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What to Do with Marx's Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach?
tienne Balibar (bio)
Columbia University in the City of New York
eb2333@columbia.edu
Abstract
This essay is based on a reading of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach from 1845, especially Thesis 6, which discusses its
wording with reference to signifying chains tracing back to the constitution of Western Metaphysics. The claim that "the
human essence is not an abstract being inhabiting the singular individual" not only rejects post-Aristotelian metaphysics,
but also theologies of the interpellation of the subject. Saying that "in its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations"
opens the possibility of a multifaceted ontology of relations. Further, it identifies a weakness in Marx's assessment of
Feuerbach's philosophy of the "generic being." It is on this basis that applications to contemporary debates on
philosophical anthropology should be reformulated.
The Theses on Feuerbach, an ensemble of eleven aphorisms apparently not destined for
publication in this form, were written by Marx in the course of 1845 while he was working on the
manuscript of the German Ideology, also left unpublished. They were later discovered by
Friedrich Engels, who published them with some corrections (not all insignificant) as an appendix
to his own pamphlet, "Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy" (1886).
1
They are
widely considered one of the emblematic formularies of Western philosophy and sometimes
compared to other concise texts - such as Parmenides' Poem or Wittgenstein'sTractatus -- that
combine a speculative content of seemingly enigmatic, inexhaustible richness with a manifesto-
like style of enunciation, apparently signaling a radically new mode of thinking. Some of the best-
known aphorisms have achieved a posteriori the same value of a turning point in philosophy (or in
our relationship to philosophy) as, for instance, not only Parmenides's and Wittgenstein's
respective "tauton gar esti noein te kai einai"
2
and "Worber man nicht sprechen kann, darber
muss man schweigen" (27), but also Spinoza's "ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et
connexio rerum" (Ethics II, Prop. VII) or Kant's "Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen
ohne Begriffe sind blind" (Critique of Pure Reason B75/A51), etc.
In such conditions, it is both extremely tempting and imprudent to embark on a new
commentary. But it is also inevitable that we return to the letter of the Theses, checking our
understanding of their terminology and phrases, whenever we decide to assess the place of Marx
(and an interpretation of Marx) in our contemporary debates. This is what I am trying to do in this
presentation, at least partially, with regard to an ongoing discussion of the meaning and uses of
the categories "relation" and "relationship" (both possible equivalents for the German Verhltnis).
The implications of this discussion range from logic to ethics, but involve in particular a subtle,
perhaps decisive nuance separating a "philosophical anthropology" from a "social ontology" (or an
ontology of the "social being," as Lukcs, among others, would put it). My purpose quite naturally
leads to emphasizing the importance of Thesis Six, which in Marx's original version reads as
follows:
Feuerbach lst das religise Wesen in das menschliche Wesen auf. Aber das menschliche Wesen
ist kein dem einzelnen Individuum inwohnendes Abstraktum. In seiner Wirklichkeit ist es das
Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhltnisse.
Feuerbach, der auf die Kritik dieses wirklichen Wesens nicht eingeht, ist daher gezwungen: 1. von
dem geschichtlichen Verlauf zu abstrahieren und das religise Gemt fr sich zu fixieren, und ein
abstrakt - isoliert - menschliches Individuum vorauszusetzen. 2. Das Wesen kann daher nur als
"Gattung", als innere, stumme, die vielen Individuen natrlich verbindende Allgemeinheit gefat
werden.
Here is a standard English translation:
Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no
abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.
Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled to
abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to
presuppose an abstract - isolated - human individual. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended
only as "genus," as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals.
(Marx/Engels 13-15)
Among the many commentaries devoted to these formulas (and especially to the first three
phrases), I single out those of Ernst Bloch and Louis Althusser, which illustrate sharply antithetic
positions.
3
For Bloch, whose detailed commentary, part of his magnum opus Das Prinzip
Hoffnung, was first published separately in 1953,
4
the Theses include the full construction of the
concept of revolutionary praxis, presented as a "word/motto (Losungswort)" that overcomes the
metaphysical antitheses of "subject" and "object" and of "philosophical thinking" and "political
action." The Theses express the crucial idea that (social) reality as such is "changeable
(vernderbar)" because its complete notion does not only denote given states of affairs or
relations arising from an accomplished process (i.e., the present and the past), but also always
already involves the objective possibility of a future or a "novelty (novum)" - something neither
classical materialism nor idealism ever admitted. For Althusser, the Theses are symptomatic of
the theoretical revolution (or "epistemological break") through which Marx would have dropped an
essentially Feuerbachian, "humanist" understanding of communism to adopt a scientific (non-
ideological) problematic of social relations and class struggles as the motor of history.
The Theses thus deserve a (rather counter-intuitive) reading that reveals the "new" ideas twisting
an "old" language to express (or rather announce and anticipate) a theory that, essentially, has no
precedent, but whose implications are still to come. (The main example of this hermeneutic of
twisted, internally inadequate concepts is Althusser's reading of praxis as a philosophical name
for "a system of articulated social practices"). Interestingly, both Bloch's and Althusser's
commentaries emphasize the temporal scheme of a "future" objectively included within the
present as a disruptive possibility - except that for Bloch, this scheme characterizes history,
whereas for Althusser, it characterizes theory or discourse.
5

What is most interesting for us are the ways they resolve the paradoxes in Thesis Six that arise
from antithetic definitions of "human essence (das menschliche Wesen)"; these definitions directly
affect the notion of "anthropology" (inherited from Kant, Hegel, and Humboldt, but above all of
course from Feuerbach, whose main thesis in The Essence of Christianity [1841] is that the secret
of theological discourse is anthropological experience, or that the idea of God and his attributes
are inverted, imaginary representations of human essence). "But the human essence" - Marx
bluntly objects - "is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble
of social relations." This seems to leave no other possibility than admitting that "human essence"
is indeed a necessary notion (even a fundamental one, indicating the primacy of the
anthropological question in philosophy), although it can be understood in different ways: a wrong
way (attributed to Feuerbach"human essence is an abstraction (or an idea) inherent in every
isolated individual"), and a right way (claimed by Marx himself"human essence is the ensemble
of social relations," whatever the logical value of "is"). Althusser, however, goes in a different
direction: for him, the very use of the expression "human essence" involves an equivalence of two
notions, "theoretical humanism" and "philosophical anthropology," with which a theory (i.e., a
materialist investigation) of the "ensemble" (the system or articulation) of "social relations" is
incompatible, because such a theory refers to continuous historical transformations of what it
means to be "human" in relation (of cooperation, division of labor, domination, and class struggle)
to other humans and thus destroys the very idea of "universal" and "permanent" attributes that
could belong to "every single individual" (or subject). In short, a theory of the ensemble of social
relations radically historicizes and de-essentializes our concept of the human, dismantling both
anthropology as a theory and humanism as an ideology. The important expression in Marx's
aphorism would accordingly be "in seiner Wirklichkeit (in its reality)," signaling (as a theoretical
injunction or "poteau indicateur" within theory itself) that the discourse of the "essence of man" is
no longer tenable, and ought to be replaced with a different discourse that would analyze social
relations. The "social" opposes the "human" just as the "relations" oppose the "essence."
But if we return to Bloch's commentary, we observe two things. On the one hand, he clearly
falls under this critique, because he maintains that there are two successive anthropologies (just
as there are two varieties of materialism, and in fact two types of "humanism," one that is abstract
and speaks of eternal attributes of "man," and one that - in Marx's own terms - is "real" and
speaks of historical transformations of society that also create a "new man").
6
On the other hand,
he is able to connect Thesis Six with other Marxian writings which are nearly contemporary,
particularly the well-known critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in Zur
Judenfrage, which leads him to emphasize that the anthropology of "abstract essence" is in fact
itself historically produced: it expresses the political worldview (or ideology) of the ascending
bourgeoisie that resumes the ancient philosophical tradition of "natural right" (Naturrecht) in order
to give its own institution of the national citizen a universalistic foundation. Thus Bloch not only
indicates that "abstract humanism" has a class dimension; he also indicates that it is difficult to
radically criticize every humanism and anthropological discourse while retaining
a universalistic perspective (including a socialist or communist revolutionary perspective).
I find these crossed arguments particularly interesting now that debates
about universalism (and different types of universalismnot only bourgeois or proletarian, but
also gender-based, Eurocentric, or planetary) tend to replace the "dispute of humanism" as it was
fought in continental philosophy (within and outside its Marxist circles) in the 1960s and 70s.
Perhaps we should say that the new "dispute," equally acute, partly continuing and partly
displacing the "dispute of humanism," is precisely the dispute of universalism.
7
My own position
from this angle is that "humanism" and "anthropology" are in fact two distinct notions or problems
that ought to be treated separately. A "non-humanist" or even "anti-humanist" anthropology,
however paradoxical the expression may sound to classical philosophers, could prove not only
possible, but necessary. But in order to disentangle the two notions, a fresh discussion of what
Marx's Thesis exactly means proves illuminating.
