Reflection
319
It is easy to retort that this indictment of humanism follows
from conflating the restrictive specification of the human (as
white, male, heterosexual, European, etc.) with its generic
despecification—the human as what Alain Badiou calls “the
voided animal,”2 an exception that includes the unspecified
part of everything: neither white nor black, neither male nor
female, neither heterosexual nor homosexual, and so on. But the
suggestion that universalization proceeds not by generalizing
specific predicates but by subtracting them tends to fall on deaf
ears in a theoretical context where the Nietzschean equation
of universalization with domination continues to hold sway.
Once the inference from exception to exclusion is made, an all-
inclusive posthumanism supplants exclusionary humanism as the
politically “progressive” optic consonant with the liberal ideal of
inclusiveness that has become the humanities’ critical lodestone.
Here is Braidotti again:
posthuman scholarship . . . is contiguous and resonates with bio-
genetic and technologically-mediated advanced capitalism. What
prevents it from being just an epistemic form of accelerationism?
The answer is affirmative ethics, and the political praxis is collective counter-actualization of the virtual. The barrier against the
negative, entropic frenzy of capitalist axiomatic is provided by the
politics that ensue from the ethic of affirmation. The political starts
with de-acceleration, through the composition of transversal subject assemblages that actualize the unrealized or virtual potential
of what Deleuze calls ‘a missing people.’ In the old language: de-
accelerate and contribute to the collective construction of social
horizons of hope.3
2 See Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum 2009), 114.
3 Braidotti, Posthuman Glossary, 11.
320
320
Human
Braidotti espouses Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysical definition
of capitalism, according to which capitalist reterritorialization is
the entropic residue of a primary deterritorialization synonymous
with creative Life. But because it jettisons the crux of Marx’s
analysis of capital as the “moving contradiction” seeking to extract
ever-increasing magnitudes of surplus labor from ever-decreasing
amounts of necessary labor, this yields an equally metaphysical
anticapitalism, wherein the premium on creative affirmation
obviates the need to abolish the social forms shoring up this
moving contradiction: private property, class, wage labor, and so
on.4 By the same token, because it shares with its accelerationist
sibling Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysical premium on creativity
over reactivity, Braidotti’s posthumanism is “critical” only insofar as
it seeks to palliate rather than to celebrate the social consequences
of capital’s creative destruction. Braidotti’s appeal to “unrealised
or virtual potential” also jars with her Deleuzean commitments.
Deleuze pits virtual and actual against Aristotle’s potentiality and
actuality.5 Where the latter are equal halves of equivocal being,
the former constitute the unequal halves of univocal being. Thus
where potentiality is not yet present, virtuality is unpresentable.
This equivocation underwrites Braidotti’s invocation of “hope” in
an as yet unrealized but present potential; a hope which supplants
the imperative to abolish the social relations shoring up the
boundary between the presentable and unpresentable. Because it
is wholly immanent to capital, the counteractualization of virtual
potencies required by Braidotti’s hope is effectively the cultivation
of empowerment within existing social relations. Last but not
least, it is not clear how a posthuman ethics that has banished
negativity the better to affirm the immanence of what is could
4 On Marx, see also Pack’s Reflection here.
5 On Aristotle, see also Deslauriers and Filotas, c hapter 2 here.
Reflection
321
recognize anything as “missing,” let alone a “people.” It seems
telling that the categories in terms of which Braidotti identifies
the “missing”—the indigenous, female, queer, otherwise enabled,
and others—are identifications of the excluded acknowledged by
capitalist neoliberalism, rather than indices of the unpresentable
capable of destroying its logic of incorporation (subsumption under
value). What is “missing” for Braidotti is simply whatever is not
yet included. And since capitalism has already subverted bourgeois
humanism by personifying things (including corporations), the
“social horizon of hope” for “a people to come” under capitalism
reduces to the claim that the indigenous, feminist, queer, otherwise
enabled, and so on are “people” just as much as things are.
