The Philosophy of Marx. Étienne Balibar

unity of practice

      At the same time, a theory is also outlined here which – though it vigorously rejects the label of philosophy – nonetheless represents a new departure in philosophy. Marx has exited from the exit from philosophy. But he has not simply come back inside … We can demonstrate this by raising here a very old issue in dialectical thought. As I have said above, though the notion of praxis or revolutionary practice declared with unrivalled clarity that the aim of ‘changing the world’ had put paid to all essentialist philosophy, it was still, paradoxically, liable to present itself as another name for the human essence. This tension increased with the notion of production, as now analysed by Marx. Not only because there is a whole empirical history of production (which will oblige the philosopher to become an economist, historian, technologist, ethnologist etc.), but, above all, because Marx removed one of philosophy’s most ancient taboos: the radical distinction between praxis and poiêsis.

      Since the Greeks (who made it the privilege of ‘citizens’, i.e. of the masters), praxis had been that ‘free’ action in which man realizes and transforms only himself, seeking to attain his own perfection. As for poiêsis (from the verb poiein: to make), which the Greeks considered fundamentally servile, this was ‘necessary’ action, subject to all the constraints of the relationship with nature, with material conditions. The perfection it sought was not that of man, but of things, of products for use.

      Here, then, is the basis of Marx’s materialism in The German Ideology (which is, effectively, a new materialism): not a mere inversion of the hierarchy – a ‘theoretical workerism’, if I can put it thus (as has been the charge of Hannah Arendt and others²⁴), i.e. a primacy accorded to poiêsis over praxis by virtue of its direct relationship with matter – but the identification of the two, the revolutionary thesis that praxis constantly passes over into poiêsis and vice versa. There is never any effective freedom which is not also a material transformation, which is not registered historically in exteriority. But nor is there any work which is not a transformation of self, as though human beings could change their conditions of existence while maintaining an invariant ‘essence’.