristic of Hegel and also the sort of Marxist response to Hegel. That is, that we no longer have the ability to constrain the possibility space of subjectivity or agency, and therefore the completion of history in humanity is in a sense voided, because in a sense we're not in a position to make any a priori claims about it from within our current historical situation. So I guess my tentative response might be to suggest a kind of

a different kind of post-humanist reading of this situation. I'm very sympathetic with your critique of critical post-humanism. I don't think post-humanism can give us an ethics. I think it's best read as a counter-ethical system, rather along the lines of Claire Colebrook suggests. But I think there's a way of fashioning an epistemological response to an epistemological account to support that which avoids the kind of epistemological equivocation of a certain kind of deconstruction and that's at least allows a kind of more empirical approach as well to our current historical juncture it doesn't simply um it doesn't simply kind of reduce

deconstruction to negative theology in other words so i mean that's not really a question it's a kind of tentative response i guess because i i i'm trying to think this stuff through as well and i found your thoughts invaluably evaluably helpful by the way thank you so much thanks no thanks that's that's a very helpful um comment um Yeah, I mean, this claim, you know, your suggestion that it's what Derrida is doing is, you know, I guess calling into question the possibility of, you know,

I guess, you know, of the reflexive, you know, the reflexive encompassing of the, you know, of the in itself. That whatever is kind of is opaque at one level of consciousness or one level of experience can be recuperated and either, you know, made explicit or kind of, you know, positively conceptualized at this kind of at a higher level or kind of or a meta level this is I mean I think that's a really good way of you know characterizing kind of Derrida's

project in a way it makes me think of what you know there's a passage I quote in the essay from I think it's actually not I'm not I don't think it's not from the end it's from Ozean Gramme another kind of essay an essay on kind of Heidegger and Aristotle from the same book where Derda talks about a writing but anyway a kind of a writing without form. He goes through this list of this list of subtractions, a writing that could no longer be conceptually formed,

that would no longer accord with the catalogue of conceptual forms provided by, I don't know, by metaphysics or whatever. um but then you know i think the problem is that the um look the moments of um you know that then the kind of you know the point i was trying to make is that this um i can't remember what i actually i should look at what i said because i think it's kind of it's relevant here uh to this passage um um probably got it in front of me I think it's on

page 24, I think. Oh, great. Okay. Yeah, in the page 24 in the PDF. 23 to 24, sorry. Everything in Hegelianism that receives the predicate yes um uh but there's an also passive word derrida is talking about the writing um oh yeah uh it's uh yes it's on page uh sorry 21 where he talks about uh the reduction of meaning which

I'm completely sympathetic to the reduction of meaning on the basis of a meaningless formal organization, a new writing that would inscribe a difference, still more unthought, a difference between being and beings, a writing without presence, without absence, without history, without cause, without archaea, without telos, a writing that absolutely upsets all dialectics, all theology, all theology, and all ontology. Well... Yes, I mean, as Derrida well knows, and this is why this kind of rhetoric in Derrida is always puzzling, because he himself knows full well that the reduction of form, there is no, you know, there's no absolute reduction of form. You need the resources of form to suspend form, you know, to interrogate form.

the and in a way that's what I take him to be insisting upon is like you know it's another way of saying that you know kind of you know the alterity you know the suspension or the interruption of conceptual form comprehension you know reflexive recuperation of form you know needs you know can only be negotiated through this very kind of delicate operation um and i agree that's very problematic and as you rightly bring out because daryl just sometimes talks about syntax in this passage but of course you know a kind of formal conception of syntax only makes sense within some kind of opposition between syntax and semantics and some kind of clear set of

rules. But as you know, he makes a similar point, for example, in his reading of Mallarmé's Minique in the double session. I guess, I mean, I guess with, you know, within the concept that he's bringing to bear on the notion of form, I agree that that's extremely problematic. he makes similar claims in relation to Bataille's work as well and I'm quite happy to admit that if you pursue that line of that approach that sort of epistemology

you know that you relinquish certain kind of ontological and if you like formal guardrails. I mean, I think it's a problem I've been sort of working on as well. I don't know. At the same time, I think the question is whether there are kind of persuasive reasons to risk that loss of bearings. I think what's interesting about Derrida Roth is not so much the explicit claims about difference, but the way that he gets there,

often by some actually quite consequential argument, that there is actually some... You can reconstruct those arguments. They do actually lead you somewhere, even where if where they lead you can at certain moments look like an impasse so I'm not at all denying the sort of difficulty of that in the sense of that juncture you know if we follow that if you're like anti-Pegelian line. I mean look I'm just I've just been struck by something you

In your own work, I agree with you about, and I think what is persuasive in Derrida's critique of Phenomen Angers is there is a kind of myth of self-presence, of the fulfillment, the coincidence of intending and intended. you know, I think, and in your work, in your own work, you've emphasized that there's something, you know, that there, the suggestion that there are structures that are, you know, necessarily opaque to kind of phenomenological reflection that cannot be recuperated. And I completely agree with that. But I guess the disagreement is what consequences to draw from the critique

of self-reflection, the idea that kind of, you know, consciousness can, you know, access these, its blind spots, kind of opacities, etc. And actually, because I think, you know, my, you know, inclination is to say that, in a way, the whole kind of Szilagyian critique of the framework of givenness when he said that kind of you know the the structures of the structures that condition intending you know and self-consciousness etc precisely cannot be accessed by the screwing

up of one's you know inner mental eye in other words there's a kind of there's a process of reflection which is not phenomenological which doesn't presupport in other words it's a process of reflecting on the articulation of in a way the um the uh the infra and the meta level okay yeah i mean i i agree with that and i and i think that i mean i think there is a there is a you know it is possible to pursue an analogous critique of that sort of Szilagian line via, I guess, via, you know, thinking about rule following considerations, which I probably, I mean, I've tried to do that in some of my later work, but I mean, I won't go through it here.

but I mean, you know, I don't think the failure of reflection has to be understood in purely phenomenological terms. Actually, even in Derrida's work, you know, obviously there's his speech act theory, and, you know, there are, if you like, alternative lines of approach to reflectivity which are not exclusively phenomenological. But I don't want to go on too long because I think other people will want to come in. but anyway, thanks for such a productive... Sure, I mean, hopefully we can return later. Yeah, I'd love to do that, yeah, absolutely. No, it's just kind of more than probably could be unpacked here in reasonable time.