Thus the logic of liberalism culminates with the ontological
ratification of capitalism’s personification of things and reification
of people in the formal equivalence of human and nonhuman.
The ideological corollary of this logic is an “ethics of affirmation”
that not only masks but consolidates capital’s subdivision of class
into the ramifying fractures of race, gender, ethnicity, culture, and
so on. But it is too easy to expose the conservative kernel beneath
posthumanism’s radical veneer. Counteracting it requires more than
abstractly opposing the generic despecification of the human to its
restrictive specification. What must be shown rather is how both
this specification and despecification are conjoined in capitalism
as a historically specific mode of social reproduction. With this
aim in mind, I want to contrast two ways in which the subversion
of the human proceeds, from below and from above. I will focus
particularly on the latter in order to argue that the exception of the
human, its status as an ontological anomaly, is constituted by an
unhuman element whose twin facets are revealed in the Freudian
concept of the drive and in the Marxian concept of the commodity.
The human exception is not due to any positive trait but follows
from a “negative universality”: the fact that humans are compelled
to produce and reproduce the means of their social existence.
322
322
Human
Subversion from Below
Humanism’s subversion from below is straightforward: it consists
in undermining any attempt to specify the difference between
humans and other animals in terms of the capacity for language
(the human is the talking animal), reason (the human is the
rational animal), or politics (the human is the political animal).
That language is a species of signaling, reasoning a species of
reckoning, and politics a species of cooperation, reintegrates
the differences that were taken to be constitutive of the human
back into the continuum of biological capacities. The specificity
of human difference reduces to specific capacities that humans
share with other animals. But this renaturalization of the human
assumes two very different forms in contemporary philosophical
discourse. In mainstream Anglo-American philosophy, it follows
from acknowledging the evolved nature of all the cognitive
prowesses taken to be characteristically human.6 In Anglophone
critical theory, by way of contrast, it proceeds from an animist
metaphysics that conceives of all of nature as living.7 Thus we have
two reductions of the human, one positivist, one animist.8 Where
the positivist reduction seeks to explain how human mindedness
arises from mindless but scientifically tractable processes, the
6 For an exemplary statement of this brand of philosophical naturalism, see Daniel C. Dennett,
From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (New York: Norton, 2017).
7 See for instance Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010). See also Braidotti: “all matter or substance being one and immanent to
itself, it is intelligent and self-organizing in both human and non-human organisms. . . . Vital
matter is driven by the ontological desire for the expression of its innermost freedom (conatus).”
Braidotti, “Theoretical Framework,” 4.
8 Although it is customary to contrast positivism to naturalism, I use the term here to characterize
all those varieties of philosophical naturalism for which current science delimits the scope of
knowledge and culture is continuous with nature. Animism is also a variety of naturalism, but one
that proceeds from a straightforwardly metaphysical conception of nature. The contrast between
positivism and animism is not between naturalism and antinaturalism but between scientific and
speculative naturalism. Both concur in stipulating an underlying continuity between culture and
nature.
Reflection
323
animist reduction rejects modern scientific “reductionism”
and seeks instead to reunite culture and nature by attributing
mindedness to everything. For those who embrace this second
option, the ubiquity of mindedness (understood as sentience
rather than sapience) follows from poststructuralism’s “decentering
of the subject.” The destitution of the subject as “the I that is we
and the we that is I,”9 which lies at the heart of philosophical
modernity as elaborated by Kant and Hegel, entails the dissolution
of anthropocentrism and the inception of a postmodern animism
for which anthropomorphism is no longer an error but an enabling
commitment.10
Scientific naturalism is more audacious: it rejects
anthropomorphism as well as anthropocentrism. Subjectivity is a
cognitively tractable natural phenomenon: it is (for example) the
embedding of a transparent self-model within a representational
system’s world-model.11 Nevertheless, positivists and animists
concur in rejecting Kant’s claim that the knowing subject is neither
a substance (Descartes) nor a bundle of experiences (Hume) but
an epistemic function that cannot be located within the world
whose experience it renders possible. Kant desubstantializes
9 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press 2018), 108.