8
I divide this discussion into three parts: 1) a
new discussion of the pars destruens in Marx's Thesis Six, namely the critique of an "abstract
essence" inherent in the "isolated individual," in order to elucidate which doctrines (beyond
Feuerbach himself) are implied in this categorization; 2) a new discussion of the pars construens,
namely the recommendation of an "equation" of human essence with "social relations," in which I
focus on some oddities in the wording of the Thesis; 3) a critical discussion of the "bifurcation"
offered by Marx's thesis and an exposition of which orientations his formulas open and which
they close (or even prohibit) in a philosophical debate about anthropology that predated his
intervention and that continued or became renovated after it.
The negative statement: "the human essence is no abstraction inherent in
each single individual."
A discussion addressing the semantics and grammar of Marx's statement must rely on the original
German. To translate (into English or French) is useful but insufficient, since Marx's words have
no perfect equivalent and involve a spectrum of meanings that becomes truncated in other
languages. As we will see, it is also important that Marx uses a Fremdwort or foreign term.
Let us begin with the crucial category Wesen. The usual translation, as we saw, is "essence,"
and this is of course inevitable because Marx is discussing Feuerbach, who famously wrote Das
Wesen des Christentums or The Essence of Christianity, where, as I recall above, the thesis is
held that "God's essence" is an imaginary projection of human essence (i.e., nature). But a
perfectly acceptable translation would be also "being," and in fact the common understanding of
"ein menschliches Wesen" in German would be "a human being." A correlation of the two
notions being and essence (in Greek, to on and ousia) has been effective since the beginning of
Western metaphysics, particularly in Aristotle; even today his legacy remains divided between, on
the one hand, empiricist-nominalists for whom the only "real beings" are individuals (or, in
Aristotle's formulation, "individual substances") and for whom general notions or essences (also
called "universals") represent intellectual abstractions that apply to a multiplicity of individuals
bearing similar characteristics, and, on the other hand, essentialist-realists for whom the singular
individuals "participate of" (or even "derive from") general ideas (which can be conceived as
essences, types, or species) that are themselves (hyper)real.
This general background (long predating "bourgeois" ideology) explains why Marx's critique
cannot avoid raising ontological questions. But there is also, I believe, a need to refer to a
Hegelian background that was very familiar to both Feuerbach and Marx: this is the passage in
the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) where Hegel defines the essence of "spirit" (der Geist, which
generically designates all the figures of consciousness that have become intersubjective,
therefore institutional, and therefore historical) as an "operation of all and everyone" (Tun aller
und jeder), so that a "spiritual essence" (das geistige Wesen) is also, as such, "the essence of all
essences" (das Wesen aller Wesen) (154; Ch. VI, "Spirit").
9
This is a remarkable formula that we
should not hasten to deem a mere product of dialectical jargon, because it contains the principle
of a transition from individual consciousness, where subjectivity and objectivity remain antithetic,
to collective figures, where subjectivity and objectivity emerge (even if through many
contradictions) as complementary aspects of the same historicity. This is indeed a problematic
that Marx will never abandon. A discourse of "essences," however, does not capture all the
connotations of the passage: if we translate it in terms of "a spiritual being" and "the being of all
beings," we discover another dimension of the same question - one that is not only ontological but
furthermore onto-theological, much in the sense that Heidegger will later define it as an
identification (a confusion, from his point of view) of the "being of being (Sein des Seienden)" with
a "supreme being." We are led to understand that all the "essentialist" formulas are inscribed in a
semantic chain, where the theological thesis (that the "being of beings" or "supreme being" is God)
and the anthropological thesis advocated by Feuerbach (that the "being of beings" is Man, who is
also "supreme" in the sense that all other beings are included in his representations) can be
problematically subsumed under a third one: the "being of beings" is Spirit (with the latter also
serving as a historical transition between the first two, depending on whether you understand
"spirit" as a transcendent attribute of the Divine, or as a transcendental faculty of the Human,
synonymous with intelligence, representation, imagination, and so on). This elucidation adds
important connotations to the debate initiated by Marx and continued after him, because it shows
that Marx (in spite of his admiration for the critique of religion accomplished by Feuerbach) had a
strong prescience that "anthropology," inasmuch as its key category is "human nature" or "the
essence of man," could be simply another theology, and "Man" or "Humankind" another name for
God (or a Divine Name), provided it be endowed with sufficiently eminent or transcendent
attributes or powers (such as "self-consciousness," "self-emancipation," or "self-creation") - which,
after all, is a heretical but perfectly defendable thesis within a Christian discursive tradition.
10
It
also shows that Marx could find himself caught in the same aporia, inasmuch as "History,"
"Society," "Revolution," or even "Praxis" could become instantiations of "Spirit" (in spite of or even
because of all declarations of "materialism"). These categories would then oscillate between an
anthropological and a theological understanding. We know that this was quite frequently the case
in the Marxist tradition, and in fact few Marxists are immunized against the (onto)theological
recuperation of their concepts (Bloch and Althusser being no exceptions). The question then
becomes: would Marx be aware of such a possibility in the very moment he uncovers the
"metaphysical" content of Feuerbach's "materialism," when he suggests that Feuerbach remains
a "bourgeois theologian"?
11
And by what "strategy" could Marx not repeat (or "iterate") the onto-
theological effect, when he keeps referring to the issue of "human being/essence" in his criticism
of the anthropological reduction of theological discourse? Such expressions as "social ontology"
or "historical anthropology" are not sufficient answers, but the solution also cannot reside in
cancelling the anthropological framework from the outside.
A further indication that the conceptual tensions underlying every choice of a word or a
propositional form in Marx's text are not to be understood without a close comparison with Hegel
also results from discussing the antithesis between "abstraction" (Abstraktum) and "reality"
(Wirklichkeit, probably better translated - jargon permitted - as "effectivity" or "effective reality").
There is a direct source for this opposition in the same crucial passage from the Phenomenology:
when reaching the level of the "spirit," which (anticipating later developments of his political
philosophy) he identifies with the "ethical life of a people," Hegel explains that singular entities
(figures) or individual subjects (consciousnesses) are only abstractions or abstract moments of
the "effective" spirit itself. This explains why, in the great antithesis forming the core of the critical
argument ofThesis Six, Marx can at the same time vindicate a "nominalist" point of view
la Stirner, for which a general notion or idea (e.g., that of a species or kind, such as Humankind or
Mankind) is only an abstraction, and reject as equally "abstract" the notion of isolated individuals
themselves (such as they are imagined, with the help of metaphysics, by bourgeois political or
economic theory): because both the collective essence and the singular "egoistic" individual are
abstractions when they are "isolated" from the Wirklichkeit, which is much more than "reality" (i.e.,
more than a de facto existence or observable "being there") insofar as it is an operation or a
process of realization (Wirklichkeit comes from Werk and wirken, the German equivalents
for opus and operari). Hegel had defined this process as Spirit, and Marx himself will identify it
with an ensemble of historical processes of transformation affecting social relations. Thus Marx
retains Hegel's simultaneous rejection of the antithetic "essences," which are all the more
"abstract" since they claim to represent the negation of abstraction, but he also radically subverts
the "logic" of that rejection in terms of a "spiritual" operation. How radically, that is the question.
But before we consider his definition of a process that is as "effective" as Spirit while not being
Spirit, we must reflect on another term used by Marx that has remained hitherto undiscussed.
This is the (negative) formula: "...kein dem einzelnen Individuum inwohnendes Abstractum." Up
to now, following most commentators, we have been focusing on the antithetic
terms Individuum or Abstractum, the individual or the abstraction (easily identified with an idea or
"universal idea"). But we have neglected to discuss the (present participle) verb inwohnend, which
translations usually render as "inherent in." It was slightly altered by Engels, who transformed it
into "innewohnend," a modern term whose main use refers to "possession" and "being
possessed" (by some magic force, a god, or the devil, etc.), but that is also etymologically close to
the name Einwohner, meaning "inhabitant" (or resident, dweller) of a country, place, or a house,
etc. Actually the original "inwohnend" (with the same etymology) does exist in German, but it is an
archaic form found in theological contexts (for instance in Meister Eckhart, whence it passes to
J akob Bhme) :
12
it corresponds to the (church) Latin inhabitare, Inhabitatio (which Thomas
Aquinas distinguished from the simplehabitatio, habitare).
13
Returning to this etymological and
theoretical background (with which Marx, as a perfect student of German Idealism, may have had
a direct or indirect acquaintance) is of course not sufficient to support an interpretation, but it
provides a symptom of the complexity of the articulations between an "individual" and an
"abstraction" (or abstract essence) that may be falling under Marx's critique. These articulations
broadly obey two very different models, whose convergence in the end accounts for the
construction of the modern transcendental subject (as defined by Kant and his followers): the
(post-)Aristotelian and the (post-)Augustinian models of individuation.
