Abstract
The article focuses on a hardly noticed anti-humanist continuity that runs through the competing wave movements between ‘structuralist Marxism’, ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘new-materialist’ posthumanism. Starting out from Althusser’s reduction of subjects to effects of the structures of society and its ideology, it explores the poststructuralist antihumanism of Deleuze and Foucault, which is heavenly indebted to the Nietzschean ’overman’-cult, investigates the early Judith Butler’s erasure of human agency by discursive chains and their (often incomplete) performative repetitions, and observes with the example of Karen Barad’s ‘posthumanism’ how this anti-humanist line is extended to ‘matter’ and its ‘intra-agential’ dynamics. In all the variants discussed, the intervening practices of the acting subjects are made to disappear. However, erasing human specificities absolves humans from their responsibility for the way, in which they co-construct themselves through nature. It thus paralyses human agency in a dangerous conjuncture where humanity and the biosphere are threatened by ecological catastrophe and a hightech-fascist transhumanism.
Keywords
Antihumanism, Ecology, Ideology, New Materialism, Nietzscheanism, Posthumanism, Poststructuralism, Quantum Physics, Structuralist Marxism, Transhumanism
It is well known that theoretical developments often occur through pendulum movements. More often than not, they are overdetermined by the mechanisms of the capitalist ‘market of ideas’, which manifest themselves in the pressure to distinguish oneself from previous or current theoretical productions in order to make one’s own work appear as something absolutely new, as a genuine paradigm shift. Critical theory (in the broad sense) is not exempt from this. Althusser, for example, proclaimed a ‘theoretical anti-humanism’ against the ‘humanist ideology’ of the young Marx as well as against Gramsci and Sartre; Foucault profiled his concept of discourse and power against Althusser’s theory of ideology and claimed to overcome the Marxian critique of capitalism and the state by focusing on the ‘microphysics of power’; Deleuze and Guattari attempted to undermine both Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist analyses of the capitalist mode of production with their vitalist concept of ‘desire-production’; and those who since the 1990s present themselves as ‘new materialists’ turn against the one-sided prioritisation of discourses by poststructuralism by absolutising the inherent dynamics and agency of ‘matter’.
In the following, however, we will focus on a much less noticed continuity that runs through the wave movements between ‘structuralist Marxism’, ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘new materialism’. It stretches from an antihumanism, which primarily refers to Nietzsche and Heidegger, to ‘new-materialist’ posthumanism. When Foucault concludes The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses, 1966) with the announcement ‘that man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand on the edge of the sea’,[1] he takes up Nietzsche’s proclamation of overcoming the ‘last man’ by the ‘overman’. One can speak of a Nietzschean ‘line’ here, provided, however, that this is not understood as a history of ideas that is just determined by Nietzsche’s philosophy. When Nietzschean arguments are taken up, continued, and transformed, we need to analyse them as specific interventions in certain ideological constellations. At the same time, however, these are not coincidental correspondences, but, rather, elective affinities within an ideological conjuncture directed against different varieties of humanism. This will not be presented here in an exhaustive overview, but, rather, in the form of a few exploratory cross-drillings. They are intended to reveal some veins that lead from Deleuze to ‘new materialism’, from Althusser to Foucault, and from the early Judith Butler to Karen Barad’s ‘posthumanist’ quantum theory. In a concluding outlook, we are going to reflect on some differences to and intersections with current development of a hightech-fascist ‘transhumanism’.
The tracking starts with Althusser’s ‘theoretical anti-humanism’, which was not primarily developed in the tradition of Nietzscheanism, but in the context of a structuralist Marxism. Its significance for this inquiry is twofold: on the one hand, it prepared the ground for Foucault’s neo-Nietzschean anti-humanism, on the other hand, it was overwhelmed by the latter and pushed back in the academia, in particular in the ‘humanities’, as well as in a large part of social movements and left-wing politics.
Looking back at Althusser’s ‘theoretical anti-humanism’
First in Pour Marx (1965), then in Lire ‘Le Capital’ (1968), Althusser develops the interpretation of an ‘epistemological break’ between a young Marx, still entrenched in the ideology of humanism, and a mature Marx, who from ca. 1845 onwards, left behind the humanist categories of the human and their ‘alienation’ and replaced them with a new arrangement of historical materialist concepts: ‘social formation, productive forces, relations of production, superstructure, ideologies, determination in the last instance by the economy […] etc.’.[2] According to Althusser, one can only know something about people ‘on the absolute precondition that the philosophical (theoretical) myth of man is reduced to ashes’.[3] Althusser explicitly emphasises that this is a theoretical anti-humanism that considers humanism as an ideology to be a ‘conditional necessity’.[4] It is essential that communists ‘pass to and fro’ between theoretical and ideological concepts, so that real or socialist humanism ‘can serve as a practical, ideological slogan’, but must never claim the attributes of a theoretical concept.[5]
In fact, there is an overlap here with Marx’s critique of the ‘cult of man in the abstract’, which was produced by bourgeois Protestantism and was adequate to capitalist commodity society.[6] Nevertheless, Marx and Engels did not abandon the concept of humanism, but attempted to detach it from its abstract and speculative forms and, according to Engels, to connect it with the ‘science of real men and their historical development’.[7] Even if the terminology of ‘alienation’ recedes in Marx’s late writings, the conceptual content has by no means disappeared in the Critique of Political Economy.[8]
The fact that Althusser declares it impossible to connect the development of the human species being with the analysis of their respective societal conditions is mainly due to his concept of ideology, which he – pace Marx – defines as an omnihistorical system of representations, images and unconscious structures that applies to all societies (including a communist one). It differs from science ‘in that in it the practico-social function is more important than the theoretical function’.[9] He has thus identified ideology (in general) with social practices and their subject forms, which science alone opposes, conceived as an ‘objective’ subject-less production process detached from what Marx described as the standpoint of ‘social humanity’ (gesellschaftliche Menschheit):[10] ‘The negation of the ideological by science remains abstract: without a standpoint in human praxis itself.’[11]
According to Althusser, Marx’s sixth Thesis on Feuerbach means ‘that the non-abstract “man” is the “ensemble of the social relations”’.[12] He thus reads it as if Marx here equated the concrete individuals with social relations. He obviously does not understand that Marx is not concerned here with concrete human beings, but with the ‘essence of man’, which is not to be grasped as an ‘abstraction inherent in each single individual’, not as an ‘inner, mute, general character which unites the many individuals in a natural way’, but, rather, needs to be explored ‘in its reality’ from the respective ‘ensemble of social relations’.[13] As Marx and Engels explain in the German Ideology, their critique targets ‘what the philosophers have conceived as “substance” and “essence of man”, and what they have deified and attacked’.[14] Taking the example of Feuerbach, this would be his ahistorical understanding of the ‘essence of man’ as the trinity of reason, love and will.[15] The fact that Althusser mistakes such notions of the ‘essence of man’ for the concrete ‘human being’ reveals his own anti-humanism (projected back onto Marx), which reduces humans to the effects of economic and ideological structures.