Okay. Thanks, Ray, yeah, great. Thanks again. Should I read the... Oh, yeah. Okay, yes, sure, sure. Okay. My question concerns the conception of capitalism as a totality. For example, in explorationism, they always stress that we should, for example, distinguish modernity and capitalism, and we should kind of disentangle them. And shouldn't we also try to disentangle capitalism from itself. So shouldn't we rather try to see it as different institutions, different

techniques that interrelate and maybe we can salvage some like money and labor and we have to discard others like competition. And so it wouldn't be a more systems-theoretic approach or understanding of capitalism, yeah, be more productive maybe, because otherwise, if you want to conceptualize the new society after capitalism, we have to refer to some alterity and we never we never want to do this like some radical alterity that isn't yeah it isn't conceptualizable before we get there or before we experience it.

Okay thanks. Okay yeah so no I realize this insistence that you know capital So, well, I think, first of all, I'm following Marx here, I think there's an important distinction between capital and capitalism. And capital, for Marx, is both a social relation, it's a class relation, which divides, you know, proprietors, owners of the means of production from those who only own their labor power. And it's also a process, the valorization process, the kind of the constant expansion of surplus value.

And those two, the process and the relation are kind of intertwined in Marx's analysis. You know, capitalism then would be the network of, you know, practices, you know, habits, cultural forms, etc. That are in a way conditioned and encompassed by this, you know, this relation and this process. and the Marxian claim is in a way that this capitalism is this Marx kind of analyzes these social forms

the commodity form, the money form the value form along with a whole bunch of others and shows how they kind of in a way these social forms which are interdependent and interlocking and presuppose one another, we condition all the social and cultural practices that human beings currently engage in. So the word totality is not to be understood as a kind of hermetically see, I think, you know, there's a useful distinction to make between a totality and a whole. Actually,

Althusser makes this distinction, where a totality, and although, I mean, Althusser rejects the kind of, he thinks that Hegel kind of, you know, conflates these two, thinks, you know, thinks of the whole and the totality as kind of equivalent, Althusser will say, well, every totality is constituted by a point of an impossibility, something that is kind of not positively inscribed within it. So in other words, there is something, what holds, what articulates the totality is something that is not itself, that can't be counted as an element of that totality.

So there's a sense in which every totality is open and not closed in this sense. It's not, you know, to say that a structure is totalizing is to say that it's a process of totalization, which is necessarily incomplete, which can't, because it would no longer kind of, it would de-totalize. The moment it kind of completed itself and turned into a whole, it would no longer be a totality. And in a way, I think that Marx already, but when Marx says that capital is animated by this moving contradiction, moving contradiction between the imperative to kind of maximize surplus value

while minimizing the necessary labor from which this surplus value is drawn, He also said this is a process which tends towards a limit, but the limits can never actually be reached. As capital reproduces itself, it reproduces the limit. And Deleuze and Guattari are right about it. They stress this aspect, but they're kind of faithful to Marx when they stress this aspect. In reproducing itself, capital always kind of tends towards a point of disintegration. which it can never, you know, which is never kind of reached. So in this sense, it's not possible, you know, in a way to abolish capital.

It requires abolishing money and value. And it's not. The problem then is to kind of, you know, to find a mode of. the question is how indispensable is for instance the money form to you know to human social reproduction i mean obviously societies without money have existed human societies without money have existed but when mark says that capital that money is the kind of the the self-estranged manifestation of um you know the you know the inexhaustible plasticity of human self-consciousness.

You know, Marx says, you know, money is this kind of, money's capacity to commensurate incommensurables is exactly, is a kind of, is an estranged, you know, manifestation of what is the, a characteristically human capacity. So the point would be, if we could regulate and coordinate our relations with one another, and find a medium of exchange that no longer entails the estrangement of our own kind of metamorphic capacities.

In other words, and actually Adorno says something in the same essay I quoted from about this. He says that every form of exchange, you know, exchange has been a constant of, you know, human societies. You know, magic and sacrifice are forms of exchange. The capitalist exchange abstraction is, in a way, the culmination of the attempt to commensurate incommensurables.

But the way in which money commensurates in commensurables is by, in a way, subsuming this commensuration to value, to value, to this kind of abstract form, which reproduces itself, you know, and in reproducing itself, you know, coordinates human relations through the money form in a way that inhibits and prevents the, you know,

the expansion, you know, the realization of our kind of metamorphic capacities. So the point is that if you could decouple exchange from valorization, then, which means abolish the kind of, you know, because abolishing valorization also entails abolishing the capital relation, the class relation, means that human beings would be able to relate to one another and to exchange no longer on the basis, or on the basis of needs that are no longer curtailed by scarcity. Okay, so human beings will be able to give to one another without, you know, freely and gratuitously,

without, you know, in a way kind of exacting kind of, you know, some kind of compensation in return. It would be exchange without kind of compensation. And that's what, you know, in order to have a society where human beings can relate to one another without competition, without domination, etc., etc., then you need to, you know, to have solved the problem of scarcity You need to have abolished the material conditions which oblige human beings to compete for resources, to compete with one another, and to preserve themselves at the expense of others.