14

The "metaphysical," post-Aristotelian model (which includes a permanent oscillation between a
"nominalist" and a "Platonist" or "essentialist" interpretation), is better known and more frequently
invoked in philosophical discussions of Thesis Six. It refers to an understanding of the essence as
a "genre" or "species" (in this case Humankind or the Human species) of which the individual
beings are "instances" or "cases" who participate of the attributes of the same essence or,
alternatively, whose analogous characters lead to the formation of a single idea of their common
type (a "general idea"). Hence the importance of Feuerbach's use of Gattung (genre), which, in
the classical discourses of natural history and anthropology, names the common type, and
becomes now turned against him by Marx. Each individual is a representative of the type, or can
be conceived as separately "formed" or "created" after the type: as a consequence, all the
individuals "share" a similar relationship to the type, but they remain isolated from one another in
this similarity, since each of them (more or less perfectly) partakes of the complete type, which
indeed can be a moral or a social type. It is only a posteriori, when they already exist as typical
individuals, that they can relate to one another in various ways: this variable relationship is
"accidental" and does not define their "essence." From Kant to Feuerbach himself, however, a
correction is made to this: in the case of the "human species" - which is not anyspecies -
individuals possess an additional "essential" character: they consciously relate to the (common)
species, and they rely on this consciousness to build a moral community. In that sense, their
"being in common," or "community-forming-essence" (Gemeinwesen) is already present in
potentia in their "specific essence" (Gattungswesen).
15
But with this teleological understanding of
the nature of Man, we already lean in the direction of a second, equally traditional model that is
symptomatically indicated in Marx's Thesis through the use of "inwohnend."
Anybody who has some acquaintance with Augustinian theology knows the statement from De
vera religione (On true religion): "Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi: in interiore homine habitat veritas
(Do not go outside, [but] return to yourself: truth inhabits the internal man)" (29, 72). This echoes
many other formulas in his work (notably in the Confessions and the De Trinitate) suggesting that
what lies at the heart (or the most intimate: interior intimo meo) of the human soul, and therefore
expresses a "truth" that is not only the truth of man's condition but also a truth for him (destined
for his redemption), is also what infinitely surpasses him (superior summo meo), i.e., his singular
relationship to God or God's "presence." I argue this is the second model underpinning Marx's
formula in Thesis Six, allowing us to better understand in which sense the idea of "social
relations" subverts classical representations of the "essence of Man." Within this tradition there
are many variations, ranging from reiterations to interpretations to transformations (and
particularly secularizations).
16
The latter can be "psychological," but they are more interesting
when they rise to a "transcendental" point of view, because this is the deepest way to confront the
tensions of verticality (orsovereignty) and interiority, or transcendence and immanence, that
adhere to the problematic of the "subject." Indeed, it is only against the background of this second,
traditional model that the "subjective" dimension of Marx's discussion can be fully grasped. From
the originary theological point of view, the guiding idea is a unity of opposites, since the vertical
relationship between the Sovereign figure (God, or God's Word, or God's Idea) and the individual
"subject" (Manor better, a singular Man, "each one") must be read from both sides: as a
creation, injunction, visitation, or revelation arising from God's power and grace, and also as a call,
demand, recognition, or act of faith expressing the subject's individual dependency.
17
But from the
secularized, anthropological point of view, the guiding idea is displaced by the fact that there is no
longer any "verticality" or "sovereignty" governing Man's subjection (or "subjectivation," as more
recent philosophers would say) other than effects of authority (which can also be read critically as
domination) arising from human representations and activities themselves. A good example (in
fact, much more than that) is Kant's notion of the categorical imperative, which is also interpreted
as the "inner voice" of reason expressing the dependency of the human subject with respect to a
moral community of rational beings that renders him autonomous or produces his "emancipation"
by virtue of its essential universality.
Marx seems to be discarding this genealogy when he objects to "Feuerbach" that his
conception of human essence as "Gattung (genre)" remains "mute (stumme)" and tries to "relate"
or "unite" (verbinden) many individuals (subjects) only through a natural universality. Why, then,
would he use the term "inhabiting" instead of simply "informing" or "shaping (bildend, formierend)"?
Apart from the theological connotations suggested by Feuerbach himself (to which I return below),
we could think of another violently ironic interpretation (rather close to the critical discourse of On
the Jewish Question), namely, the idea that what "possesses" the "abstract individual" (or
the individualized individual) from inside is nothing else than the "idea of [private] property," which
in the era of bourgeois (metaphysical) materialism has been substituted for God as the "inner
truth" of Man.
18

The positive statement: "In its reality it is the ensemble of social
relations."
The decisive moment is of course the next one, when Marx moves from indicating what "human
essence" cannot be to defining what it actually is, thereby providing the critique with a determinate
orientation and content. As as we know from the commentaries and transpositions, however, this
is also where Marx's formula proves ambiguous and open to contradictory interpretations. Not
forgetting that these are "improvised" personal notes (but also that they are endowed with a kind
of "geniality," as suggested by Engels, or, in Benjaminian terms, have the quality of an
"illumination"),
19
we can try to clarify the issue by making as much as possible of the writing itself.
A first point to examine is the semantic value of the opposition "In seiner Wirklichkeit,"
translated as "In its reality." A "weak" interpretation reads it as simply marking a reversal: leaving
aside what the human essence was only in a speculative-imaginary-abstract (and therefore wrong)
representation provided by philosophers like Locke, Kant, and Feuerbach, we will now indicate
what it really is. "Really" then means "truly" or "true to the facts," as logicians like to say. In a post-
Hegelian context, however, it seems advisable to take into account the logical difference between
"reality (Realitt)" and "effective reality" (or "effectivity [Wirklichkeit]"), and this means not only to
indicate what the human essence effectively is, or what it becomes when it is "effectuated"
(i.e., produced as a result of material and historical "operations," which is the point on which Marx
continuously insists in the Theses, under the heading of such concepts as Ttigkeit and Praxis),
but even more than that: this means to indicate what identifies the "essence" with an effectuation
or an "actual process." The concept of being/essence is nothing else than the concept of an
activity/process, or a praxis.
20
This is a "stronger" interpretation, but I believe that it must be
pushed to an even more cogent level to suggest that the "effectuation" affecting at the same time
the human essence and the concept of human bein /essence (Wesen) must also be understood
as its dialectical Aufhebung or realization-negation. Thus what the critique is targeting is not only
an "abstract" representation of human essence, but also the notion of "human essence" itself as
"abstraction." Althusser is right on this point, but it is Bloch who provides the clue by
systematically referring the invention of the category praxis in the Theses to the contemporary
motto that "philosophy must be realized (verwirklicht)," but cannot be realized (or become "real")
without also being "negated" (aufgehoben) as "philosophy" - the reverse also being true:
philosophy cannot be negated without being realized.
21
My personal complement to this is that, in
the context of Thesis Six, the typical form of "philosophy" or philosophical discourse is
precisely anthropology, which leads us to the conclusion: anthropology as a discursive figure (or,
as Althusser would say, a "problematic") must be realized-negated (aufgehoben and verwirklicht)
and, since "human essence/being" (das menschliche Wesen) is the category from which the very
possibility of a philosophical anthropology derives, it also must become negated-realized. But the
concept that crystallizes this dialectical operation is "the ensemble of social relations": we must
interpret it from this point of view, beginning with "social relations" (gesellschaftlichen
Verhltnisse).
It is important here to keep in mind a triple philological fact: 1) that Marx's formulas are situated
historically in the wake of a crucial event in the history of ideas (affecting philosophy as well as
politics), namely, the "invention" of "social relations" (as a concept, and originally in French as les
rapports sociaux);
22
2) that "relation" belongs to a complex paradigm that is never fully
translatable (German Verhltnis and French rapporthaving partly different scopes) and whose
philosophical use immediately raises the issues of active versus passive, subjective versus
objective, and internal versus external oppositions (what Kant called the "amphibologies of
reflection"); 3) that any discussion of a Marxian formula involving die gesellschaftlichen
Verhltnisse (and granting them an "essential" function) is inevitably polarized by Marx's later
uses ofProduktionsverhltnisse ("relations of production" and subsequent economic and non-
economic derived "relations") and Klassenverhltnisse ("class relations," with subsequent
description of their "antagonistic" character and their entailing different forms of social
"domination"); what is striking in the Theses, however, is the absence of this more precise
determination and the indeterminate use of the category "relation" except for the attribute "social."
The question for Marxist readers was thus inevitably posed whether they should read "social
relations" as implicitly directed towards a (historical-materialist) notion of the determining function
of production and class struggles in human history, or whether they should associate
the Theses with a (potentially more general or generic) notion of "relation" that, in turn, would
betray a continuity with the tradition of philosophical anthropology (in its very "realization" or
"secularization") or that would open the possibility of a broader (social) ontology based on the
categorical equivalence of the two key notions (relation and praxis ortransformation). All these
questions are linked, of course, and I can clarify them here only partially.
To begin with, in English a "relation" tends to indicate an objective situation, whereas a
"relationship" specifically indicates a relation between persons that has a subjective dimension;
but "relation" also has a logical and ontological meaning (whereby relations are opposed to forms
or substances). French distinguishes between relation (which commonly means a person to
whom one relates) and rapport, which means both a proportion and an objective structure, but
can also be used to indicate an active intercourse among persons, as in "rapport sexuel" or
"rapport social" (especially in the sense of an intercourse that takes place in a "social"
environment or follows "social rules"). The German Beziehung is reserved for logical contexts but
also to qualify persons, whereas Verhltnis essentially means a quantitative proportion or an
institutional correlation of situations (e.g., the Hegelian and Marxian complex formula
"Herrschafts- und Knechtschaftsverhltnis," a relation of domination and servitude/subjection). All
these terms partially overlap, of course, but each time in a different way. It is important to recall,
finally, that each of the three languages has another term of very broad application, especially in
the early modern period, namely "commerce" in French, "intercourse" in English, and Verkehr in
German.