This reductionism is evident not least in Althusser’s model of ideological interpellations, in which the interpellated subjects do no more than turn around and ‘recognise’ themselves in the interpellating SUBJECT.[16] Accordingly, the subjects constituted in this way generally function by themselves, apart from the ‘bad subjects’ who are handed over to the care of the repressive state apparatus.[17] The theoretical model does not allow for the conceptualisation of different options, for example, – as Stuart Hall suggests – of the possibility of accepting interpellations only partially (‘negotiated code’) or rejecting them completely (‘oppositional code’).[18] This is mainly due to the fact that his subject theory, inspired by Lacanian psychoanalysis, collapses subjectivity and subjection, which leads to the erasure of humans’ capacities for direct observation and experimentation – competences that Gramsci conceptualised as ‘good sense’ (buon senso), the ‘healthy nucleus’ of common sense, from which the weight of ideologies can be pushed back.[19] In the perspective of a philosophy of praxis, the subaltern classes are also able to have everyday life experiences that potentially oppose ideological interpellations or modify their reception.[20] Against the tendency of some Marxists to reduce the concrete human beings to social structures, the Berlin school of Critical Psychology has introduced a conceptual distinction between a ‘human nature’ designating the emergence of specific human capacities from biological evolution like long-term anticipation, conscious production and cooperation, and the ‘essence of humans’ in the sense of Marx’s sixth Thesis on Feuerbach designating the respective societal relations, into which subjects need to develop and form.[21]
Althusser’s ‘theoretical anti-humanism’ rightly opposes a humanism that invokes people as free, autonomous subjects detached from societal and natural conditions, instead of examining them in their historical-social development. The negation of the ‘cult of man in the abstract’[22] turns into an abstraction, however, because it reduces the subjects to effects of social structures and assigns ‘sensuous human activity, practice’,[23] which constitutes the Marxian starting point of a philosophy of practice, to ideology and its imaginary misrecognition.
Before we examine how Foucault’s anti-humanism branches off from Althusser’s approach, we look at the foundation of ‘leftist Nietzscheanism’ by Gilles Deleuze, which became an important reference point for both Foucault’s reception of Nietzsche and the posthumanism of ‘new materialism’.
From Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ to Deleuze’s ‘assemblage’
All the traits that we associate with poststructuralism, from the dismissal of mediation to the decentring of the subject, ‘go back to Deleuze’s resurrection of Nietzsche against Hegel’, notes Cornel West.[24] Deleuze’s 1962 book Nietzsche et la philosophie opposes Nietzsche’s ‘affirmation’ to ‘dialectical negation’, ‘the difference to dialectical contradiction’; joy, enjoyment to ‘dialectical labour’; ‘lightness, dance to dialectical heaviness, beautiful irresponsibility to dialectical responsibilities’.[25] Deleuze presents here a postmodern ‘Lorianism’, which stages itself as a fun society and makes fun of the dialectical conceptual work.[26]
A key term of Deleuze’s interpretation is ‘difference’. Deleuze took it from the ‘pathos of distance’, which the late Nietzsche used in the Genealogy of Morals (I, Aph. 2) to describe the social divide between the ‘noble’ and the ‘low’.[27] Nietzsche explicitly states that the contrasted terms high-low, noble-vulgar, good-bad are to be understood not in the ‘moral’ sense, but designate a social opposition: ‘Then I found’, he writes in Aph 4, ‘that everywhere “aristocrat”, “noble” in the social sense [im ständischen Sinne] is the root idea out of which “good” in the sense of “with aristocratic soul”, “noble’ in the sense of “with a noble soul”, “with a privileged soul” have necessarily developed’.[28] Nietzsche clarifies the social meaning of ‘noble’ by some historical examples: the Greek Dorian aristocracy of Theognis, about which he had written his final paper as a high school student in 1864, the Roman ‘warriors’ and the Aryan race of conquerors and rulers.[29] At the core of the aristocratic races, Nietzsche identifies ‘the beast of prey, the magnificent, marauding blond beast lusting after victory and spoils.[30] Also the contrast between ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’, which a priestly aristocracy will then sharpen and internalise, should initially be understood as essentially ‘non-symbolic’: ‘clean’ is ‘only a man who washes himself’, eats no unhealthy meals, who ‘does not sleep with the unclean women of the lower classes, who has a strong aversion to blood’.[31]
In Deleuze’s rendition, this Nietzschean clear text is defused beyond recognition: Nietzsche’s social opposition between the ‘noble’ and the ‘low’ classes becomes that between ‘nobleness’ and ‘baseness’,[32] whereby the former is presented as ‘active force’ and ‘affirmative will’, the latter as ‘reactive force’ and ‘negating will’.[33] While, in Nietzsche’s myth of origin, the ancient class antagonism is clearly named (albeit from a fictitious aristocratic point of view of the ‘nobles’), in Deleuze, there are only ‘active’ and ‘reactive’, ‘affirming’ and ‘negating’ forces.
Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche can be characterised as a postmodern variant of what Domenico Losurdo named as a ‘hermeneutics of innocence’, which dissolves even the most brutal avowals of elite rule and the annihilation of the weak into euphonious metaphors and allegories. [34] With regard to the ‘will to power’, the basic operation is to exchange Nietzsche’s concept of power underhand with Spinoza’s concept of ‘potentia agendi’. But, while Spinoza conceives ‘power to act’ not as a power of domination over others, but as a cooperative capacity,[35] Nietzsche conceives of power as an ‘overwhelming, taking mastery’ over the less powerful,[36] suppressing, raping and exploiting.[37] The significance of the syntagm ‘Will to Power’ (first mentioned in Nov. 1882 in the preliminaries to Zarathustra[38]) consists in naturalising social domination, exploitation and oppression by transferring them to the ‘essence of life’ in general.
However, according to Deleuze’s Spinozistic reinterpretation, Nietzsche’s will to power ‘is manifested as the capacity for being affected’ and as ‘differential sensibility of force’.[39] The book ends with the assertion that the ‘sole quality’ of the will to power remains ‘the affirmation’.[40] Thus disguised as a new Spinoza, Nietzsche is now introduced in Deleuze’s Pensée nomade of 1973 as a nomadic rebel who is far more revolutionary than Marx and Freud: while the latter merely strived for a re-coding of the state (Marx) or the family (Freud), Nietzsche transformed thought into a nomadic force – into a ‘war machine’ against the rational, administrative machinery.[41] According to Manfred Frank, this reveals a ‘tendency to “dangerous thinking”’ per se, which poses no danger to real domination and at the same time can be exploited from left to right.[42]
In the books Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Mille Plateaux (1980), written together with Félix Guattari, the Nietzschean concept of power is linked with the Freudo-Marxist debates in France. However, the authors are not interested in the further development of a synthesis between psychoanalysis and Marxism, which they reject as ‘sterile parallelism’,[43] but, rather, operate a subordinate insertion of both into a Nietzschean paradigm.[44] In the course of this subordination, Nietzsche’s will to power is transformed into a schizoid-multiform ‘desire-production’, which, in turn, is supposed to provide the basis for the Marxian concept of social production: desire ‘belongs to the infrastructure’[45], in truth ‘social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions’.[46] Accordingly, the ‘production process’ of desire is consistently referred to as ‘workshop’, ‘industry’, ‘desire-machine’, ‘factory’ and the like.[47] In the gesture of a radical ‘materialism’ of desire, the social forms and conditions in which the metabolism between humans and non-human nature takes place are made radically unreal. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari invoke a cosmic libido, which permeates all kinds of life forms as a neo-Bergsonian élan vital.
The notion of a manifold production of desire now becomes the pivotal point at which the project of ‘liberating’ psychoanalysis from Freud’s Oedipal triangle of father-mother-child is transformed into a vitalistic ontology of the universe. This shift is signalled, among other things, by the category of a ‘body without organs’. The term is meant to designate ‘matter that always fills space to given degrees of intensity’.[48] Thus, the earth as a body without organs is ‘permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles’.[49] Matter denotes ‘the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified […] body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities’.[50] What is meant by ‘prephysical’ or ‘prevital’ is not explained. The metaphors, which seem to gesture towards quantum-physical findings on the oscillation of particles and energy waves, conjure up an amorphous-flowing multiplicity, which is not being differentiated with regard to the specific emergent qualities of ‘matter’.
In this context, Deleuze and Guattari coined the term ‘agencement’, which, in its English translation ‘assemblage’, became a central point of reference for both ‘new materialism’ and Bruno Latour’s ‘actor-network theory’ (ANT).[51] The fact that the category begins its career in English translation is a symptom of a hierarchical structure in which theory production shifts from France to the USA and from there – along the academic channels of US hegemony – is disseminated worldwide as a global export brand ‘French Theory’ and thus returns to Europe.[52] In Thousand Plateaus, the ‘assemblage’ refers to the arrangement that enables, accomplishes and stabilises the stratification, shaping and unification of the initially formless matter.[53] Manuel DeLanda, who claims to transform Deleuze’s and Guattari’s vague allusions into an ‘assemblage theory’, proposes to define it as ‘a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns different natures’.[54] Other attempts at a definition emphasise the anti-essentialist character of the established connections: they are never organic entities, but, rather, ‘external relations of composition, mixture and aggregation’.[55] The assemblage is so general that it can be applied to all conceivable areas – e.g. physics, biology, social and cultural micro- and macrostructures, language and literature. Due to its abstract construction, the term does not identify any specific emergent quality of ‘matter’ and thus loses any discernible meaning.
The reception by ‘new materialism’ and ANT now emphasises what is already laid out by Deleuze and Guattari: the ‘assemblages’ operate without the notion of a ‘human work master’, and this allows us to overcome the ‘praxis-piety of old materialisms’ by an ‘affectivity of assemblages’.[56] Bruno Latour proposes to ‘shift’ or ‘delegate’ the concept of ‘social action’ to non-human ‘types of actors’ – like, for examples, kettles ‘boiling’ water, knifes ‘cutting’ meat, baskets ‘holding ‘ provisions, hammers ‘hitting’ nails on the head.[57] The underlying concept of the ‘actor’ (or ‘actant’) is defined so broadly that it is understood as ‘any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference’.[58] This definition separates agency from any reference to intention, anticipation and consciousness. As Andreas Malm observes, it thus conceives of it so generally that it coincides with the quality of everything that exists.[59] It misses the difference between intentional agency and a ‘derivative intentionality’ of things (like kettle, knife etc.) transferred from a human actor.[60] The result is a ‘flat ontology’ that allows all conceivable entities to appear as actors – it ‘humanizes things by allowing them to act and reifies people’.[61]
The following example may illustrate some of the platitudes that this pseudo-ontology opens the door to: Jane Bennett observes in a grate over the storm drain the ‘assemblage’ of a plastic glove, a mat of oak pollen, a dead rat, a bottle cap, and a wooden stick. In it, she discovers a ‘thing power’, i.e. an ‘ability to make things happen, to produce effects’.[62] She demonstrates this, among other things, by the effect of disgust that the dead rat exerts on the observer[63] – which, of course, reveals an anthropocentric and subjectivist perspective by which the ‘agency’ of things is identified according to the emotions of the human observer. On a large scale, Bennett finds an ‘assemblage’ in the huge accumulation of waste in the Pacific Ocean, where she attempts to understand the interaction of the material components of waste (especially plastic), the ocean currents and the market economy as ‘joint agency’ of people and things and as ‘material agency’ of ‘thing-power’.[64]
Such a displacement of the capacity to act to ‘vibrant matter’ in general is not only useless for an effective ecological policy, but even harmful, as it blocks the identification of the specifically human, especially capitalist causes. As Andreas Malm shows using the example of the ozone hole, the distinction between social components (production of chlorofluorocarbons for refrigerators, aerosol cans, etc.) and natural components (their reaction with the ozone layer) was precisely what was essential in order to understand their destructive interaction as a ‘unity of opposites’, which, in turn, paved the way for banning the production of chemicals containing chlorine and bromine in the 1987 Montreal Protocol[65] – one of the few multilateral environmental agreements that achieved real success.
