question ‘What is man?’ (or ‘What is the human essence?’) and, a fortiori, making this the fundamental philosophical question. If we, in fact, make it such, we enter upon a new problematic which we might, with Althusser, call a theoretical humanism. Astonishing as it may seem, such a problematic is relatively recent and at the point when Marx was writing, it was not very old at all, since it only dates from the end of the eighteenth century. In Germany the most important names are those of Kant (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 1798), Wilhelm von Humboldt13 and Feuerbach, which indicates that the trajectory of theoretical humanism connects with that of idealism and its refutation. The parallel is an illuminating one. We see in effect that, where the rival (spiritualist, materialist) theories of human nature are concerned, Marx will proceed to a critique of the same order as the one he carried out on the theories of the subject, of activity and sensuous intuition. To say that, ‘in its effective reality’ (in seiner Wirklichkeit), the human essence is the ensemble of social relations is clearly not to reject the question. But it is to attempt radically to displace the way in which it has until now been understood, not only where ‘man’ is concerned, but also as regards ‘essence’.
Philosophers have formed a false idea of what an essence is (and this error is so … essential to them that one can hardly imagine a philosophy without it). They have thought, firstly, that the essence is an idea or an abstraction (one would say today, in a different terminology, a universal concept), under which may be ranged, in a declining order of generality, specific differences and, finally, individual differences; and, secondly, that this generic abstraction is somehow ‘inherent’ (innewoh-nend) in individuals of the same genus, either as a quality they possess, by which they may be classified, or even as a form or a force which causes them to exist as so many copies of the same model.
We can see, then, the meaning of the strange equation made by Marx. At bottom, the words ‘ensemble’, ‘social’ and ‘relations’ all say the same thing. The point is to reject both of the positions (the realist and the nominalist) between which philosophers have generally been divided: the one arguing that the genus or essence precedes the existence of individuals; the other that individuals are the primary reality, from which universals are ‘abstracted’. For, amazingly, neither of these two positions is capable of thinking precisely what is essential in human existence: the multiple and active relations which individuals establish with each other (whether of language, labour, love, reproduction, domination, conflict etc.), and the fact that it is these relations which define what they have in common, the ‘genus’. They define this because they constitute it at each moment in multiple forms. They thus provide the only ‘effective’ content of the notion of essence applied to the human being (i.e. to human beings).
The transindividual
Let us not go into the question of whether this point of view is absolutely original and specific to Marx here. What is certain is that it has consequences both in the field of philosophical discussion (at the level of what is called ‘ontology’),14 and in that of politics. The words Marx uses reject both the individualist point of view (primacy of the individual and, especially, the fiction of an individuality which could be defined in itself, in isolation, whether in terms of biology, psychology, economic behaviour or whatever), and the organicist point of view (which, today, following Anglo-American usage, is also called the holistic point of view: the primacy of the whole, and particularly of society considered as an indivisible unity of which individuals are merely the functional members).15 Marx will embrace neither the ‘monad’ of Hobbes and Bentham, nor the ‘grand être’ of Auguste Comte. It is significant that Marx (who spoke French almost as fluently as he did German) should have resorted to the foreign word ‘ensemble’ here, clearly in order to avoid using the German ‘das Ganze’, the ‘whole’ or totality.
Perhaps things would be clearer formally (though not in their content) if we, in our turn, added a word to the text – if need be by inventing that word – to characterize the constitutive relation which displaces the question of the human essence while, at the same time, providing a formal answer to it (and one which thus contains in embryo another problematic than that of theoretical humanism). The word does in fact exist, but is to be found in twentieth-century thinkers (Kojève, Simondon, Lacan …): we have, in fact, to think humanity as a transindividual reality and, ultimately, to think transindividuality as such.16 Not what is ideally ‘in’ each individual (as a form or a substance), or what would serve, from outside, to classify that individual, but what exists between individuals by dint of their multiple interactions.
Althusser
Louis Althusser (born, Birmandreis, Algeria, 1918; died, Paris, 1990) is better known today by the general public for the tragedies which marked the end of his life (the murder of his wife, his internment in a psychiatric institution; see his autobiography, The Future Lasts a Long Time, trans. Richard Veasey, Chatto and Windus, London, 1993) than for his theoretical works. Those works did, however, occupy a central place in the philosophical debates of the sixties and seventies after the publication in 1965 of For Marx and (with Étienne Balibar) Reading Capital (trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Books, London, 1970). At that point he was one of the leading figures of ‘structuralism’, alongside Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault and Barthes. Acknowledging that Marxism was in crisis, but refusing to attribute the cause of that crisis to mere dogmatization, he undertook a re-reading of Marx. Borrowing the notion of ‘epistemological break’ from historical epistemology (Bachelard), he interpreted the Marxian critique of political economy as a rupture with the theoretical humanism and historicism of idealist philosophies (including Hegel), and as the foundation of a science of history whose central categories are the ‘overdetermined contradiction’ of the mode of production and the ‘structure in dominance’ of social formations. Such a science stands opposed to bourgeois ideology, but at the same time demonstrates the materiality and historical efficacity of ideologies, defined as ‘the imaginary relation of individuals and classes to their conditions of existence’. Just as there is no end of history, so there cannot be any end of ideology. Althusser simultaneously proposed a reevaluation of the Leninist theses on philosophy, which he defined as ‘class struggle in theory’ (Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Books, London, 1971), and he used this to analyse the contradictions between ‘materialist tendencies’ and ‘idealist tendencies’ within scientific practice (Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (1974), trans. Warren Montag, Verso, London, 1990). In a later phase, under the influence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the May 1968 movements, Althusser criticized what he now considered to be the ‘theoreticist deviation’ of his earliest essays, a deviation he attributed to the influence of Spinoza at the expense of dialectics (‘Elements of Self-Criticism’, in Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock, New Left Books, London, 1976). Reaffirming the difference between Marxism and humanism, he outlined a general theory of ideology as the ‘interpellation of individuals as subjects’ and as a system of both public and private institutions ensuring the reproduction of social relations (‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1970), in Essays on Ideology, trans. Ben Brewster, Verso, London, 1984).
An ontology of relations
Here, we must admit, an ‘ontology’ is taking shape. However, for the discussion of the relations between the individual and the genus, it substitutes a programme of enquiry into this multiplicity of relations, which are so many transitions, transferences or passages in which the bond of individuals to the community is formed and dissolved, and which, in its turn, constitutes them. What is most striking in such a perspective is that it establishes a complete reciprocity between these two poles, which cannot exist without one another and are therefore in and of themselves mere abstractions, albeit necessary abstractions for thinking the relation or relationship (Verhältnis).
At this point, speculative as it may seem, we are in fact closer than ever, by a characteristic short-circuit, to the question of politics. Not only are the relations of which we are speaking in fact nothing other than differentiated practices, singular actions of individuals on one another;