In the early 19
th
century, in the wake of the industrial revolution and the French revolution,
which totally transformed the perception and discourse of politics, a (mainly French) generation of
historians and social theorists invented (as we would say today retrospectively) the concept of
"society" in a new sense that went beyond the classical notions of political/civil association, or
normative rules for the education and interaction of individuals with different statuses, to indicate
a system or totality whose transformations and institutions confer roles on individuals (and shape
or challenge their sentiments and ideas), but also follow certain objective laws or display
tendencies that are not reducible to individuals' intentions. It is in this general framework that the
conflicts were fought among the newborn "ideologies" of the post-revolutionary era (such as
"conservatism," "liberalism," and "socialism") and that the idea of a new "science,"
called sociology, was born.
23
The key notion for the political ideologies and the sociological
discourse was precisely rapport sociali.e., a distribution of roles and a pattern of interaction
among individuals and groups marked by reciprocity or domination, as that which belongs
"organically" to the construction (or "fabric") of a society and characterizes its difference from
others in history or geography (and thus makes central the issues of transformation and
comparison in the social sciences).
There is no doubt that this epistemological breakthrough also has affinities with the Hegelian
notions of "objective spirit" and "civil society (brgerliche Gesellschaft)," within which Hegel's
phenomenological concept of "recognition (Anerkennung)" becomes integrated as a subjective (or
better, inter-subjective) moment to account for the permanent tension of individuality and
institution in history. But an important difference is that the Hegelian notions are more "deductive"
(or even speculative, in spite of their important realistic content that attests to Hegel's reading of
Montesquieu's social history, Adam Smith's political economy, or the German school of positive
Law), because they are meant a priori to justify a construction of the bourgeois constitutional
monarchy as the historical achievement of "rationality" in politics. And there is also no doubt that -
in theTheses on Feuerbach and in the immediately subsequent work (written with Engels and
Moses Hess), the German Ideology, where the "French" concept of "rapport social" is translated
and pluralized as die gesellschaftlichen Verhltnisse Marx is beginning to offer his own
contribution to this epistemic change by combining a "communist" perspective of radical social
transformation with a specific way of "dialectically" analyzing conflicts as immanent forces of
development and change in the social structures that historically "frame" human character.
The specific modality of this contribution in the Theses is what interests us here. It is both very
speculative itself (even when fiercely attacking "philosophical" speculation) and, as I already
noted, largely indeterminate - which also means that several potential developments remain latent
in the formulations. It was certainly inevitable that, trying to overcome pure speculation (or an
abstract critique of abstraction), Marx needed to reduce the indetermination of his concepts. As
we know (and most commentators agree), this is already well under way in the German
Ideology (to which I will have to refer again). But in order to understand why theTheses produced
such an echo in philosophy, and remain a key text if we want to "problematize" Marx's thought
and choices, we must pay attention equally to what is already there of the coming "historical
materialism" and to what still differs from the latter's axioms. I believe that two elements are
especially important here: one is the articulation of the two attributes "human (menschlich)" and
"social (gesellschaftlich)"; the other is the enigmatic use of a (French) Fremdwort to name the
sum total (or combined effect) of the social relations "equivalent" to a new definition of the human
essencedas Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhltnissen, when so many categories would
be available within the German philosophical tradition.
It could be useful to discuss each single use of the words "human" and "social" in the Theses.
For the sake of brevity, I shall concentrate on the implications of Thesis Ten in relation to the
anthropological question: "The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society (die brgerliche
Gesellschaft); the standpoint of the new is human society (die menschliche Gesellschaft), or
social humanity (die gesellschaftliche Menschheit)." Again, we find here one of these beautifully
symmetric formulas invented by Marx that nevertheless remains difficult to interpret! Engels's
"corrections" are revealing, because they bring to the fore an only latent political content at the
risk of blurring the analytical implications. Apparently he was worried that the apposition "die
menschliche Gesellschaft," "die gesellschaftliche Menschheit" amounted to a tautology. Therefore
he introduced a more explicitly "socialist" content by transforming the latter into "die
vergesellschaftete Menschheit" or socialized humanity: a society (or a "world") in which
individuals are no longer separated from their own collective conditions of existence and thus
forced into an "abstract" form of existence that paradoxically makes individualism the "normal"
form of social life and that "alienates" humans by isolating them from the relations to others on
which their "practical" life depends (or that lends those relations a coercive, inhuman forma
"separation" leading to a "split of the self [Selbstzerrissenheit]" that religious communal feelings
then seek to heal in the imaginary) (Thesis Four). To complete this clarification, Engels also puts
quotation marks around the adjective in "brgerliche" Gesellschaft, which is a way of indicating
that the term retains its technical value in Hegelian philosophy (usually translated today as "civil
society," as opposed to "State" or "political society"), but also a way of suggesting that this civil
society has a bourgeois character, in which social relations are dominated by the logic of private
property generating individualism and an alienated form of society. The full argument then
becomes explicit: "ancient Materialism" (to which Feuerbach still belongs) will not be able to
overcome the alienation that it loudly denounces, because it is still a "bourgeois" philosophy
assuming an individual "naturally" separated from others (or separately referred to the essence of
the "human"), whereas a "new Materialism" - whose key categories are "social relations"
constituting the human and praxis, or a practical transformation already at work in every form of
society - is able to explain howhumanity returns to its essence (or its authentic being)
by acknowledging (not denying, repressing, or contradicting) its own "social" determination. The
human, in other words, was always "social" from the point of view of its material conditions (or
never consisted in anything else than "social relations" in itself), but it was for itself split and
alienated, contradicting this essence in its ideology and its institutions, with the modern "civil-
bourgeois" society pushing the contradiction to the extreme. And it is necessary now that the
contradiction be resolved, with society practically eliminating its own alienating "products" and
becoming reconciled with itself, which is to say, becoming both fully "human" and effectively
"social."
This is a reading fully compatible with some of Marx's most explicit statements about the
various stages of human emancipation as they were enunciated in his contemporaneous writings
that proposed a "dialectic" of the reversal of alienation (or the separation of human beings from
their own essence).
24
But it also too easily resolves the philosophical tensions involved in Marx's
permanent double use (quid pro quo) of the terms "human" and "social" by distributing their moral
(or ethical) uses and their historical (or descriptive) meaning into different categories, thereby
transforming the strong performative dimension of Marx' s writing (which is also at the core of his
"practical humanism" or "real humanism") into a political syllogism. Marx was in fact suggesting
that an authentic relationship of subjects to their own being/essence (Wesen) would inevitably
transform our interpretation of what it means to be (a) "human," because it would reveal that the
human is essentially "social" and that the "social" is both a condition of possibility for every
individual life ("man is a social animal," as the post-Aristotelian tradition registered it) and an ideal
realization of man's ethical aspirations (in other words, a "communist" form of life); whereas
Engels now suggests that a process of socialization is to take place historically for the conditions
to emerge that make it possible to transform "human nature" in a revolutionary manner. But this
redistribution of the ethical and historical sides of the two categories among the complementary
realms of "ends" and "means" also effectively injects into Marx's formulas a "social ontology" that
is not necessarily there (or not literally present). And, as a result, while reducing the
indetermination of Marx's statements, it also reduces their potentialities.
25
We find confirmation
that this reduction has been taking place when we examine the other enigmatic stylistic effect in
this part of Thesis Six, namely the use of the "French" word ensemble.
I submit that we cannot just explain it "weakly" through a reference to circumstances and
conditions of writing: the fact that Marx (who in any case wrote and spoke fluent French) was
living in Paris at the time, and would quite naturally insert French words into his personal notes
when they came to his mind quicker than German concepts (he did the same later with English).
This may be true, but it blurs the fact that certain crucial semantic oppositions are at stake here.
In fact "ensemble" is, I would suggest, an aggressively "neutral" or "minimal" term, which makes
sense if we see it as an alternative to such speculative notions, central to Hegelian dialectics (but
also to the emergent "sociological" discourse with its obsession for "organicity"), as das Ganze,
die Ganzheit (or Totalitt), or die gesamten (gesellschaftlichen Verhltnisse), i.e., the whole, the
(organic) totality of social relations. What Marx is carefully avoiding here is a category that
indicates completeness, in the very moment in which he seems to follow exactly the Hegelian
movement of privileging the "concrete universality" against "abstraction" (since the concrete and
the complete are synonyms in Hegel).