10 See for instance Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology beyond the Human
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal
Metaphysics, trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis: Univocal/University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Bruno Latour is perhaps the most significant precursor of this strand of posthumanist thought. See
his We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993). I have criticized Latour’s philosophical claims elsewhere: “Concepts and Objects,” in
The Speculative Turn: Continental Realism and Materialism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and
Graham Harman )Melbourne: Re-Press, 2011), 47–65. On Kant, see also Tolley, c hapter 9 here.
11 See for instance Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-
Model Theory of Subjectivity
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Bradford Books, 2003). See also Metzinger, ed., Conscious Experience
(Paderborn: Imprint Academic, Thorverton und mentis, 1995). My point here is not to endorse
Metzinger’s account unconditionally (it too quickly glosses over the problem of the reality of
appearances) but to flag its significance as an attempt to account for the phenomenon of first-
personal subjective consciousness using the explanatory resources of contemporary natural science
(specifically, neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience).
324
324
Human
the subject by subtracting it from the reality it conditions.
By reinscribing subjectivity within reality, both positivism
and animism resubstantialize it. Animism does so directly by
embracing panpsychism, understood as the claim that all things
think. Positivism does so in a less direct but ultimately no less
metaphysical fashion by reintegrating the scientific perspective into
the reality it seeks to describe and explain. Science is not a “view
from nowhere” but a particular perspective on reality embodied by
organisms with specific biological histories and cognitive defaults.
By collapsing Kant’s distinction between the causal aetiology
of knowledge and its normative justification, both positivism
and animism relativize their own cognitive claims in a manner
that oscillates between empiricist skepticism and metaphysical
perspectivism.12 In either case, subjectivity is reified as both
conditioning of and conditioned by the reality it knows.
Subversion from Above
The metaphysical short-circuit between conditioning and
conditioned subjectivity is avoided by humanism’s subversion
from above. It is a post-Kantian operation that seeks to evacuate
the residue of substance in the transcendental subject. It does so
by uncovering a conceptual keystone that correlates subject and
object while dereifying both. This is no longer a reinscription of
the human from below but a decentering from above that turns
the human into the site of a difference more radical than any
12 The skeptical tendency is exhibited in the pessimistic metainduction and the claim that science
can no longer lay claim to overarching unity. The perspectivist corollary is the suggestion that
reality may have as many different facets as there are vocabularies for describing it. Both tendencies are discernible in recent philosophy of science: see for instance John Dupré, The Disorder of
Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995), or Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Reflection
325
metaphysical difference. The human is no longer a different kind
of being but the site of another kind of difference. But here again
there are two distinct ways of characterizing this difference: as
existence or as drive. In Heidegger’s fundamental ontology,
existence is not a specifiable property but a seinkönnen, a pure
potentiality-to-be.13 Humans are unlike other entities because their
way of being is characterized by a structure of temporal projection
in which the past, the present, and the future are not successive
but inseparable yet unpresentable. This structure is the wellspring
of temporal transcendence: time, not eternity, is the source of
transcendence, but one that is finite and human, as opposed to
infinite and divine. This transcendence unfolds as the correlation of
Dasein and Sein, existence and being. The source of this correlation
lies in Dasein’s “preunderstanding” of being; a preunderstanding
rooted in its practical comportment towards things. Fundamental
ontology is the interpretation of the preunderstanding of being
implicit in practical comportment.