so that human beings then could relate to one another and exchange, but exchange without, you know, exchange without this exchange being subsumed by this transcendent social form, capital, which actually, yes, which turns money into a medium, into this universal equivalent by systematically kind of disabling the possibility of human beings

being able to relate to one another without either identifying or estranging one another. Okay, so that's very abstract, but it's a concrete point. What does money do? Why is money necessary? I think Marx is right. I believe Marx's account about that money is this kind of uh this is why the the you know the invention you know the what money does under capitalism prefigures what human beings could do you know um once they've kind of

overcome capitalism and found a you know a way of um establish a mode of kind of social coordinate social synthesis that doesn't um you know that doesn't require the uh the commensuration of their activities um through this um you know foreign medium or through this kind of uh alien medium um And, yeah, some people have, I mean, it's difficult to envisage from where we are because, I mean, in a way, so much of what we are and so much of how we conceive of ourselves is bound up with this, you know, historic, this mode of production.

that it's, I think, it's not even as if you can, and here, like, you know, there was a time in which I thought, like, it was, you know, you mentioned the distinction between capitalism and modernity. And, you know, while on the one hand I don't want to, you know, I think it's a mistake to identify capitalism with modernity and therefore to think that modernity must be abolished as well as capitalism. But I also think it's a mistake to think that what we call modernity, or those institutions

and practices that we identify as peculiarly modern, already positively prefigure communism. I think that modernity is like the medium through which we access communism, which would be, I mean, if the term wasn't already kind of fatally kind of poisoned, you know, by all its associations, I mean, actually, Brandon uses the term postmodernity and spirit of trust, because that he means what comes after modernity, which is, you know, the realization of the promises that modernity can't keep that that modernity has to make but cannot keep um so yeah i don't know if

that's um an answer but um it was thank you it was helpful um there's there's a question um from kyle um should i read the question Okay, so Kyle writes, I'm curious about your use of the term generic in the human essay, do you distinguish your use of this term from Larry Elm Badiou? I'm curious about your thoughts on their attempts to decouple the formation of the human from transcendent synonymous metaphysics. Lastly, could you elaborate on your use of the prefix in human at the end of your essay? yeah obviously the term generic is used by Badiou but also by Laravel

and in a way I was already kind of very interested in their use of the term but then I think again that what Marx in a way Marx's point is that it's not enough. So for instance, if one thinks of, you know, when, you know, when Badiou calls the human the voided animal, you know, the animal that is, you know, you know, that is the bear capable of, you know, producing truths, and therefore the animal that can't be reduced to any kind of positive, any set of anthropological predicates.

I think the margin point is that those, I mean, in a way, the problem is, you know, the process of, if the generic is produced by subtracting specific predicates, this process of subtraction remains you know purely ideal unless one gives some accounts of you know the the social historical conditions which you know which generate which make those specific predicates effective or actual so in other words all the ways in which

you know the the human animal has been positively characterized and which are you know obviously are exclusionary and involve kind of you know domination etc it's simply not enough one remains on the kind of at the level of like you know ideal abstraction if one simply kind of of, you know, yes, kind of distinguishes the generic from the specific conceptually. And the point would be to show how, you know, I take this as Marx's whole point is to show that human, you know, that all the specific predicates that constrain, you know, the,

or that kind of the predetermine the you know the the possibilities proper no the possibilities kind of you know characteristic of the human are generated through real social you know relations you know because of you know material conditions of social reproduction and it's it's so in other you have to anchor the process of specification in the process of social reproduction, and then understand how the de-specification must involve radical kind of social transformation.

So in other words, I think that the generic for Marx, the kind of the generosity of the human can only be properly understood via the critique of political economy and the process of social reproduction. And so, yeah, and I think that's why, I mean, yeah, I think I'm indebted to Laruel and Badiou, but I think their conceptions are still in this kind of almost post-Hegelian.

Their characterization of the generic is still kind of in this kind of pre-Marxian, kind of post-Hegelian moment, because they haven't identified its kind of material kind of basis for the, you know, the production of the generic. And then you also ask about their attempts to decouple the formation of the human from transcendence and metaphysics. Yes, I think there are two thinkers who are unwilling simply to kind of, you know, if you also defend the generosity of the human from the claim that, and away from the Heideggerian claim, that humanism is just part of, is in league with metaphysics.

So what's interesting about, they both reject that kind of Heideggerian destitution of humanism as simply kind of, you know, a component of metaphysics. And finally, the final part of your question is, could you elaborate on your use of the prefix inhuman at the end of U.S.? Yeah, I mean, the points... I was trying to, I mean, that was, in a way, that's a residue from an earlier version of this paper,

where there was an attempt to talk about social reproduction and libidinal repetition, as these two, you know, inhuman forces that condition the human, okay, so that the inhuman within the human is reproduction and repetition, and in a way I still want to find a way, it's a way of avoiding, just to say that, you know, of avoiding the kind of the juxtaposition of the human and the non-human. And with the whole point of saying that the human doesn't actually, Adorno's point that the human humanity has not been realized,

doesn't exist because it's not a natural kind, is to say that the boundary between the human and the non-human, as currently drawn is not at all to be... Once you realize the conditions under which that kind of... The work that that kind of demarcation is doing, then the point is not simply to kind of dissolve it. It's not simply to kind of abolish the boundary by metaphysical fiat. okay and to say that we don't yet know what the human is because the conditions

yes we don't yet know what it is therefore we can't we're not in a position to say what it is not okay that's I guess that's the best I can do in response to Kyle. Thank you. I have a question. My question about the construction of a concept of humanity and therefore concept of totality. In Gestalt psychology, there is a distinction between figure and form. So I mean, So it seems distinction between human and non-human constitute as a distinction between one figure and another figure, not figure and form.

So, for example, when post-humanist theorists tell about non-human and non-human entities, they picture for us about images of animals or some objects and other entities who has place and who may list for projection of human image. Therefore, place of human

the human presence in theory and in perception not exclusive. For example, for Guterian domains flows filler universes and territories, which exclusive not only human as object, but as a place. What do you think about more complete deconstruction of human and non-human with the exclusion not only human exclusivity, but the place of human, the statement of its question?