26
Therefore he is departing from Hegel in the moment in
which he also comes closest to him. To put it more provocatively, it is as if Marx were reversing
the Hegelian choice for the "good (or real) infinity" (meaning an infinite that becomes integrated in
the form of a totality) in favor of the "bad infinite" (an infinite that is only "indefinite" and that is
identical with a mere addition or succession of terms that remains open). This hypothesis is
supported by a single symptomatic word, but it has the great interest of making it possible to
combine all the logical, ontological, and even onto-theological elements of the debate in one
single critical operation.
I believe that three positive connotations can be attached to the apparently negative preference
for das Ensemble instead of das Ganze, in other words for the use of a Fremdwort that
performatively deconstructs the totalization-effect or (to borrow from Sartre) indicates that the
"new" category of being/essence (Wesen) only works as a "de-totalized totality" (or perhaps even
as a "self-de-totalizing totality"). The first is a connotation of horizontality: "social relations" are
interact or interfere with one another, but they are not to become vertically hierarchized (with
some social relations being more decisive or more essentially human, and one type of relation
determining the others "in the last instance").
27
The next is a connotation of indefinity or seriality,
meaning that social relations constitutive of the human form an open-ended network for which
there is neither a conceptual closure (no a priori or empirical demarcation between what is human
and what is not) nor a historical one (no limits ascribed to the developments of social
relations/activities that open new possibilities for the human, whether constructive or even
destructive). Finally we can evoke a connotation of multiplicity in the strong sense,
i.e. heterogeneity: not only are there in fact several "social relations" that "form" the human, but
they belong to many different realms or genres (or, as Bloch would say, they form a multiversum)
and not to a single one that would confer upon them the "human" quality. Thus it is not like in the
Aristotelian polis--with which Marx's conception seems to share so many "anti-individualistic"
axioms--, where there is a multiplicity of social relations, symmetric or dissymmetric but always
attributed to the human by virtue of their use of language (or discourse--logos); it is, rather, more
like in Aristotle's metaphysics, where different, heterogeneous genres of being are called that by
analogy and distributively, but are not emanations of a univocal supreme genre that would be
"Being as such."
If we assume these connotations together (and carefully avoid imposing at a more generic
level something like an "ensemble of the ensembles"), we finally understand why the internal
critique of the very notion of "essence," the dissolution of "abstract" representations of the Human
(or "humanist" notions inherited from the metaphysical tradition and appropriated by bourgeois
philosophers to reconcile economic individualism with moral and political notions of the
community), and a contradictory use of Hegel's concept of "effective reality" are imbricated in this
complex manner. To write that "in its reality (Wirklichkeit) the human being/essence (Wesen)
is not an abstraction inhabiting the single/singular/isolated individual, but the (open,
indeterminate) ensemble of social relations" is a performative gesture that simultaneously
transforms the meanings of all the key terms it uses. As "essence" becomes applied in a
"materialist" manner to the anthropological problem, it also acquires a paradoxical
(anti)ontological meaning whereby its accepted consequences are reversed: instead of "unifying"
and "totalizing" a multiplicity of attributes, it now opens an indefinite range of metamorphoses (or
historical transformations) inasmuch as individuals are essentially "modes" (as Spinoza would say)
of the social relations they actively produce, or they collectively interact with others and with
natural "conditions." This critique reveals that there can be a single alternative to the apparently
antithetic notions of individuality and subjectivity inherited from Western metaphysics - an
alternative that also tentatively avoids creating a new figure of the "supreme being."
The bifurcation: rival "ontologies" and "anthropologies"
Drawing lessons from these philological and semantic considerations, and returning to the central
difficulty, which concerns a "transformative" or "performative" relationship of Marx's thought (and
conceptual choices, expressed through words) to the issue of "anthropology" (for which antithetic
interpretations in the history of Marxism testify), I would summarize my conjectures in the
following manner:
1. a. There is no way we can discuss the tensions in the idea of a philosophical anthropology, and its relations
to the ideal of "humanism," without bringing in an ontological issue, which in fact forces us not only to locate the
debate about anthropology in its immediate modern or "bourgeois" context, but also to return to the broader realm of
the "history of metaphysics," its "revolutions," and its problematic "end." I have suggested as much in the past when
proposing that Marx's "early" materialist philosophy be referred to as an "ontology of the relation," where the basic
notion is not "individuality" but "transindividuality" (or a concept of the individual which always already includes its
relation to - or dependency on - other individuals).
28

But then a perilous ambiguity may arise. We could believe that - just like Bloch and others for whom the distinction of
Marx's invention was not a gross suppression of the anthropological problem, but rather its being transferred from
bourgeois/metaphysical abstractions to historical social determinations - the whole issue has to do with inventing
a social ontology. We can see now that this is an ambiguous formula. It could mean that we are "ontologizing the
social," which in turn means either that "society" as a whole (as a system, organism, network, development, etc.) is
installed in the place of "being," or that the emergence of the social (as opposed to the biological, the psychological,
etc.) is "essentially" attributed to some quasi-transcendental instance that has a "socializing" quality (such as language,
labor, sexuality, or even "the common" or "the political"). Or, twisting the previous representations, as it were, it could
mean that we are "socializing ontology": not in the sense of subjecting ontology to some preexisting, "more
fundamental" social principle (which is not very different from installing "Society" where "God" used to be in classical
metaphysics), but in the sense of "translating" every ontological question (e.g., individuation/individualization, the
articulation of "parts" and "wholes," the imbrication of past, present, and future, etc.) into a "social" question in the
most general sense, that of the conditions or relations that prevent human individuals from the possibility of isolation,
whatever the "matter" or "substance" and the modalities or functions of these relations. "Relating to" and "being
related to" would thus be considered the constitutive ontological mark of the human.
This is indeed what I had in mind when, some years ago, I interpreted in this sense Marx's statement that "in its reality,
the human essence/being is the ensemble of social relations." But something disturbing remains to be clarified here,
namely, that once again we have been forced to make use of the adjective "human" in the very formula that withdraws
"humanism" from our discourse, i.e., that prevents us from any possibility of identifying/defining "the human" prior to
the (forever incomplete) discovery ofthe multiplicity of other ways of "relating humans" or of "relating to any human." I
see only one possibility for overcoming this difficulty: this is to radically draw the conclusions from the fact that
"humans" (or "men," in classical language) only exist in the plural. This is not only to say that a plurality made of
irreducible singularities (or "persons") is an originary condition of being-human (Arendt's thesis), perhaps not even
only that "multitude" is the originary figure of human existence in society and history (Negri's thesis), but also that
social relations in the strong sense are those that, while bringing humans together or preventing their "isolation,"
also make their differences irreducible, particularly through distributing them among various "classes" in the widest
possible sense - which is not to say that such distributions are stable, eternal, or coherent among themselves.
29
In
other words, "social relations" are always internally determined as differences, transformations, contradictions, and
conflicts that are radical enough to leave only the heterogeneity that they create as "the common" (or, in more
jargonesque philosophical terminology, the "being-in-common" or Mitsein) without which individuals "relating" to one
another would return to essential isolation or ontological "individualism."
30
But this is not really different from explaining
that social relations are "practical" (or that the essence of society is praxis, as Marx powerfully enunciated in
the Theses). The distinctive feature of relations (and also the reason why, to a second degree, they must be
articulated with one another or influence each other without becoming fused in a single "whole") is, in other words, the
way they make it possible for some "individuals," "groups," "parts" (or even "parties") totransform others,
be transformed by others, and perhaps in the end transform the modality of the relation itself. As Marx was suggesting,
"relation" and "praxis" become strictly correlative terms (and the second is no less metamorphic or vernderbar than
the first) as soon as a notion of "effective reality" is cut from the (theological, spiritual) ideal of "completeness" and is
associated instead with a scheme of "open infinity."
31

2. b. But an even greater amphibology still "inhabits" such an attempt at identifying how we must understand
the subversive philosophical operation in Marx's re-definition/de-construction of "human essence": this is the
amphibology about whether the "relations" and their intrinsic process of "transformation" (or changeVernderung in
the terminology of the Theses) should be interpreted as "external" or "internal," i.e., as inscribed in a (changing)
distribution of conditions and forces, or implied in a (decisive) effort (perhaps just a deviation) on the part of subjects
that then constitutes them as makers of their own relations.
32
This is indeed a very old discussion in philosophy. Here
we are interested in why such seemingly "metaphysical" aporias never cease to return within a "dialectical" discourse
that, officially, exposed their purely "abstract" character (first in Hegel, but also in Marx). Many a brilliant "Marxist"
discourse has been elaborated to philosophically resolve the dilemma of externality versus internality by transposing
onto a different plane the Hegelian notion of subjectivation as the dialectical interiorization of external relations. Let us
simply recall (in opposite directions) Lukcs's "ultra-Hegelian" notion of the Proletariat as a "subject-object" of history,
whose class-consciousness involves the negation of the "totality" of the social relations already transformed by
capitalism into commodity-relations, and is therefore an immanent, active reversal of these "reified" relations
themselves. Or Althusser's "Spinozistic" (and radically anti-Hegelian) suggestion that the same "overdetermined"
historical process could become analyzed in terms of its "external," objective, and necessary conditions as well as in
terms of its intrinsic, "aleatory," transindividual actions or agencies (which he calls "encounters").