Foucault’s ‘End of Man’
Foucault’s dissociation from his former mentor and supporter Althusser can be described as a paradigm shift from the concept of ideology to that of discourse and then of power, whereby the connection to class relations and the state is pushed into the background by the focus on a ‘microphysics of power’.[66] But, with regard to our question, Foucault separates himself from Althusser above all at the point where he extends Althusser’s critique of humanism from the ‘young’ Marx to the whole of Marx’s oeuvre and to dialectics per se.
This generalisation of the critique of humanism is addressed when Althusser criticises Foucault’s ‘crazy interviews [interviews déconnantes] on Marx’ in 1966.[67] Another difference lies in the much more intense relationship to Nietzsche’s anti-humanism. To be sure, Althusser mentions, in retrospect, in his memoir The Future Lasts Forever, that he had read ‘somewhat belatedly’ Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, ‘which influenced [his] argument concerning theoretical antihumanism in Marx’,[68] and Nietzsche and Heidegger appear alongside Epicurus, Spinoza and Marx as precursors of a ‘materialism of encounter’;[69] but, as late as 1984, he complains of being ‘shockingly ignorant’ with regard to Nietzsche’s philosophy.[70] In contrast, Foucault consistently professes his ‘fundamental Nietzscheanism’[71] throughout his writings.
In his book on Foucault, Deleuze sees his encounter with Nietzsche and Heidegger primarily in the shared criticism of the ‘subject’ and the conception of the human as a ‘fold of Being’.[72] However, since Foucault was, ultimately, not so much interested in Heidegger’s ontology but, rather, in Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’, it is really about a ‘histoire nietzschéenne plutôt que heideggerienne’.[73] In fact, the construction of postmodern Nietzscheanism in France is largely the result of the interplay between Deleuze and Foucault, which manifests itself for example by the fact that, in 1966, they also took on the publication of the critical edition of Nietzsche’s works in France.
The assumption that Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ also means the ‘death of man’ is already asserted in Deleuze’s Nietzsche book of 1962. Accordingly, Nietzsche’s critique of religion is essentially directed against a different ‘death of God’, namely the one operated in the Hegelian framework of a reconciliation between man and God or by its Feuerbachian derivate of a replacement of God by man.[74] This is quite correct as far as it goes.[75] But Deleuze also adopts the Nietzschean justification that with such an overcoming of God, man is still the ‘reactive man, the slave who does not cease to be slavish by presenting himself as God’, so that ‘the whole of the dialectic moves within the limits of reactive forces’.[76] Why this should be so remains unclear. The argumentation reproduces a kind of reversed and yet retained theism. In order to unhinge humanism, it falls back on a religious explanation that derives the identity of man from God’s creation and his making of humans in the image of God.
Foucault is also convinced that the death of God coincides with the death of man. At the heart of The Order of Things is a critique of the ‘anthropological’ paradigm of the human sciences of the 19th century. It begins with the thesis that ‘man’ is only a young invention of about 200 years – ‘no more than a kind of rift in the order of things’, a ‘new fold in our knowledge’ – and ends with the announcement of his impending death, through which he ‘would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.[77] What makes him disappear is a new constellation of knowledge, which can be seen, above all, by man’s ‘absolute dispersion in language’[78] (as conceptualised, for example, by structuralist ethnology and Lacanian psychoanalysis). The possibilities of a new thinking ‘in the void left by man’s disappearance’ had been opened up especially by Nietzsche, in particular through his teaching of the ‘overman’ and the ‘Eternal Return’.[79]
In fact, Nietzsche described man in Zarathustra as a ‘skin disease of the earth’.[80] To him, it was clear why he rejected the human species being: because of the implied equality of human beings – a ‘constructed phantom’, which he explains with the fact that the ‘mass instinct’ has also seized on the domains of knowledge.[81] ‘To play the big game – to spare no effort so that the existence of mankind may perhaps reach something higher than the preservation of the species’, noted Nietzsche in 1883 in a draft to Zarathustra’s last speech.[82] The postmodern proclamation of the ‘death of man’ appears to reenact this ‘big game’ – this time, however, in the transition to a neoliberal high-tech capitalism that will set about replacing a grand part of workers with learning machines and robots.
For Foucault, Marx – like Smith and Ricardo – belongs to the ‘anthropological’ paradigm, which is centred around the concept of labour as an ‘irreducible, absolute unit of measurement’.[83] Paradoxically, Foucault justifies this assessment with Marx’s analytical distinction between use-value and exchange-value,[84] which, in fact, opens the way to criticise the abstract ‘unit of measurement’ of exchange-value and the measureless capitalist accumulation based on it. According to Foucault, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity’ in Western knowledge, but found its place as a ‘full, quiet, comfortable … form. […] Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else’, the controversies between bourgeois and revolutionary economics being only ‘storms in a children’s paddling pool’.[85] They all revive ‘the weary good intentions of the humanisms’ and the utopias of completion, which on the promised evening ‘cause man’s anthropological truth to spring forth in its stony immobility’.[86]
Foucault has thus tailored the concept of ‘anthropology’ to the pursuit of a human ‘essence’, which is to be restored from ‘alienation’ (Marx) or the ‘unconscious’ (Freud).[87] This attribution is absurd with regard to both Marx and Freud, the former having, in his Theses on Feuerbach, rearticulated the human ‘essence’ as the ‘ensemble of social relations’,[88] the latter challenging the notion of a unitary subject by the dynamic contradictions between Id, Ego and Super-Ego. Foucault finds ‘all these forms of leftist and warped reflection’ (gauches et gauchies) particularly ridiculous, i.e., all those ‘who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation’, all those, who ‘refuse to think, without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking’.[89] Such polemical overdrive prevents him from recognising that what is stored in historical configurations of knowledge and discourse also had to be ‘thought’ at one time by human beings, and that what is given in knowledge configurations also has to go through the brains and minds of actual thinking individuals once it is to be ‘thought’ and put into practice.