This has two consequences. First, existence as transcendence
unfolds within the bounds of sense. Second, Heidegger ontologizes
sense while decoupling it from the senseless processes that
shape practical comportment. Or rather, he subordinates the
description and explanation of these senseless processes to the
preunderstanding of sense. This idealist premium on sense is
exacerbated by the later Heidegger’s decoupling of being from
existence, or event from comportment. But the ontologization
of sense cannot be countered simply by affirming the primacy
of comportment, recoded as practice. Practices unfold within
social forms that can be idealized as horizons of meaning
or symptomatized as apparatuses of power. This alternative
encapsulates the divide between post-Heideggerean pragmatism,
13 On Heidegger, also see Withy, chapter 10 here.
326
326
Human
which emphasizes the primacy of being-in-the-world, and post-
Nietzschean genealogy, which anatomizes the operations of
power. But the more radical materialist counter to both the
hermeneutics of sense and the metaphysics of power lies in the
psychoanalytic concept of the drive (trieb). As compulsion to
repeat, the drive is not just senseless but the instance articulating
sense and senselessness. Mladen Dolar lucidly expresses the way in
which the concept of the drive subverts every familiar metaphysical
opposition, whether between the one and the many, freedom and
necessity, or culture and nature:
the drive, libido, is not a One, it is not a substance; it possesses the
key quality of the drive by the very impossibility of being substantialized and totalized. . . . Or in other words, we don’t have two separate, independent and opposed areas [nature and culture], neatly
localized and delimited, which would come into conflict with always unsatisfactory outcome. . . . Both nature and culture appear as
non-all, not fully constituted, but held together by their impossible
overlap [the drive]. We cannot simply oppose two massive totalities
of nature and culture, for the Freudian notion of the drive can be
seen as the concept the aim of which is ultimately to de-totalize the
two, to undermine this very opposition and its self-evidence.14
On this psychoanalytic account, the exception of the human is not
derived from the reflexive structure of existential transcendence,
understood as the interpretation of understanding. The exception
consists rather in the enigma of the drive as that which is prior to
understanding but cannot be interpreted. As Jean Laplanche puts
it: “the psychoanalytic method, in its originary moment, works not
with [hermeneutic] keys but with screwdrivers. It dismantles locks,
14 Mladen Dolar, “Of Drives and Culture,” Problemi International 1 (2017): 77–79.
Reflection
327
rather than opening them. Only thus, by breaking and entering,
does it attempt to get at the terrible and laughable treasure of
unconscious signifiers.”15 Unconscious signification is the “terrible
and laughable” obverse of ontological understanding. What is
decisive here is the opposition between unconscious signification
and implicit meaning. The drive at work in unconscious
signification is neither the residue of nature in culture (of the
object in the subject) nor the trace of culture in nature (of the
subject in the object); it is this splitting itself, the disarticulation
of the two. As such, the drive disrupts the consistency of nature,
understood as the domain of instinct, as well as the integrity of
culture, understood as the realm of the normative. In this regard,
and as Dolar emphasizes, the concept of the drive subverts the
post-Kantian opposition between the normative and the natural,
or between reasons and causes. In one sense, the drive is the missing
link between freedom and nature; in another sense, it is the
dissolution of both. It is neither human nor nonhuman but both
more and less than human: the unhuman core of the human.
But the danger of ontologization remains: not the ontologization
of sense through existential transcendence but of the drive as
aboriginal bifurcation of culture and nature. To posit the drive as
aboriginal schism would be to posit it, as Hegel says, as “like a shot
from a pistol.”16 The split is mediated by its extremities. Although
not of the order of either culture or nature, the drive cannot be
wholly abstracted from them. Dereifying it requires supplementing
the psychoanalytic account with an account of the reciprocal
mediation of culture and nature, but one that is not predicated upon
a humanist hermeneutics of sense or a posthumanist metaphysics
15 Jean Laplanche, “Psychoanalysis as Anti-hermeneutics,” trans. Luke Thurston, Radical Philosophy
79 (1996): 12.
16 G. W. F. Hegel, “With What Must the Beginning of Science be Made?,” in The Science of Logic,
trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 45.