33
In these concluding
remarks, I want only to describe how the amphibology surfaces in the "moment" of the Theses (and of the German
Ideology, in short, in the year 1845).
I believe that the aporias in Marx's text are interesting not only as objects for "Marxologists," but also because they
form a whole new episode of the age-old philosophical controversy concerning the possibility (or impossibility) of
"internal relations," which in a sense (from Plato to Russell) redoubles the controversy among nominalists and realists
concerning "universals." Hegel is indeed a privileged example of a philosopher who defends the idea of the existence
of "internal relations" (i.e., relations that are not only contingently and externally binding for those "terms" like
individuals or substances that remain independent of their relations, but that are furthermore mirrored in the
constitution or disposition of their bearers themselves)
34
; but he also defends the much stronger idea that relations are
"real" only if they are, precisely, internal or internalizedwhich, in his case, can only mean that they are "spiritual"
relations or have become moments in the development of the (objective) Geist, i.e., are realized in the form of
historical institutions endowed with the consciousness of their cultural value, their political function, and so on. How to
criticize this "spiritualistic" (and also teleological) construction of the internality of relations without simply returning to
what it was meant to overcome, namely, a mechanistic and naturalistic representation of external relations (i.e.,
primarily non-subjective relations) whereby the supporting terms (be they "individuals," "nations," "cultures," "classes,"
etc.) are passive andautonomized from their "common" element? But also: Why avoid the privilege of externality
(space, matter, dissemination, contingency, etc.) that, precisely, every spiritualism abhors and every materialism a
contrario vindicates and tries to build into its own conception of "agency" or even "subjectivity"? Why should
"subjecthood" become equated with "interiority"?
35

If we project these interrogations onto our reading of Marx's thesis of the Wirklichkeit of the "ensemble" of social
relations, it seems to me that what we uncover is a permanent oscillation between two possibilities of interpretation:
one more "externalist," the other more "internalist," and neither ever entirely separated from the other. One way of
reading the "ensemble" identifies it with what became later known as a structure, and insists on the "logical" fact that
processes of subjectivation accompanying the passivity or the becoming active (even revolutionary) of the social
agents are interdependent and are formally dependent on the relations forming their "conditions." (Anti-capitalist
movements, for instance, are dependent on the transformations of capitalism, which affect their ideologies or
consciousness, their forms of organization, and so on). But another way of reading it is to bring back the great
Hegelian model of intersubjectivity or "conflictual recognition" (as exposed primarily in the Master-Slave dialectics of
the Phenomenology): this model avoids all risk of ontologizing the relationship in the form of a formal or abstract
structure overlooking the actions of historical subjects, because it suggests that the institutional dimensions of social
relations are essentially crystallizations or materializations of the dissymmetry affecting each subject's perception of
the other (the mutual inability of the Master and the Slave to "perceive" what renders the other's worldview irreducible
to his own, for instance: sacrificing one's life for "prestige," or cultivating labor as a progressive value). But this model
also produces the illusion that, in a given social conflict, anything taking place "in the back" of the conscious subjects
(or remaining bewusstlos, as Hegel puts it) can ultimately become reintegrated or "interiorized" within consciousness,
so that antagonistic (or simply different) subjectivities are mirror images of a single "spirit." Using a different
terminology, we could say that there is an element of "transindividuality" in each of these possibilities.
It is very interesting to see that, in the German Ideology, whose writing accompanies the framing of the Theses on
Feuerbach or immediately follows it, Marx tries to "mediate" the amphibology of the "internal" and "external"
understandings of the category "social relation" (its fluctuating either towards an objective structure or towards a pure
intersubjectivity) through an almost ubiquitous use of the term Verkehr ("commerce" or "intercourse"), which could be
read from both angles (or on both registers). Soon, however, the duality will return with different ways of explaining
the alienation characterizing the relations within capitalism (and more generally bourgeois society)
36
: either as an
estrangement of the subjects from their own collective "world," as a splitting of that world into antithetic life-worlds
one utilitarian and individualistic, the other imaginary and communitarian (the explanation clearly privileged by the
aphorisms in the Theses describing the ideological "redoubling" of the social world), or as a more strategic pattern
of domination, conflict, and political struggle among "classes" (what Capital calls the Herrschafts- und
Knechtschaftsverhltnis or political relationship that "directly" arises from the "immediate antagonism" in the
production process between exploited laborers and proprietors of the means of production [Book 3, Ch. 47]). In both
cases, however, the initial multiplicity (and heterogeneity) of the "social relations" has been subsumed under (and in
fact reduced to) the absolute privilege of the labor relations, which bring back a "social ontology" because they confer
upon "labor" the unique capacity of really "socializing" subjects in a "division of labor," and because they tend to
represent society as a "productive organism," however complex one might conceive the system of other instances
(later called "superstructures [berbau]") deriving from the material function of labor or ideologically covering it. Social
alienation in all its forms (psychological, religious, artistic, and so on) is essentially a development of the alienation of
labor. And political conflict is essentially an antagonism among classes that are either laboring classes or propertied
classes living off other men's labor, as the Communist Manifesto states right away.
3. c. After the fugitive moment of the Theses, Marx may have had very good reasons to accomplish this
anthropological reduction to alienated labor cum ontologization of the indeterminate statement in Thesis Six about
"human essence" (and let us once again repeat that this is not so much a "betrayal" of the philosophical radicality
expressed by the 1845 aphorisms than a continuation, in a given conjuncture, of the risky speculation they initiate):
there was the huge extent of social phenomena, ranging from everyday life to the constitutional transformations of the
State and the new forms of mass politics, produced by the industrial revolution and the ascendency of capitalism -
which was probably even more decisive in its negative form, namely, the "materialist" imperative to counter the
bourgeois suppression of the active social role of laborers and working classes, and the intellectual denial of the
"productive" forces and activities. Without this equation one-sidedly asserted by Marx (social relations =relations of
production, or their consequences), we would perhaps still identify a "society" with a spirit, culture, or a political regime.
We must, however, take the full measure of the anthropological consequences (I am tempted to say
the anthropological price) involved in this reduction, first of all in the sense of a "reduction of complexity.".
Perhaps the best way to measure it, within a discussion of the Theses on Feuerbach, is to indicate which distorting
consequences it produced for the reading and interpretation of Feuerbach himself. Marx's main objection in
the Theses against Feuerbach is that his conception of materiality/sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) remains "abstract" or
"inactive" (which interestingly means that it lacks at the same time a "subjective" and an "objective" dimension:
see Thesis One). Feuerbach, accordingly, would keep subsuming single human beings under a human essence that
is only an idea, however "concrete" or "empirical" it was proclaimed to be. By contrast, Marx's own materialism
identified social relations with activity (Ttigkeit), but this activity would become all-encompassing when (in the next
step) it was defined as a continuous collective process that is both poisis and praxis, ranging from elementary
productive activities to revolutionary insurrections and making the collective worker qua laborer/producer a potential
revolutionary (and, conversely, the revolutionary subject a conscious, organized, and indomitable worker). This is the
basis of the communist great narrative. But is it a correct reading of Feuerbach himself? Not quite, obviously, and for
one good reason: it could not be said without qualification that Feuerbach's concept of human essence only refers to
an "abstract notion of genre" where the "relational" dimension is absent (and that consequently imagines the genre
as separately "inhabiting" every individual, conferring upon them all a "human" quality in the same manner).
Feuerbach's genre (Gattung) is in fact profoundly relational itself, because it is conceived in terms of a "dialogue"
between subjects distinguished as "I" and "You." What remains questionable, of course, is whether the kind of dialogic
"relationality" that, according to Feuerbach, is inherent in the human essence can be called "social." Probably it
is existential rather than social. But is there not in turn a risk that Marx's denial of a "social" character in what
Feuerbach calls a "relation" (or, more precisely, a "relationship"Beziehung rather than Verhltnis) arises from the
former's arbitrary decision to identify certain relations and practices (linked to production and labor) as social relations
and as socializing practices at the expense of all others?
Let us be more specific. Thesis Four is a good guide here: in The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach does "demystify"
the mysteries of theology by reducing theological notions (the concept of God, to begin with) to anthropological notions
and "human realities." But he is more precisely concerned with an interpretation of the Christian dogma of the Trinity in
terms of a double transposition: a transposition of the "terrestrial" institution of the family into the ideal image of the
"Holy Family," followed by a transposition of the Holy Family itself (as an imaginary community) into a more
speculative communication of divine "persons" (hypostases) who are supposed to be One in Three (i.e., fully
"reconciled") - the Father, the Son (incarnated Word), and the Spirit instead of the Father, the Son, and the (virgin)
Mother. From there it is not a long way to explain that the "secret" of Christian theology is a projection of sexual
relations among humans (marked by desire, imperfect love, and sensual pleasure) into an ideal,perfect love (that
celebrated passages of the Bible straightforwardly identify with "God").