Okay, just let me see if I understood. So you're asking not about, you know, so deconstruction of the human, which doesn't simply want to kind of question, you know, the boundary between the human and the non-human as if they were two distinct forms, is that what you were saying at the beginning, but rather the very place from which this distinction could be made? Yeah, I mean, Guattarian book, his analytic cartographies.

Okay, yes. okay yeah yeah oh for domains it's a cm2 access uh you know okay i guess the i mean um what are we talking about when we talk about the human i guess you know that's that's the key thing and in a way all the thinkers we've discussed they'll say that you know whenever there's a kind of you know the privileging of the human involves the privileging of some kind of property or

characteristic which is you know uniquely human so you know the the favorite candidates are like something like rationality or self-consciousness or freedom. Okay. Now, Guattari, yeah, I mean, obviously Guattari and his work and, you know, also with Deleuze, he calls all those things into question. He thinks all those kind of, you know, positive characterizations of what constitutes the exception of the human or, you know, metaphysically dubitable. And, but then you get into, okay, another way of asking this is it's about, like, really,

if you're asking about, you know, the place from which you're making this distinction, you're asking about the status of the subject. Because that's, it's really what it's about. and Kant's, all these, Guattari and Deleuze and others, they are anti-Kantian. They reject Kant's claim that the subject is not an object in the world, cannot be located or situated within the world because the subject is the condition for experiencing or knowing the world. So if you're going to make this move, you need to kind of subvert this Kantian claim about the subject.

And here, I mean, here I think usually the claim is that this is the subject. Well, there's two things. is that in Kant, Kant doesn't really identify, you know, the human with, you know, transcendental subjectivity, but he says that any cognizing being would instantiate some of these structures, these, you know, the synthetic powers of transcendental subjectivity. But famously, he calls this subject, you know, this subject is anonymous and impersonal in Kant. And even a thinker like Heidegger, you know, Dasein is kind of, you know, Dasein is not the human being.

It's the place where, you know, the question of human being is raised and articulated, but it can't be simply identified with, again, the human as anthropologically conceived. But so, in a way, these two kind of forms of, in a way, the transcendental subject in Kant, the radical, the being, which is in each case mine in Heidegger, these are both philosophical you know moves that's you know suspend that are you know

put metaphysics at a distance say that metaphysics the problem with metaphysics is that it begins it makes kind of it starts kind of it claims to be able to know substance you know, i.e. what is, without first investigating, you know, the conditions of possibility for or being able to think or know about anything, okay? And so part of, like, this kind of, you know, anti-humanism, this rejection of kind of Kantian transcendental humanism is is also kind of, well, it's either a way of, it's either kind of saying that Kant's, you know,

epistemological critique of metaphysics is not radical enough, is itself too metaphysical, because pure apperception still privileges self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is a, the dualism of form and content and of concept and intuition, this is still metaphysical. okay um that would be like you know a kind of a kind of deconstructive kind of uh critique of that move or you can say that um the kantian subject is precisely um it's it's simply the subject of representation and that we have a kind of uh there is this you know we have this non-representational or sub-representational access to reality

and that we can you know think and experience you know the in itself without this kind of going through taking the detour through these conditions of representation the with the former the problem is that with the former, the critique of metaphysics threatens to become paralyzing and threatens to kind of, in a way, the more suspicious you become of metaphysical naivety, of any kind of positive characterization of critical conditions,

then the more the risk is that you end up, you paint yourself into a corner where all that's left is radical alterity, some kind of sheer, kind of undescribable transcendence. So in a way, you criticize the residues of dogmatism in critical epistemology and the Kantian critique of metaphysics, but only to find yourself in a position where your critique of critique leaves you, becomes at least kind of functionally indiscernible from either a mysticism or a kind of theological dogmatism.

In other words, the other, you know, the ineffable, the indescribable comes in through the back door. Alternatively, if you think that there are, you know, we can circumvent representation because we can, you know, we can know and experience the world, you know, at this kind of sub-representational level, then you have to kind of, then it seems that you're back into a kind of, you know, no longer you know you're doing metaphysics again in other words you have a recourse to intuition you claim that we just intuit kind of things in themselves and those things in themselves may not be objects but they are things like dynamic flows fluxes of becoming etc so whatever the kind of

you know so in other words i'm not convinced it's possible in a way to collapse the place you know the uh the subject you know something like transcendental subjectivity is the place from which um you know conditions of knowledge and experience um are you know identified or kind of characterized without finding yourself in either one of those two kind of undesirable positions. So this is why I think the problem is, you know, once you realize that if by humanism,

or if by you mean the identification of the human with the rational animal, you know, the kind of or whatever, the kind of the animal, the kind of the self-conscious animal, etc., then you could say, well, that's not, you know, in a way, this tradition, the tradition that I think leads in Marx doesn't make those, is not kind of, doesn't resort to metaphysical humanism in this sense. And if that's not what you mean, then what exactly is, you know, then it's like what what is it you're objecting to um in other words if it's just subject something like transcendental subjectivity you're saying that that's the ultimate kind of uh you know

hiding place for humanism um then your critique of humanism is actually coincides with i mean with religious anti-humanism because there's a critique of humanism which is like theological and dogmatic okay which wants to kind of say human beings are miserable kind of you know miserable creatures sinful and you know they shouldn't the problem is that you know humanism elevate illegitimately elevates the human and human beings need to know their place but that's a very that's not a kind of a new claim. That's a kind of a familiar claim. So in a way, that's why I'm not, you know,

what is at stake in the critique of humanism and what is being objected to in the figure of the human? And I, you know, part of like, it was clear up to a point what was objectionable, but I think that there's, you know, it's, I think, possible to show that, you know, in a way, the targets, you know, the philosophical targets that are kind of, you know, surreptitiously being targeted in the critique of humanism, i.e. Kant, Hegel, and Marx, are being attacked for, also there's a kind of an ideological component

of the critique, which I think, if you unpack it is its radical credentials are really kind of dubious. So yeah, that's again, I don't know if I've kind of addressed you know, I don't know if that's a satisfactory response. Yeah, thanks. You write, tell about Dasein here their presence. This object in is near to a Gautarian interpretation, but I mean more scientific, not religious.