It is not a question of generalising the explicitly anti-Marxist orientation of The Order of Things – Sartre called it ‘the last bulwark […] that the bourgeoisie could still erect against Marx’[90] – to Foucault’s entire oeuvre. There is no doubt that his political interventions and theoretical emphases shifted several times and in multiple ways.[91] But the critique of humanism and ‘anthropology’ runs through all phases. Characteristic of Foucault’s radical left-wing phase after 1968 is, for example, a conversation with high school students in November 1971, published under the Nietzschean title Beyond Good and Evil. There, Foucault argues that humanism contains ‘everything in Western Civilization that restricts the desire for power’.[92] It is now time to blow up this restriction, on one hand through a ‘de-subjection [désassujettissement] of the will to power […], and on the other hand by a cultural destruction of the subject, i.e. by abolition of sexual taboos, through common life, and the abolition of the prohibition of drugs’.[93] When a student criticised this as a ‘vague, unsubstantial underground ideology’ and countered that the point is to theoretically understand society as a whole,[94] Foucault replied that the idea of the ‘whole of society [l’ensemble de la societé]’ and its theoretical conceptualisation is ‘precisely that which should not be considered except as something to be destroyed’.[95] Foucault’s left-wing Nietzscheanism manifests itself as an endeavour to introduce a particularist type of critique into the protest movement, which undermines the development of a political-ethical responsibility for the ensemble of social relations (including social relations to non-human nature).
As Foucault declared himself, his 1975 book Discipline and Punish is construed as a further development of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality.[96] Its basic operation is the application of the Nietzschean critique of ‘civilisation’ to modern historical material. The great taming of humanity, which Nietzsche saw carried out in the dim and distant past, so to speak, in the ‘transvaluation’ from an aristocratically conceived, sovereign master’s origin to both the Greek polis democracy and to Judaism, is now transferred into the era of the emergence of bourgeois democracies between about 1760 and 1840. Its main target is a humanist interpretation that interprets the replacement of the torture spectacles by the prison as a ‘progress’ of humaneness, whereby, in Foucault’s view, it concerns only a refinement of punishing power, which can now anchor itself ‘down to the finest grain of the social body’.[97] A comparison with the classic study Punishment and Social Structure by Rusche and Kirchheimer of 1939 shows that Foucault’s neo-Nietzschean dichotomy of direct physical violence (torture) and the subtle impact of ‘disciplinary power’ on the subject is way too simplistic to grasp the relationships between the development of the penal systems and the respective modes of regulation of capitalism.[98] Since Foucault focuses his criticism on the penal system’s pedagogical claim to moral ‘improvement’, he overlooks the contrast between socio-pedagogically oriented approaches to prison reform, on the one hand, and eugenicist, proto-fascist and fascist initiatives aiming at the systematic impoverishment of prisoners and the killing of ‘abnormal’ subjects on the other.[99] Fixated on the welfare-state integration and therapeutic rehabilitation models of the ‘social-democratic age’, he no longer took note of the neoliberal restructuring of social control and, in particular, its bifurcation between areas of upper- and middle-class ‘self-regulations’ and the disciplinary supervision of the unemployed and precarised sections of the subaltern classes.[100]
Instead, when in 1978/79, in his lectures on the Birth of Biopolitics, he deals with neoliberalism’s new forms of subjectivity, he emphasises that the humanistic values and ideals that made the functioning of the normalising disciplinary power possible and, at the same time, concealed it, are now called into question by an ‘anthropological erasure’ (gommage anthropologique),[101] whose homo oeconomicus reacts ‘rationally’ and thus ‘beyond good and evil’ to the incentives of the economic environment. When Foucault joins the neoliberal criticisms of collective human rights and welfare guarantees, he does so because of his fascination for the neoliberal utopia of a post-disciplinary governmentality, which he deems characterised by ‘an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated … in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals’.[102] Since he is not interested in neoliberalism’s actual governmental strategies on the ground, he does not take into consideration that neoliberalism developed its own varieties of ‘disciplinary power’ through the deregulation of labour relations, ‘lean production’, the ‘just in-time’ principle, and the privatisation and marketisation of ‘non-economic’ domains of society. [103]
The overcoming of the human by the ‘overman’
Foucault’s dismissal of Marx’s ‘anthropological sleep’ overlooks the fact that Marx was, in fact, engaged in a deconstruction of the transcendental subject. By moving the human ‘essence’ out of the speculative background world and into ‘its reality’, i.e. the ‘ensemble of social relations’, the 6th Feuerbach thesis replaces the transcendental subject of ‘man’ by a multitude of socio-historical actors, who are to be examined in their actual life relations with the help of an ‘epistemology of practice’.[104] But, instead of allying himself with the practice-philosophical critique of the ‘cult of man in the abstract’,[105] Foucault resorts to Nietzsche’s myth of the overman. According to The Order of Things, the overman ‘took up anthropological finitude once again’, but in order to use it as a basis for his ‘prodigious leap’ of the overman.[106] But how does the proclaimed ‘end of man’, which Foucault understands, among other things, as ‘absolute dispersion in language’,[107] fit in with Nietzsche’s overman, who is supposed to be characterised precisely by the fact that in him the “multiple man” whom we have today is to be ‘bound unhesitatingly into the yoke of a single goal’?[108]
At this point, it is important to distinguish two phases in Nietzsche’s characterisation of the overman. First, he describes him as a free-spirited artist of life who lives according to his own laws and separate from the rabble like an ‘Epicurean god’, and expressly does not want to rule.[109] If this aspect of the overman is attractive for ‘free spirits’, it is not least because it paints a privatistic, elitist and depoliticised image of ‘liberated’ life. But then a ‘transition from the ideal of apolitics to the doctrine of domination’ takes place:[110] in the preparation for the third part of Zarathustra (in the fall of 1883), Nietzsche reflects on the ‘transition from free spirit and hermit to the need to dominate [zum Herrschen–Müssen]’.[111] He does this in the self-understanding of unwillingly having to execute a necessity: ‘Dominating? Forcing my kind onto others? Horrible! Isn’t my happiness simply looking at many others? Problem’.[112]
But only with the overman as ‘legislator’ does the doctrine of eternal recurrence become for the first time ‘bearable’ for Zarathustra.[113] Nietzsche expects the overman to resolve the problem that, in the course of the eternal return, the ‘surfeit of human beings’ will also return as a ‘dirty river’, ‘rabble mish mash’, ‘human mould and bones and crumbling past’: ‘Oh, nausea! Nausea! Nausea!’[114] It is precisely at this point that Nietzsche develops the figure of the overman as a ruthless ruler that is elaborated by the late Nietzsche up to the fantasy of a medical annihilation of ‘degenerating life’.[115] The high point both of the ‘bliss’, as of the ‘desire’, will now be ‘to press your hand upon millennia as if upon wax – bliss to write upon the will of millennia as if upon bronze’.[116] The overman becomes now the ‘parable’ for the ‘secretion of a luxurious surplus from mankind’, which develops on the ‘substructure’ of a highly technological ‘economic administration of the earth’ a ‘higher form of aristocratism’.[117] Nietzsche’s overman figure thus unfolds its appeal as an image of radical domination: a role model for anti-democratic elites and all those who want to participate in their prestige. His effectiveness in the ideologies of fascism lies not least in the combination of these aspects.