37
With this doctrine, we see another possibility
of interpreting such a statement as "The human essence is not an abstraction... in its reality it is the ensemble of
(social) relations" that would not be directed against Feuerbach, but would rather support his position: it would suggest
that what "inhabits" individuals and makes them "humans" is the sexual relation with its affective dimensions (love)
and its institutional realizations (the family). Therefore individuals are constituted in and by relations. This is also a way
to emphasize a Verkehr (in the sense of "intercourse") as the producing-reproducing structure of the human.
38

What would Marx possibly object to this Feuerbachian defense? Probably what is latent in Thesis Four and slightly
more developed in the German Ideology, namely, that Feuerbach's vision of the "terrestrial family" is not very "real"
itself, because itremoves the contradictions through its (romantic) emphasis on "love," while nevertheless trying to
locate the source of religious "alienation" in the imperfection or finitude of human sexuality. In the German Ideology,
Marx (and Engels) will explain that sexual difference (as a difference of human "types") results from "a division of
sexual labor" (sic) among men and women. And in the Communist Manifesto (1847), borrowing from Saint-Simonian
"feminist" criticism, they will explain that marriage and the bourgeois family are a form of "legal prostitution" (in perfect
agreement with the statement in Thesis Four that the "contradiction" inherent in the terrestrial "basis" of religion can be
resolved only through the "theoretical and practical annihilation" of the family). This is a powerful argument, which
amounts to explaining that "metaphysical" notions of human essence are not only inherited from an ideological past,
but also permanently reconstituted through processes that "sublimate" social contradictions of all kinds. But it also
confirms the Marxian tendency to eliminate some of the potentialities of his own "theses" in order to avoid "opening"
the "ensemble" of social relations towards an unlimited range of heterogeneous modes of socialization (and therefore
also modes of subjectivation), and instead reinstate a quasi-transcendental equivalence of the "social" (and the
"practical") with the specifically (or essentially) human attribute of "labor" (and work). It is through a revolution in the
division of labor that human agents may transform their own constitutive relations (which makes them human), not
through a "revolution" in any of the subordinated or accidental relations that form so many fields of application for the
same general division of labor. And in this way, the powers of the One (of unity, uniformity, and totality) are even more
forcefully imposed, because they become the very powers of the novum, the emancipation to come.
39

tienne Balibar
tienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Universit de Paris X - Nanterre and
Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, and is currently Visiting Professor at
Columbia University in the City of New York. He has published widely in the area of Marxist philosophy and moral
and political philosophy in general. His many works include Lire le Capital (with Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey,
J acques Rancire, Roger Establet, and F. Maspero) (1965); Spinoza et la politique (1985); Nous, citoyens
d'Europe? Les frontires, l'tat, le peuple (2001); Politics and the Other Scene (2002); L'Europe, l'Amrique, la
Guerre. Rflexions sur la mediationeuropenne (2003); and Europe, Constitution, Frontire (2005).
Footnotes
1. Marx himself had died in 1883. Engels explained that Marx was so secretive about the Theses that he did
not share them with him, even though the two men were already cooperating and cowriting. Some of Engels's
corrections, meant to improve a "hasty" redaction and clarify the Theses' intention, are far from innocent. This
is particularly the case with the famous Thesis Eleven, which in Marx's original formulation reads: "Die
Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kmmt drauf an, sie zuverndern." It was
corrected by Engels like this: "Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt
aber darauf an, sie zu verndern." By changing the mode of the verb and adding the word aber in the second
sentence, Engels imposed the idea of a relationship of mutual exclusion between "interpreting" and
"transforming" that was not necessarily there in Marx's version. With the help of other formulations in
the Theses, the Eleventh was understood subsequently as positing a general opposition between
(revolutionary) praxis and (mere) theory. As we will see, Thesis Six also contains a correction that deserves
discussion.
2. "For the same thing is thinking and being" (Poem III). See the new edition and commentary - in French - by
Barbara Cassin.
3. For Ernst Bloch, see Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Vol. 1) and "Keim und Grundlinie. Zu den Elf Thesen von
Marxber Feuerbach." For Althusser, see "Marxism and Humanism," chapter seven of For Marx. Althusser
returns to the interpretation of the Theses on Feuerbach in a much more critical manner in "Sur la pense
marxiste," written in 1982 and published posthumously.
4. The Principle of Hope was written in the war period when Bloch was in exile in the US, but published only
after his return to Germany (the GDR) between 1954 and 1957.
5. This scheme is very different from the traditional idea, inherited by Hegel from Leibniz, that the present time
is "pregnant with" the future to which it will give birth. In fact it is the opposite. It would be interesting to relate
this scheme to both Bloch's and Althusser's (independent) insistence on the "non-contemporaneity" of the
present as its typical structure.
6. The notion of "real humanism" is above all used by Marx in his immediately preceding work (with
Engels), The Holy Family (1844); see the beginning of the foreword:
Real humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative
idealism, which substitutes "self-consciousness" or the "spirit" for the real individual man and with
the evangelist teaches: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing." Needless to say,
this incorporeal spirit is spiritual only in its imagination. What we are combating in Bauer's criticism
is precisely speculation reproducing itself as a caricature. We see in it the most complete
expression of the Christian-Germanic principle, which makes its last effort by transforming
"criticism" itself into a transcendent power."
7. I borrow the expression "dispute of humanism (la querelle de l'humanisme)" from Althusser himself, who
projected a book (left unfinished) under this title. I coin "dispute of universalism" on the same model.
8. In the following argument, which partly rectifies my oral presentation at the conference "The Citizen-Subject
Revisited," I do not attempt a complete reading of the Theses (even if I draw some illumination from Marx's
other aphorisms). Therefore I leave aside the issue of the "order" or "structure" of the Eleven Theses, which I
had touched in passing. Both Bloch (in his essay) and Althusser (in his oral teaching) had specific "thematic"
suggestions about how the theses should become "divided" and "regrouped" in order to highlight the latent
construction of their argument and concepts. A very interesting subsequent explanation is offered by Georges
Labica; see his Karl Marx. Les Thses sur Feuerbach.
9. I leave aside the other great reference: Hegel's Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik), divided into three Books:
the Doctrine of Being (Sein), the Doctrine of Essence (Wesen), and the Doctrine of Concept (Begriff). In the
1840s, Marx, who was certainly not unacquainted with the Logic, was mainly focusing on
the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right.
10. The idea that God's true essence is a self-creating or self-emancipating Man runs from ancient Gnostic
doctrines to modern Protestantism to the positivist idea of substituting the superstitious "religion of the
transcendent Deity" with a rational or affective "religion of Humankind," notoriously defended in the Romantic
era by Auguste Comte in France, but also by Feuerbach himself. See Decloux and Sabot.
11. The answer must be yes, also for the following reason: when Marx drafted the "Theses," he may have been
already affected by the Stirnerian critique of every "essentialist" (or non-nominalist) category, in The Ego and
Its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum), which was published the same year (1845) and which particularly
targets both Feuerbach's notion of Man as "generic being" (Gattungswesen) and the doctrine of communism
based on the idea of Man as "community being" (Gemeinwesen).
12. See Bhme 3-1.5 and 3-7.4.
13. It is common in the philosophical and theological tradition to explain metaphorically that the soul "inhabits"
(habitat) the body, or that the body forms a "house" for the soul. Inhabitare/inwohnen would indicate a more
intimate and more intense relationship, such as the "presence" of God within the soul of the faithful Christian.
Its use is especially associated with developments of the Trinitarian doctrine; see Lehmkuhler.
14. This presentation is strongly indebted to Alain de Libera's work on the genealogy of the "subject" between
scholasticism and modernity ; see his contribution to our common entry "Subject," and his Archologie du sujet.
15. An essential link between Kant and Feuerbach on this point is indeed Hegel, in his Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences (1817 and 1830), where, however, the concept of Gattung as "species" is limited to
the animal life.
16. Augustine's formula is famously quoted by Husserl at the end of his Cartesian Meditations from 1929, in a
way that has been criticized by eminent phenomenologists who claim that he retained only one side of the
Augustinian motto (asking the philosopher to "abstract from the world" in order to investigate an inner truth, but
failing to understand that this inner truth also represents the place "inhabited" by man's "visitor" from heaven,
i.e., Christ himself, and therefore deprives man from his own mastery, or "dis-possesses" him from inside). See
J ean-Luc Marion (139).
17. This typical unity of opposites is well preserved in Descartes's transposition of the Augustinian argument
into the language of ontology: "I exist with such a nature that I possess an idea of God in my mind" and
therefore as a finite substance (or "essence") harboring an infinite substance (or "essence"). See my
commentary in "Ego sum, ego existo. Descartes au point d'hrsie."
18. This suggests an emphasis other than Kant's on the secularized form of the truth "inhabiting" the individual:
the one provided by J ohn Locke in his theory of personal identity: the subjects who "own themselves"
separately are isolated because what makes them identical humans is not only the power of an "abstract idea"
(private property), but the power of the idea of "abstraction" itself. This is a very acute understanding of the
logic of the "ontology" that we can call, after C.B. MacPherson, "possessive individualism." See my essay "My
Self et My Own. Variations sur Locke."
19. It is of course fascinating to search for echoes between the Marxian Theses on Feuerbach and
Benjamin's Theses on the Concept of History (1941), which consciously try to follow the tracks of the former
(and therefore provide an interpretation that is also a transformation!)