328
328
Human
of power (or Life). Here lies the salience of Marx’s historical
materialism. Its key claim is that humans produce and reproduce the
material conditions of their social existence. Thus the difference that
separates humans from other animals is neither metaphysical nor
transcendental: humans make the difference through the historically
different forms in which they produce and reproduce their social
existence. This is Marx’s advance over metaphysical humanism. As
Althusser points out, Marx’s claim (in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach)
that the human essence is not an abstraction inherent in the
individual but a historically variable ensemble of social relations is
not a definition but a dereification of the concept of the human.17
But Althusser’s allergy to the Hegelian aspects of Marx’s analysis of
the commodity form blinds him to its significance as the mediating
link between culture and nature. What is crucial is the twofold
nature of the labor involved in commodity production: it is at once
abstract and concrete. Both the exchange value of abstract labor and
the use value of concrete labor are encompassed by the commodity
form (since the dimension of use value does not exist independently
of exchange value). Labor is exchanged abstractly but used
concretely. Because abstract, value-producing labor is inseparable
from concrete, use-producing labor, the commodity form
mediates social reproduction while remaining utterly opaque to its
practitioners. The commodification of production and exchange
blinds producers and exchangers to the social relations (and more
fundamentally, to the class relation) embedded in their acts of
producing and exchanging. This socially necessary un-consciousness
is entwined with the un-consciousness of the drive. The un-human
core of the human, or what is at once more and less than human,
17 “Between these two terms (man/ensemble of the social relations) there is, doubtless, some relation, but it is not legible in the definition, it is not a relation of definition, not a relation of knowledge.” Louis Althusser, “A Complementary Note on Real Humanism,” in For Marx, trans. Ben
Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 243.
Reflection
329
comprises both the compulsion of the drives and the compulsion
exerted by the social forms necessarily occluded from experience.
Thus the un-human is not only what compels us to repeat ourselves;
it is also what drives us to reproduce ourselves without knowing
that what we are doing makes us what we are. To recognize this is to
recognize human history as a process that does not unfold linearly
from an identifiable origin to foreseeable end. Human history
unfolds catastrophically, in a ceaselessly reiterated overturning of
origin and end driven by the twin pulses of libidinal repetition
and social reproduction. This is the insistence of the un-human
at the core of the human. It is the insistence of this un-human
negativity that un-determines the metaphysical and anthropological
determinations of the human.
Negative Universality
Thus the human is neither a metaphysical subject nor an
anthropological attribute. It is the cipher for an “undetermined
determinability” that cannot be rooted in the metaphysical
difference between actuality and potentiality. Simon Skempton
defines this as “a negative and contentless universality; the
overcoming of all specific determinacy; thus it is not the
universalization of any determination.”18 It is precisely the
negative universality of being-human that is estranged in money
and exchange value. Thus Marx writes: “the inversion and
confusion of all human and natural qualities, the fraternization
of impossibilities, this divine power of money lies in its being the
externalized and self-externalizing genus-being of man. It is the
externalized capacities of humanity.”19 Skempton glosses this as
18 Simon Skempton, Alienation after Derrida (London: Continuum, 2010), 200.
19 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed.
David McLellan, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 118.
330
330
Human
follows: “this alienation involves universal determinability taking
the form of the ‘spectrality’ of money and exchange value. For
Marx, humanity’s ‘generic being’ is an insubstantial unessential
universality, not tied to specificity, which is the basis of its social
relationality, but which is alienated from the individual through
capitalist social relations and the division of labor, which in turn
tie her to specific determinacy.”20 The question is whether this
universal determinability has become estranged, or whether it is
(retroactively) generated through this estrangement. If humanity’s
generic being is “insubstantial, unessential universality” then the
alienation at issue cannot be that of the generic determinable’s
estrangement in its specific determination (as when theologians
describe human power and wisdom as limited manifestations
of God’s limitless power and wisdom). For in this case, the
determinable’s undeterminedness would be a subtraction from
the determination of its species, and its negativity would follow
from the negation of determination, not the negation of negation.