I'm not in God and any superstitions. So, flows and territories, basic Gautarian concepts. Flows and... Concrete scientific correlations. For example, each organ machine, design machine, is defined as a cut of any flows. What is the flows? It's a demographic flows, it's a flow of genetic code as a flow of words, is a flow

of instrumental activities, is a flow of commodities and monies and other flows. includes flows of energy, stuff and information, who circulate in society and other nature. But its flows circulate in different places. for there is a place of human body, concrete and miserable in meters in square. Therefore, more abstract spaces, more abstract territories, for example, normatic territory of human activity.

Dasein is a good illustration. So, I suggest if we talk about human and non-human, we talk about two figures, not about figures and form, not about many flows of objects of any nature and places which are cats and interacted. That's what I mean. Thanks. Okay, thanks. Thank you. Should I read? There's a couple more questions, I guess. So there's a question from Amanda.

Can you say more about bad and good forms of totality? If bad totalities are illusions that dupus what forms illusions are implicated in good totalities is there a need to make a distinction between the qualities the qualities of impossibility that reside within good and bad totalities well i guess the distinction between you know the the good and the bad totality is I mean Marx it's not you know Marx doesn't say this but um it's um Adorno and um you know Postone in the in the kind of examples I was discussing earlier um so why is um you know Why is capital a bad totality?

Because it's... Because the claim... Well, you have to, there's two ways of unpacking, you know, I guess the meaning of good and bad here. And obviously Adorno said, you know, the whole is the false, the untrue. the claim is that Marx has an imminent critique of capital

because his analysis of the social forms through which capital and labor reproduce themselves is involves involves a mystification a mystification that prevents us from it's very I mean I don't want to say I mean the danger is always to kind of talk about things like

again to come up with kind of a positive characterization of human capacity that is being curtailed or inhibited. And look, so exploitation in Marx is an analytical category. When Marx says that labor is exploited, he means that this is, that capitals claim to be, you know, to be fairly remunerating the laborer for their labor power

hides, you know, hides the fact that they are being, the conditions under which they exchange their labor power to the capitalist means that they are precluded from benefiting from the products of that labor. And capitalism, in a way, capitalism insists that everything is exchanged, you know, fairly and equally for, you know, for its value. But the discrepancy between the value the value of labor power, you know, and the value of labor power when it's sold,

and the value generated through the consumption of labor power, that this inequality is violates, you know, the tenets of capitalist ideology, which says that everything should be exchanged fairly and equally. So in other words, there's a kind of, there's an expropriation of value from the exchange of labor power, which is I guess, you know, unfair by capital's own lights.

Okay. It's like because precisely because equality and equivalence are the two, you know, the tenets or kind of capitalist ideology. So the fact that this equality and equivalence is upheld on the basis of inequality and non-equivalence points to a kind of contradiction, a contradiction in capitalist ideology. So the second claim is, I think, domination. So exploitation is kind of, you could say that the claim that capital is exploitative is where users use the categories of capitalist ideology against themselves.

themselves. The claim that capital is a form of domination, I think is abstract domination. That's more, you know, that's, I'm not sure if it's simply possible to, you know, if it's so easily kind of describable as like kind of an eminence. Well, I guess, I mean, just thinking about it, you say that concrete domination is when, you know, human beings are ruled by hierarchies or castes or systems of

of privilege which are irrational, okay, which are just simply kind of, you know, stipulated by, which are simply enforced by violence. Again, capitalism proclaims equality and rights, but because of the exploitative character of wage labor, It means that a whole, you know, the majority of the human population is, you know, finds itself dominated.

One class finds itself dominated by another class. And moreover, both those classes are dominated by, you know, the auto reproduction of capital. because both bourgeois and proletarians are mere kind of, they play a social role, which is determined by, you know, the reproduction of value of capital. So here again, this is also kind of, I think, makes sense as an imminent critique, because he's saying that the claim that relations between human beings should be non-coercive is false. Because in fact, human beings are coerced or compelled to sell their labor power because they have no alternative.

and that's coercion involves even if it's it doesn't directly involve acts of violence although it frequently does with original accumulation if you think of sweatshops etc. it often does involve violence and intimidation but even if it doesn't it involves a kind of a violation of the, you know, of a tenet of bourgeois ideology, which claims that human beings ought to be self-determining, okay? So I think both, so the kind of capital is a bad totality,

I think, can be reconstructed without appealing to any kind of transcendence, yardstick of rightness or wrongness. By the lights of bourgeois ideology, capitalism is exploitative and domineering. And the fact that it kind of immiserates more and more human beings, that's also, instead of freeing human beings from wanton scarcity as it claims to it actually kind of, it only frees a select, a diminishing portion of the human population

from wanton scarcity while inflicting wanton scarcity on the majority. So I think all those denunciations or don't invoke any kind of transcendent metaphysical values. What the good totality would be is just negatively. It would be where all of these, where exploitation and domination have been abolished, and again, where human beings can relate to one another without having to compete for resources and without having to kind of, you know, without these kind of, you know, gratuitous antagonisms, you know, that are, you know,

part and parcel of the conditions of capitalist existence. Okay, and then the second part, is there a need to make distinctions between the qualities and impossibility that reside within good and bad totalities. Well, I guess the part of what Marx is saying is that the possibility for the good totality is implicit or imminent in the bad totality because the elimination of want, the elimination of scarcity, The satisfaction of all basic material human needs is already there with capitalist production.