Applying a ‘symptomatic reading’ to Nietzsche’s discourse,[118] we could interpret the overman as a figurative prediction and, at the same time, apologia for a kind of class-based species-separation within the human species, in which the elites of high-tech capitalism separate themselves from their ‘ordinary’ fellow human beings with the help of biotechnical enhancements and artificial intelligence, while exploiting and dominating them all the more effectively. An interpretation that takes Nietzsche’s elitist class standpoint seriously could sharpen our awareness of these real threats, which in turn could be used for democratic counterstrategies that defend humanity against its high-tech disempowerment and alienation. However, a poststructuralist allegorisation that obscures the understanding of power relations blocks this possibility right from the start.
What interests Deleuze most about the overman is that ‘he has nothing in common with the species being of the dialecticians’.[119] Deleuze thus adopts Nietzsche’s hostility to the equality of human beings that he sees implied in the notion of a human species. In this context, Deleuze also turns against Heidegger, who treated the overman as the realisation of human essence.[120] In contrast, it is important to distance him as something completely different from man, and indeed also from the ‘higher’ man: Whereas the human species being is determined by the ‘reactivity of all forces’, the overman defines himself ‘by a new way of feeling, […] of thinking, […] of evaluating […], a “transvaluation”’.[121] To liberate thinking from resentment and bad conscience would therefore also mean ‘the overcoming and destruction of even the best men’.[122]
In Deleuze’s Foucault book, Nietzsche’s announcement of the overcoming of man by the overman is used as a parable of new combinations of the forces of man with new forces of the outside. By this, he means, for example, combinations with ‘the forces of information technology and their third-generation machines which together create something other than man, indivisible “man-machine” systems’; [123] or with the forces ‘of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier’.[124] Indeed, to explore the combinations with ‘new forces of the outside’ that modify the ‘ensemble of social relations’ and thus also the concrete-historical ‘essence’ of human beings is precisely the task of a historical-materialist analysis. Instead of embarking on this work of research, however, Deleuze speculates on the exit from the man-form and the ‘advent of a new form that is neither God nor man’.[125]
Nietzschean and Althusserian components in the antihumanism of the early Judith Butler
Another trace of antihumanism leads from Judith Butler’s variant of poststructuralism to the posthumanism of the feminist physicist Karen Barad. Since Barad backs up her posthumanist interpretation of quantum physics primarily with the help of Butler’s subject theory (and, to a lesser degree, of Foucault’s), we focus first on the way Butler draws on Nietzschean and Althusserian traits of antihumanism. I restrict my argument deliberately to the ‘early’ Judith Butler of the 1990s, because her theoretical approach experiences an ethical-humanistic shift in her book Precarious Life (2004) and afterwards, which cannot be explored here.[126]
In the preface of 1990 to Gender Trouble, Butler refers to the ‘genealogical critique’ developed by Foucault following Nietzsche, which does not search for the origins of identity categories (e.g. gender, sexual identity, female desire), but understands them as ‘effects of institutions, practices, discourses’.[127] Referring to Nietzsche, Butler directs her critique above all against a ‘metaphysics of substance’, which is anchored in the belief ‘that the grammatical formulation of subject and predicate reflects the prior ontological reality of substance and attribute’.[128]
The argument is taken from a passage in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals which criticises the ‘man of resentment’ and his erroneous notion of ‘good’ and ‘evil’;[129] this man had succumbed to a ‘seduction of language’ that misunderstood all action as conditioned by a subject. Just as the people ‘separate lightning from its shining and take the latter as the doing, as the effect of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from the expressions of strength, as if there were an indifferent substrate behind the strong, which was free to express strength or not.’[130] Nietzsche’s critique of a popular ‘ressentiment’ that attempts to make the ‘strong’ – that is, the ruling elites – morally responsible for exploitation and oppression is, here, epistemologically underpinned by a critique of a grammatical subject illusion: ‘But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind the doing, working, becoming; “the doer” is merely imaginatively added [hinzugedichtet] to the doing, – the doing is everything. […] Our whole science is still […] under the seduction of language, and it could not get rid of the “subjects” as the falsely imported changelings (untergeschobene Wechselbälge)’.[131]
Here, we can observe how a perceptive observation of an ideology embedded in grammar tips over into fictionalism: the fact that languages tend to break down all events according to the grammatical structure subject-predicate (- object) is connected with a deeply anchored anthropocentrism, which transfers a human scheme of action and agency to non-human nature. An ideology-critique of grammar would need to criticise this as an anthropocentric projection that imaginatively skips over the qualitative differences between human practices and processes in non-human nature. In contrast, Nietzsche draws the general conclusion of eliminating the subject as merely ‘made up’ [hinzugedichtet].