In other words, its negativity would remain positively haloed
by specific determinacy: it would be a relative rather than a
self-relating negativity. But to endow humanity with a generic
transformative potential that has become estranged in the course
of actual history would be to construe this determinability as a
distinct moment that preexists its self-estrangement. This would
be to resubstantialize the human essence as an originary state prior
to the process of social reproduction and to construe negative
universality as the defining property of the human. As I have
shown, this is precisely Heidegger’s characterization of existence as
seinkönnen or pure-potentiality-to-be.
But the materialist twist consists in the claim that the negativity of
this universality is not proper to the human because self-estranging
20 Skempton, Alienation after Derrida, 126.
Reflection
331
negativity manifests the impropriety (or accidentality) of the un-
human, upon which the determinability proper to the human
depends. This is to say that the undetermined determinability
ascribed to being human does not preexist its estrangement in the
social forms of money and exchange; it becomes possible through
them. The determinable is un-determined through its estrangement.
Thus, the determinate does not precede its determination through
negation and estrangement; it only acquires determinacy as the
result of an estrangement that has always already taken place.
This is the subversive core of Hegel’s logic of estrangement: “the
estrangement has already taken place, the distinction has been
excluded from what is selfsame and set to one side; what was
supposed to be selfsameness is thus already one of the estranged
moments much more than it would ever be the absolute essence
itself. That what is selfsame estranges itself means that it, as
what is already estranged, as otherness, likewise thereby sublates
itself.”21 Because what is supposed to be selfsame is already one of
the estranged moments, any potentiality harbored by it must be
subsequent and not antecedent to its estrangement. Potentiality
is determined ex post, not ex ante. What is materialist in Marx is
the suggestion that the negative universality of human sociality
becomes actual as a real (rather than merely ideal) possibility in and
through the social forms that seem to negate it. Communism does
not release social activity in order to recover an estranged essence—a
transcendent potentiality reified in exchange value and subordinated
to capital’s self-valorization. Rather, communism perceives in the
autotelic finality of money the estrangement of an estranging
activity (social reproduction): abstract labor is the appearance of
an essence, human sociality, whose actuality it contradicts; yet this
contradictoriness, and the political practice consequent upon it,
21 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2018), 98–99, sec. 162; translation modified.
332
332
Human
provides the ground for refounding the actuality of sociality. What
we see in abstract labor is the potentiality of our reproductive
activity given tangible form in its sheer determinability. Abstract
labor is a form assumed by reproductive activity, but it is not until
it appears as estranged in the illusory autonomy of commodified
labor power that this activity, and the possibilities generated by our
perceiving its estranged form, become appropriable as our own.
The Compulsion of the Human
Human history is generated by (social) reproduction and
(libidinal) repetition. But it is also the differential element within
which reproduction and repetition recur. As such, history is
not the linear accretion of determination but a recurring loop
through which reproduction and repetition jointly un-determine
whatever has become actually determinable. This is why the
human is not only mutable but the source of a mutability that
is sui generis. But where idealism rooted this mutability in
self-consciousness, Marx and Freud tie it to the compulsions of
reproduction and repetition, both of which operate “behind
the back of ” self-consciousness. The “tremendous power of
the negative” that Hegel attributed to “the pure I” is rooted
in a “thing” that is not any recognizably human subject or
self, precisely because it is neither a monad nor a dyad: it is
the un-human offspring of repetition and reproduction.22 But
it is precisely the error of idealism to view what is necessarily
un-conscious, understood as that which is structurally
incommensurable with conscious experience, as extrinsic or
foreign to conceptual self-consciousness. Only by grasping its
structural heteronomy, which is to say, the constitutive role
22 Hegel, Phenomenology, 20, sec. 32.
Reflection
333
played by the un-conscious within it, can self-consciousness,
or what Hegel called reason, comprehend itself and thereby
satisfy its own conceptual compulsion.23 In other words, only by
recognizing un-human compulsion can humans be compelled to
become free.
23 I owe the concept of “structural heteronomy” to Tuomo Tiisala, who uses it in a distinct but
related sense.