But the reason it's impossible to eliminate those needs so long as the capitalist class relation persists, so long as exploitation and domination persists. So everyone could be fed, clothed, have their basic needs satisfied, but the totality is structured in such a way as to preclude that. So that's why it has to be abolished. so yeah so I guess the the good again yeah I think it's once you've identified on the basis of an imminent diagnosis

of what is contradictory or you know inconsistent in the the norms you know proclaimed by capitalist ideology, you know, the basic norms that govern capitalist ideology, then you can, you know, indicate, you know, the abolition of those incompatibilities or kind of inconsistencies would point towards the good, the characteristics of the good totality. That's, I don't know if that's a plausible answer. I guess that's all I can say for now.

Thank you, Ray. That's a lot, and thank you. And I'm not going to ask you to answer this now, but I guess just what motivated my question was the idea of the place of illusion in itself. And there's this kind of idea that one defeats the illusion and has some veracity. to mobilize the politics as opposed to the mechanism of like representation. So I guess what was interesting to me was what can we see is, you know, if we cannot dispose of illusions, what illusions can be seen to be,

let's even say pragmatically useful as like even if we talk about like a pragmatic idealism but what kind of maybe we wouldn't call them illusions then you know so yeah I'm not asking you to say now because I know there's many other questions but I guess that's what was also making me wonder about these different conditions of the register of the image and what we commune around in terms of mythologies, illusions or truths, if we could call them that. No, actually, I forgot you mentioned, you know, you asked about illusions in your question. Just very quickly, I guess, you know, the fetishism of commodities is like it's not a subjective

misrepresentation of an objective state of affairs. It's, you know, Marx's claim is that the misrepresentation is at the level of commodities, of relations amongst commodities. So in a way, commodity fetishism is something that, you know, as a relation, commodities have to one another. So it's not simply, this is why it's not a kind of, it's a kind of a socially necessary illusion. And it's not simply something that you can overcome subjectively. that's what so like even subjectivity is structured by this kind of you know objective misrepresentation so misrepresentation is no longer on the side of the subject it's objects kind of misrepresent one another but this objective misrepresentation

that conditions human relations between human beings and that's a more radical claim that That's why ideology is in things, not just in our consciousness. And this is why a change of consciousness doesn't suffice. That's why Marx is not a young Hegelian. Because if you could just cast off your illusions through critical self-reflection, then it wouldn't be... But the whole problem, Marx says, is you can't just do this. And that's why consciousness itself can't simply kind of alone doesn't provide the leverage for kind of, you know, for revolutionary transformation.

Okay, thanks. Okay. There's a question from John B. Do doesn't Guattari incur both of these consequences? Could you say what you meant by both consequences? John? That was when you were talking earlier. Are they both mystification and claiming to have intuition of noumena? The two consequences of disposing of transcendental subjectivity.

Yeah, I think they certainly have the second consequence. I mean, the kind of, because, you know, yes, there is a resort, well, explicitly in, you know, Deleuze's kind of engagements with Bergson, you know, the method of, you know, Deleuze explicitly endorses, you know, and wants to radicalize Bergson's method of intuition. it's more in in anti-edipus it's more complicated but um i mean it's more sophisticated in a thousand places in anti-edipus like well the claim is like you know with the um the account of desiring production um this is um it's just a claim about um

Okay, it's no longer a claim. It's no longer a priori knowledge of substance, but it seems to be a priori knowledge of flows of becoming. So these flows of production, the three syntheses of production, are simply kind of set out before us. And the question is like, yeah, why does everything flow? What does it mean to say that there are these flows of like, you know, and think of, I mean, there's a quote on the handout. I mean, I didn't consider, but when they talk about, sorry. Yeah, it's, you know, the first characterization they give of, you know, of code.

every machine has a sort of coal built into it, stored up inside it. They talk about code, they talk about recording transmission data, they talk about chains, signifying chains, which are made up of non-signifying elements. Already the account of desiring production is conceptually saturated. okay it's full of distinctions characterizations um how you know on what basis can you do you know i mean it's it's like you know how you know how do you know that how do you just start talking about how do you just plug into the kind of uh the process of desiring production in a way that

allows you to kind of you know um it's not phenomenological the whole point is desiring production doesn't simply kind of you know um you know manifest itself or express itself in consciousness so how do they you know how do they know how are they able to say all these things about desiring production i mean it's brilliant it's it's dazzling you know but then as soon as you stop and ask like you know you know they're telling you all this stuff that's given you this incredibly detailed and ingenious description, you know, of, you know, the, you know, of reality producing itself, assembling itself. How are they able to do this, you know? So in that regard, I think there is, you know, I mean, yeah, they incur the consequence, not, I mean,

they're always fighting off the kind of the theological consequence or the kind of the recourse to kind of and it's to their credit that they know and last week we talked a lot about how they do this but again when they talk about you know so their claim about the coincidences of construction and expression and why the plane of consistency has to be constructed through this You know, that's their attempt to stave off the kind of, you know, the threat of mysticism. But, yeah, it poses other problems. So they definitely incur one of the consequences, the consequence of intuition.

And they only stave off the other consequence with, you know, with great difficulty. Thank you. Okay, there's a question from James Wilkin. I say on, you say on page 32 of the essay that the human is the name of absolute negativity. Could you elaborate? And in your essay on Angelaki, the last sentence is that history dispossesses us even as it provides a sole resource of becoming free and history is a recursive. Can you explain more on your view of history?