Butler not only omits the framework of Nietzsche’s aristocratic critique of a ‘moral economy’ of subaltern classes, she also adopts his epistemological elimination of the subject: ‘All psychological categories (the ego, the individual, the person) derive from the illusion of substantial identity.’[132] In order to rethink gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance we will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche’s claim that ‘there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything’.[133]
In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler intends to read Nietzsche in such a way ‘that he offers us a political insight into the formation of the psyche and the problem of subjection, understood […] not merely as the subordination of a subject to a norm, but as the constitution of a subject through precisely such a subordination’.[134] She adopts from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals the view ‘that morality is predicated on a certain kind of violence […] that […] founds the subject […] as a reflexive being’; even the subject that opposes the inflicted violence ‘is itself the effect of a prior violence without which the subject could not have emerged’.[135] Since, according to Nietzsche, the bad conscience ‘fabricates the soul’, the subject is ‘a necessary fiction’, without which ‘the grammatical and phenomenological subject cannot exist’.[136]
Similarly, Butler interprets Althusser’s model of interpellation to the effect that subject formation is accomplished through ‘acceptance’ and ‘self-attribution of guilt’, without which ‘there is no “I” who might ascribe a place to itself’.[137] At this point, however, she turns Althusser’s argument around: whereas Althusser’s explanation runs from the outside to the inside, i.e. from the Ideological State Apparatuses and their interpellations to the subjects’ subjection, Butler postulates that, before the interpellation, there is already an ‘prior complicity with the law’, a ‘vulnerability to the law’, a ‘complicitous desire for the law’ and its promise of identity.[138] Butler thus assumes a ‘founding submission’, which she describes as ‘a certain readiness to be compelled by the authoritative interpellation’, a ‘certain desire to be beheld by and perhaps also to behold the face of authority’, a ‘guilty embrace of the law’.[139] To become a ‘subject’ is thus to have been ‘presumed guilty, then tried and declared innocent’ or ‘to be continuously in the process of acquitting oneself of the accusation of guilt’.[140]
With the assertion of such an original desire for subjugation, Butler undermines the historical-materialist side of Althusser’s approach, which is in tension with his omnihistorical concept of ‘ideology in general’. Similarly to Lacan, Butler undertakes an ontologisation of subjugation, in which a specific state of early childhood dependence is essentialised to a human characteristic in general.[141]
In Bodies that Matter, Butler adopts from Althusser the notion that the subject is ‘produced through the accumulation and convergence’ of interpellations.[142] Following John Austin’s concept of ‘performative utterances’, she characterises this subject-production as ‘performativity’, a ‘reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’.[143] In the course of discursive repetitions, the subject is constituted as a ‘crossroads’ or ‘nexus’ of discursive forces and demands.[144] Butler critically notes that Althusser does not consider the range of disobedience that the interpellations might produce: ‘The law might not only be refused, but it might also be ruptured, forced into a rearticulation that calls into question the monotheistic force of its own unilateral operation.’[145] This possibility is explained by a ‘constitutive failure of the performative’, which is due to a ‘slippage between discursive command and its appropriated effect’.[146] This discrepancy opens up the possibility for ‘resignifying the terms of violation against their violating aims’.[147] The discursive demands can neither be summarily refused nor followed in strict obedience, but rather form a ‘space of […] ambivalence which opens up the possibility of a reworking of the very terms by which subjectivation proceeds—and fails to proceed.[148]
On the one hand, we see here how Butler succeeds in overcoming some weaknesses of Althusser’s model of subjection. She considers the possibility of ‘disobedience’ and ‘resignification’ – in this regard, her approach resembles Stuart Hall’s above-mentioned differentiation of different decodings.[149] On the other hand, she explains this possibility merely from the discrepancy within the interpellating discourses, which means that the agency of the subjects, their critical ‘buon senso’ abilities of realistic observation and experimental thinking are again made to disappear. The making of experiences, from which ideological interpellations can potentially be rejected, have vanished. Here, too, a theoretical anti-humanism is at play, which eliminates people as agents, collapses their subjectivity with their subjection and reduces their practices to discursive effects.
The comparison with Althusser reveals a threefold dematerialisation that Butler shares with other poststructuralist approaches: what has been lost is, firstly, the materiality of the ideological, its existence as ideological apparatuses, practices, rituals, which Althusser illustrates using the example of Pascal’s ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’;[150] what is absent is, secondly, the materiality of the social formation in general, its productive forces, relations of production and reproduction, class rule, relations of force in civil society, etc.; and, thirdly, with regard to the human body, her legitimate concern of a de-naturalisation (e.g. of an allegedly ‘natural’ heterosexual normativity) turns into a de-materialisation of the body, whose ‘matter’ is only conceptualised as the ‘effect of a power’ and its ‘regulatory norm’.[151]
Accordingly, materialist feminists criticised Butler for reducing materiality (via the double meaning of the English verb ‘matter’) to discourses and their normativity. According to Susan Bordo, Butler’s cultural constructivism amounts to a ‘textualisation of the body’: ‘language swallows everything up, voraciously, a theoretical pasta-machine through which the categories of competing frameworks are pressed and reprocessed as “tropes”’.[152] The body is considered as a text ‘whose meanings can be analysed in abstraction from experience, history, material practices, and context’.[153] Manuel Vasquez, who summarises several of these criticisms, attests that Butler dissolves the subject, the body and matter into ‘power-laden webs of signification’ and can therefore only develop a ‘thin’ understanding of resistance.[154] For Rosemary Hennessy, Butler reduces materialism to symbolic processes of normalisation that cause social relations to disappear and, in particular, erases capitalism’s fundamental relationship of exploitation;[155] Butler’s ‘performance identity recasts bourgeois […] individuality as a more fluid and indeterminate series of subversive bodily acts, but this postmodern subject is severed from the collective historical processes and struggles’.[156]
Karen Barad joins these criticisms. According to her, Butler conceptualises the materiality of the body as ‘citationality’[157] and sees it as the end product of the ‘agency’ of language and culture. By doing so, she falls short of the dynamic capabilities of matter and, at the same time, misses her own claim to overcome the gap between matter and discourse.[158] However, this raises the question, as to why and how Barad is utilising a theorist, whom she accuses of ‘cheating matter out of the fullness of its capacity’,[159] for her project of a materialist ‘agential realism’. In the following, I will try to show that Karen Barad’s posthumanism is based not least on her methodical decision to adopt the anti-humanist orientation of poststructuralism and to transfer it to the domain of quantum physics.