20. It is also on this point that quasi-simultaneous texts, particularly The Holy Family, pay an explicit tribute to
Hegel.
21. This motto is especially insisted upon in Marx's essay from 1844 (published in the Deutsch-Franzsische
Jahrbcher), "An Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," where das Proletariat is used for
the first time to name the revolutionary "subject" (see my "Le moment messianique de Marx" in Citoyen sujet).
Interestingly, borrowing again from the theological tradition haunting the Theses, the two notions
"Verwirklichung (realization)" and "Verweltlichung (secularization, literally becoming-world)" are used by Marx
here in a quasi-synonymous manner.
22. This is an important subject to which several discussions have been devoted. I give here only one
reference: Pierre Macherey. Macherey highlights the importance of works by Louis de Bonald (a conservative),
Franois Guizot (a liberal), and Comte Claude de Saint-Simon (a socialist, whose influence on Marx's
intellectual formation can hardly be underestimated).
23. See Wallerstein. A key analytic notion - perhaps the single central one - arising from the constitution of
sociology was that of individualism (first introduced into French by Tocqueville) as distinct from moral egoism to
describe the behavior of persons who are detached from their social affiliations (status groups, family, and
religious confessions), which of course different ideologies valued differently. In his Jewish Question (1844),
Marx keeps using "egoism," but in a sense rather akin to "individualism," i.e., to denote a contradiction between
the social conditions and their own result.
24. Most important in this respect are the developments in On the Jewish Question, an essay best known for its
critique of the "abstract" distinction between "rights of man" and "rights of the citizen" as an expression of the
bourgeois reduction of "man" to the private-property owning individual (which includes the Lockeian notion of
the "proprietor in one's person"). J ust as "religious emancipation," which liberates individuals from their
subjection to imaginary transcendent powers, is not yet "political emancipation," which allows for the juridical
equality and freedom of every individual (within the limits of the Nation-State), political emancipation (however
progressive in the history of mankind) is not yet "social emancipation," which liberates individuals from their
alienating isolation and from the iron laws of competition that make everyone a "wolf" for everyone. And it is
only a social emancipation that can be considered a fully "human emancipation."
25. What allows Engels (before many other Marxists) to carry out this rectification is, of course, the fact that he
has become familiar with Marx's later "historical materialism" and the analysis of the relations of production with
their internal contradiction, as explained in Capital: there, Marx would describe the structure of material
production (including exploitation and class domination) as a matrix that generates transformation in the
historical character of the human type, and would argue that capitalism relies on an increasing degree of
"socialization (Vergesellschaftung)" of the labor process (including cooperation, industrialization, and
polytechnic education) that must become incompatible with the rules of private property. An
interesting intermediary formulation is offered in the German Ideology, where Marx emphasizes the determining
function of labor in "producing" human "nature" and equates the development of productive forces with a
succession of modalities in the division of labor that first generates private property and then communism
(famously defined as the "real movement that abolishes-overcomes - aufhebt - the existing social state").
Instead of using the technical terms "relations of production" and "modes of production" to make this argument,
however, he makes extensive use of the terms Verkehr and Verkehrsformen (intercourse/commerce and its
forms).
26. Remember the motto in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: "das Wahre ist das Ganze" (the true is
the same as the whole, truth and totality are synonyms ; 15).
27. One is reminded of Michel Foucault's explanations in The Order of Things (1966): anthropological
definitions of the Human essence in the 19th century, after the Kantian revolution that cuts it from its theological
dependency or confers upon it a "constitutive finitude," relate alternatively to three "quasi-transcendental"
categories: "labor," "language," and "life." It is widely assumed (by Foucault himself as well) that the "Marxian"
paradigm chooses the first possibility when it comes to addressing the anthropological question (which is
exactly what Arendt and others reproached Marx for having done: chosen a definition of Man as animal
laborans). But we are concerned here with the modalities, hesitations, and suspensions of that "choice."
28. See my The Philosophy of Marx, chapter two. On this basis I had also proposed a discussion of the
affinities between Marx and, particularly, Spinoza and Freud (with all their differences). Other names could be
added of course, if it is true that there is hardly any great philosopher to whom the issue of transindividuality did
not occur and who did not consider, at least hypothetically, the possibility of viewing "relations," not "terms"
[change "terms" to "forms"?] or "substances," as the prime category for understanding the real. In his very
instructive commentary on Feuerbach's theses (Marx 1845, 137-160), Macherey elaborates on this idea with a
thesis about Marx transforming an "essence" into a "non-essence" that is quite compatible with what I have
tried to explain in this paper.
29. There are some important affinities between this formulation and what Maurice Blanchot, in a famous and
very abstract essay, not without relation to his almost contemporary meditation on "Marx's words," calls "Le
rapport du troisime genre (relation of the third type/kind)," where one also finds the equation "L'homme, c'est-
-dire les hommes (Man, that is men)" (101). I shall return to this comparison elsewhere.
30. This also explains, in my view, why it is insufficient to relate the primacy of "social relations" to the
emergence of a historical (or, for that matter, cultural) anthropology: because such an anthropology (whose
almost unsurpassable prototype lies in the Hegelian description of the "epochs" of world history as
constructions of successive "spiritual" ideas of the human) only relativizes (chronologically and geographically)
the validity of any definition of the "human essence," while insisting that such a definition must be common to
everyone in the considered society or must subordinate all the oppositions and differences within itself.
31. In his little book Elments d'autocritique, Althusser credited Spinoza for "inventing, almost alone in the
history of philosophy, the notion of a totality without a closure." He was apparently not aware that a similar
distinction formed the core of Emmanuel Lvinas's masterwork Totalit et infini: Essai sur l'extriorit (1961),
also directed against the Hegelian legacy in philosophy.
32. I take the category "amphibology" in the strict sense used by Kant in what is arguably the most remarkable
development of the Critique of Pure Reason, the "Amphibology of the Concepts of Reflection," but I assume
that it can apply not only to the cases listed by Kant (unity vs. diversity, adequation vs. inadequation, interior vs.
exterior, matter vs. form), but also to others that matter especially in "practical" matters: activity vs. passivity,
subjective vs. objective, etc.
33. I collapse indications from the "early" and the "late" Althusser, who are certainly not completely
incompatible; see Emilio de Ipola, Althusser, L'adieu infini, Paris: PUF, 2012, and Warren Montag, Althusser
and his contemporaries: Philosophy's Perpetual War, forthcoming from Duke UP, 2013.
34. A classic example for this discussion concerns the issue of paternity: does "fatherhood" connote an
"external" relationship between individuals who then become socially recognized as "father" and "child," or an
"internal" quality of each (as a result of their personal history, including birth, etc.)? How about a "mother"? a
"son," or a "daughter"?
35. To be sure, there is a third traditional possibility of overcoming this kind of amphibology: invoking a
generalized concept of "life" (or organicity, systematicity, etc.). I observe here only that classical concepts of
"organic life" tend precisely to preserveinteriority at the expense of psychology, consciousness, and subjectivity.
36. And let us note in passing that the single English or French term "alienation" renders two German concepts
used by Hegel and Marx: Entusserung or "externalization," projection "out of oneself"; and Entfremdung or
"estrangement," subjection to an "alien power," the power of the other.
37. The phrase from J ohn's Epistle I, "God is Love," plays a central role in mystical developments of
Christianity as well as in "anthropological" interpretations of Christianity ever since Spinoza; the two influences
converge in Hegel, who transforms the phrase into a symmetric equivalence (Gott ist Liebe, die Liebe ist Gott).
See my essay "Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist. Le mot de l'esprit" in Citoyen Sujet.
38. It would also retain the etymological proximity of the German name for "kind" or "genus" (Gattung) and the
names for "spouses," "husband," and "wife" (Gatte/Gattin). This proximity is used extensively by Hegel to push
sexuality back into the "animal" dimension of Man, and by Feuerbach to emphasize the "typically human"
dimension of the sexual, which a "spiritualist" discourse euphemizes and sublimates. On all this, see Sabot.
39. The reference to Saint-Simonian sources are crucial historically (although the critique of bourgeois
marriage as "legal prostitution" ultimately derives from earlier feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft) but above
all politically and theoretically. As we know, there is nothing simple in applying a single concept of "social
relation," "social movement," and "emancipatory politics" to both the emancipation of women from patriarchy
and to the the emancipation of workers from capitalism, though this formed the core of Saint-Simonian
"utopian" socialism and other romantic doctrines. This is also a problem of historicity, as clearly illustrated by
the opening sentences of the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels borrow a list of successive "class
dominations" directly from the Exposition de la doctrine saint-simonienne (1829), while eliminating the
"domination of women by men" from the list; this may be due to their male chauvinist prejudices, but there is
also no way for this other form of exploitation-domination to be inserted into the chronological succession that
leads from "primitive communities" to capitalism and to communism according to transformations in the regime
of property. See tienne Balibar, Franoise Duroux, Rossana Rossanda, Communismo e femminismo, Einaudi
editore, Torino (forthcoming).
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