I should, okay, the claim, actually, I'm not sure I'm entitled to say that the human is the name of absolute negativity, precisely because that is yet again to kind of, to make a move, you know, to name, to give, you know, to give a proper name to something which is supposed to be the kind of, you know, the destitution of propriety. So that's, I think, what I meant was that it's not an absolute negativity. If you say it's absolute negativity, then you kind of, you abstract it and you make it into something like a kind of, the danger of reifying it is there.

in a way it's in a way the human is the place for the articulation of relative and absolute negativity it might be a better formulation in a way the kind of because you know the what we know of ourselves what we call human the traits that we you know use to positively characterize what we call the human are all involve, you know, specific historical conditions, you know, and social relations. And the mistake is to kind of, you know, to reify them or to kind of hypothesize them on the one hand, but that doesn't mean,

And the corresponding mistake would be to say, and I think in a way this is a problem with, in a way, the account of the generic given in Badiou or La Ruelle, is to say the human is simply kind of this point of absolute kind of, you know, this zero degree of radical imminence or this the voided animal in bad you is that is there that you by absolutizing this negativity or this subtraction from specific predicates you hypothesize it once again so so yeah so i would i wouldn't use that i would say the human is the name

for the relation, I guess, or the conjunction of relative and absolute negativity, as opposed to the name of absolute negativity. Okay, and then second, about the Angelaki paper, history dispossesses as soon as it provides the sole recourse of becoming free. Well, the claim would simply be, and I think it's the claim that I actually think that, interestingly enough, Adorno, I think, says something similar, although this was written before I'd read that essay, the essay on progress, is that the danger, look, if history is an unfolding catastrophe, as it is for Benjamin, okay,

and this, you know, it's this storm kind of blowing from paradise, you know, and there's this accumulating wreckage, and that the wreckage is what you know the bourgeoisie called progress okay but it's actually kind of just this relentless you know accumulation of suffering okay and dispossession etc well then the danger there is always that you know there's a point you know the paradise is the point of origin, okay? And the danger then is of, you know, given that there's no transcendent vantage point from which to judge history, history is not an object of judgment, so you have to be careful,

and I think this is Adorno's point, is that he says that, actually, I have the passage here I'll quickly I just need to Yes, in that there's a kind of, there's an antimony pinpointed by Adorno. He says, on the one hand, you've got progress.

If history is just an unfolding catastrophe, then the only kind of viable or kind of salvageable concept of progress would be a theological concept, which would convert progress into redemption. Okay. So the points, history has to be redeemed. Okay. But redemption would be a point of transcendence. And in Benjamin, you know, Benjamin writes, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. In other words, you'd have to be able to redeem history would be to kind of not to name and, you know, the victims,

you know, the nameless victims of history, in order to kind of, you know, as a form of restitution, that would kind of, you know, overcome their erasure. But this means that kind of only redemption could be affirmed, okay? but then if progress is redemption history is absurd because it's unnecessary because god could intervene to save humanity at any moment okay if there is no progress if progress is just accumulating catastrophe then it means that the catastrophe could have been stopped at any moment

there's nothing that's necessary but the whole it's it's a it's a monstrous absurdity and the redemption you know could happen and should happen at any moment because you know god doesn't need history so god could intervene to redeem humanity at any point but then history is absurd it's unintelligible on the but if if the secular alternative is the progress is humanity's self-empowerment okay humanity's kind of self-liberation self-emancipation But then history is necessary because this process of self-emancipation can only unfold through history, which is a dimension of imminence. But then historical suffering is the condition of historical progress.

And this is the kind of the deadlock that Adorno identifies. He says, if progress is equated with redemption as transcendental intervention, it forfeits along with a temporal dimension, its intelligible meaning and evaporates into an ahistorical theology. But if progress is mediatized into history, then the idealization of history threatens. And with it, both in the reflection of the concept as in the reality, the absurdity that it is progress that inhibits progress. In other words, if this progress is necessary, if you think of all this suffering, all these crimes, all these atrocities become necessary for the termination of crime or the cessation of atrocity.

So both concepts become absurd. So what Adorno proposes instead is that the content of the concept of progress is social and historical, and that reconciliation is only possible through antagonism, but not simply by affirming kind of reconciliation. because reconciliation is no longer this kind of the culmination, the telos of history as a whole, but it's simply progress is breaking the spell.

It's breaking, in a way, the fatal dialectic whereby in trying to free themselves, human beings enslave others. And once human beings realize the only possibility of breaking this kind of interminable dialectic, in a way dominating domination, in dominating dominations we dominate nature, then we dominate animals and other humans that we treat as animals. once we understand if we can break the spell and see what it is where we're doing then you know we as Adorno puts it we kind of we step out of the magic spell even out of the spell of progress that is itself nature

and so it's only kind of by you know by breaking the spell which kind of perpetuates this dialectic of enlightenment, that human beings can realize freedom because they free themselves, in a way, from the compulsion to dominate domination. And that's why he writes, progress is the resistance to the perpetual danger of relapse. So progress is not this kind of linear kind of movement towards a kind of an ultimate telos.

It's simply the resistance to the repetition of nature, of the compulsion to dominate in humanity's attempt to free itself from nature. and that means, you know, according to Adorno, that progress is possible at every moment, okay, it's not, it's not redemption, you know, if redemption is possible at any moment, because history is absurd, it's just this, you know, incessant catastrophe, but what Adorno is saying is that at every point, we can, you know, you know, we can break the spell, we can step out of this kind of compulsive,

kind of this compulsion to kind of this confusion whereby we think that we are, you know, we think that we are freeing ourselves by asserting our sovereignty, but in doing so, we're actually only kind of, you know, repeating our subjugation to nature, to the need to dominate. And what Adorno was saying is that the conditions for breaking the spell in a way are kind of socially and historically kind of circumscribed.

It becomes it's the possibility of refusing of becoming aware of the threat of regression is is heightened, you know, and it's this heightening that means that, you know, that intensifies or, you know, we augments the possibility of resisting, of resisting the relapse into nature. so um yeah that's um okay that's a convoluted answer to your question um and i think yes and

that's what i meant in a way that's in a way that's in a way that's how i understand i mean that's i think you know an excellent kind of uh paraphrase of the claim that history dispossesses us, even as it provides us with a role, with a sole resource of becoming free. So the point is that it's not, we can't go back, we can't turn back the clock. But in a way, and this is kind of, this is Marx's point as well, is that in a way the condition, the extremity of estrangement, you know, is also the condition for, you know, release, you know, from estrangement. So I think this is also kind of a Marxian point. Okay, I better move on.

There's another question from Kirill. Agree with James Wilkins strongly. You draw on thinkers who use negativity in incommensurate ways. Do you just mean it in the Hegel, Brandon, Benstick, and Water way? Okay, so brandon, you know, is often, you know, chastised by Hegelians for reducing contradiction to incompatibility. and if you reduce contradiction to incompatibility then it seems hard you know incompatibility you know would be something like a is a relation of you know representations are incompatible

kind of assertions are incompatible and this means that you know the reason can't affirm contradiction, can't affirm the truth of contradiction. To claim that negativity is constitutive of reality or of actuality is to say that everything actual is contradictory, which is a strong Hegelian claim, which is not the same thing as saying that, you know, because contradiction isn't the thing for Hegel, you know, or at least Hegel is traditionally understood, whereas Brandom seems to be, want to be saying that it's not really contradiction, it's just incompatibility

and incompatibility is in us, not in things. I think that in a way, you know, although I'm very, very sympathetic to Brandom's reading, I do think there's a problem here in that he kind of, you know, evacuates the Hegelian claim of its kind of of its charge okay um um by kind of you know relegating you know you know by reducing contradiction to incompatibility and relegating incompatibility to you know to assertions or relations amongst assertions um because then it's it's difficult to see how, for instance, like social reality itself could be contradictory.

And this is, you know, if you think about the hermeneutics of magnanimity that Brandom wants to kind of, and joins us to kind of, to accept, where, you know, we retrospectively identify, you know, kind of the incompatibilities vitiating, the incompatible commitments vitiating our predecessors discourse and we reinterpret them to try to kind of uh eliminate those incompatibilities um but that's not you know the the marxian claim is not that the marxian claim is that the incompatible it's it's not about incompatibilities at the level of beliefs or assertions it's incompatibilities at the level of you know what we do without realizing that

we're doing it or in social reality itself. In a way, there's a political kind of valence to this distinction between incompatibility and negativity. So on the one hand, yeah, I mean, I'm wary of ontologizing negativity or hypostatizing self-relating negativity. but in social but I think in a way Marx gives you you know in a Marxian register it does make sense not not to ontologize it but to say that there are you know to point to the you know and have the contradictory structure of social reality because this reality in a way involves doesn't

conform to the, it's not straightforwardly kind of objectifiable in the way in which kind of, you know, other, that's the whole point about the critique of political economy. It's not simply a representation of reality. It is, you know, the concepts that Marx, you know, construct in order to kind of to identify the machinery through which capital reproduces itself there so you know they're imminent to this you know this this social you know the social

structure as such again this needs to be unpacked properly but I think I think this is an important claim actually why this is why in a way Marx is kind of really still misunderstood because people in a way because if you just junk Marx's Hegelianism or what is still kind of you know what he still takes from Hegel and you know the critique of representation is crucial here it's not that Marx it's not a kind of it's not Marx will claim that kind of the speculative

identity of subject and object is no longer something to be affirmed but it's in a way it's the it's something in a way because capital the speculative identity of subject and object kind of articulated by Hegel was actually a symptom of this, of their kind of real practical fusion in social reality. And it's this kind of, this identity now operates, you know, behind the back of consciousness, behind the back of spirit and this is what marx is trying to kind of excavate or foreground um

um okay yeah um i should move on to the next couple of questions uh uh another question um I'm sorry I can't I'm afraid I can't pronounce your name but I'll read your question. Evgeny can apply. Okay Evgeny, Evgeny okay. So my question when you talk about theological bias against Kantian transcendental skepticism and got a shift from human unity to flow space for spaces space.

What do you mean? Is it transition from outer reference semiotic like cogito to our atward. hetero referent signifying semiotic with signifying center like marxism leninism or christian hermeneutics i suggest there is an exit out of cartesian can't and problematics auto-referent semiotics and cogito infinite method of radical dope possible through Comparative semiotics, natural and social sciences, not theology. So,

simple application, theological and signifying semiotics may be part of this process as a contradiction and opposition to outer reference semiotics not the aim of this deconstruction okay i'm just um let me just trying to make sure i get what you're what you're saying um Okay, so comparative semiotics is an alternative.

So I guess, I mean, that's, you know, yeah, I mean, that's, I'd like to hear more. I mean, I just don't know enough, you know, about semiotics or comparative semiotics to say anything, you know, interesting in response. I guess just what distinguishes semiotics, though, from... Yes, I guess what distinguishes semiotics from semantics, or the philosophy of language issues about meaning and linguistic meaning as discussed in philosophy of language. this is an instant I really don't know I mean because I don't just don't know enough about

semiotics to kind of to respond properly to this to this question excuse me Ray do you wanna keep going because we are almost over three hours okay yeah yes I'll I'll, so yeah, thanks. Yeah, I need to think about that, but I can't kind of respond right now. OK, there's a, is it, Blicero writes, this is not really a good word. No, we don't need to read that. I'm quite willing to accept that I've got it wrong.

I mean, I need to reread because I haven't read it. I read the drafts. I haven't read the latest, the published version of Spirit of Trust. I read the draft a couple of years ago. So I'm going on. So it's quite, it's entirely possible that I'm not being fair to, I'm misrepresenting Brandon. So it's not about, it's, yeah, I need to think more about this, actually. So I take your point. I can't just kind of oppose contradiction to incompatibility in this way. Okay. I think that's the end of the written questions.

I'm actually, it's just after 11 here. I'm afraid, yeah, I'm going to have to go. I really want to thank you again, Ray, for participating in this and leading these sessions. And we are all really appreciating your time. And I hope you consider joining us again in the future. Thanks. No, thanks very much. Thanks, Sepadip. Thanks. I really enjoyed it. And it was incredibly productive, actually, for me. So, yeah, very happy. So I've done it. So thanks very much and good luck with the next sessions. And I'll look forward to hearing about them.