Karen Barad’s transposition of poststructuralism to quantum physics
Barad develops her project of ‘agential realism’ on the basis of Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen school of quantum physics, which views the dynamics of material processes from their subatomic side and thus does away with reified ideas of ‘matter’. Already in the 1930s and 1940s, Ernst Bloch had criticised such reified notions of matter as ‘mechanical clod’.[160] According to him, quantum theory provides a new terrain for dialectics that the Hegelians and Engels hardly dared to dream of – in it, dialectics is ‘on the doorstep’, because it shows that atoms and electrons are not immutable elements either, ‘on which the forces of nature only act from the outside […]; but they themselves are […] in their finest parts subject to fine flowing changes’.[161] Instead of appearing as rigid opposites, wave and particle are themselves ‘moments of change that condition each other, that turn into each other’.[162] However, the physical matter of quantum theory is still completely ‘unmediated’ with the historical matter of our mesocosm.[163]
What Bloch criticises as a lack of mediation with the human world in the ‘mesocosm’ also applies to Barad’s interpretation of quantum physics. Its strength lies in the de-reification of the concept of matter, in the sense of an ever moving and moved natura naturans, oscillating between energy and substance. Instead of being a ‘fixed essence or property of things’, matter is ‘produced and productive, generated and generative’.[164] It is ‘not a thing, but a doing’.[165] W.F. Haug attests that Barad construes ‘as it were a philosophy of praxis of matter, no longer of human beings’.[166] This is due to the fact that the mediation with the matter of human history and society is blocked by an ontological generalisation that ‘sinks the historical emergence of the human form of life into the holistic process of matter’.[167]
What is criticised here as ‘sinking’ [Versenken] is formulated by Barad herself with the syntagma ‘posthumanist, performative approach’,[168] by which she claims to combine Butler’s ‘performativity’ with posthumanism. She describes this connection as a process of ‘reworking of Butler’s notion of performativity from iterative citationality to iterative intra-activity’.[169] ‘Intra-activity’ is used as a counter-concept to ‘inter-action’ and is meant to emphasise that all ‘agency’ is to be regarded as one of matter.[170] This transfer is possible because she sees Butler’s – as well as Foucault’s – merit, among other things, in having ‘blast[ed] the tenets of humanism’.[171] Based on this anti-humanism, she wants to read the quantum physics of Nils Bohr through Butler and Foucault in order to overcome the ‘liberal humanism’ still to be found in Bohr and to transform it into a posthumanism.[172] Human practices like laboratory manipulations and observational interventions ‘are part of a more comprehensive, larger material configuration of the world’ and humans are ‘part of the world-body-space in its dynamic structuring’.[173]
It is obvious that human practices – including those of experimental researchers – do not take place in a vacuum, but are woven into complex social institutions as well as into overarching contexts of non-human nature. The question is, of course, how to conceptualise both this interweaving and the human specificity within it. This would require a dialectic that makes it possible to draw analytical distinctions within phenomena that are empirically inseparable. To carry out such dialectical distinctions of what is empirically interwoven is part of the fundamental method of Marx’s critique of political economy – for example, the distinction between use value and exchange value, concrete-useful and abstract labour. Thus, Marx defines labour as the mediator of the ‘metabolism’ between humans and (non-human) nature: in this metabolism, ‘man confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs […], and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature’.[174] ‘Nature’ is, thus, to be found on all sides of this metabolic relation, not only on the side of the processed raw materials and the tools (as extensions of the bodily organs), but also of the human abilities of labour.
Marx defines the latter’s specificity in his famous bee and architect parable to the effect that ‘the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax’, the labour’s result having ‘already been conceived by the worker at the beginning’.[175] We leave out here the interesting criticism of Ted Benton that Marx’s definition of labour is fixated on handicraft and neglects the eco-regulatory function of agricultural labour.[176] What distinguishes the worst architects from the best bees are the particular abilities for anticipation, goal-oriented planning and cooperation.[177] As the Berlin school of Critical Psychology has shown, human labour is characterised by the capacity of objectivisation (Vergegenständlichung), by which the producers lock anticipated goals and meanings into the things and instruments produced. Every generation builds a world of produced objects that carry objectified meanings, and every new generation that enters this world of things is learning these meanings by practically using these things.[178] These capacities enable humans not only to adapt to given circumstances, but to proactively transform them – certainly not ‘alone’, but in co-evolution with climate change and other forces of nature. The dialectical challenge is to hold the two sides of this ‘difference in unity’ together: the fact that we are not outside of ‘nature’, but natural beings, and that as human natural beings we have developed specific species characteristics of anticipating, learning, and experimentation.
Various eco-Marxist approaches have attempted to define this dialectic with different emphases. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik speaks of a double ‘overarching’ [Übergreifen]: on the one hand, human labour is ‘overarching’ non-human nature (here, Marx takes up Hegel), on the other hand, it is integral part of nature (here he takes up Schelling) and is ‘overarched’ by it.[179] Andreas Malm conceptualises this complex relationship by the distinction between ‘substance monism’ and ‘property dualism’: the former is directed against Cartesian dualisms and means that we consist of the same substance as non-human nature; the latter means that human capacities of conscience, anticipation, intentionality are ‘emergent’ properties that developed their own particular qualities.[180] Since there is no one Great Divide between society and nature, but, rather, many divisions and flows of emergences between mutually irreducible strata, Malm then refines his concept of ‘property dualism’ as ‘property pluralism’.[181] Jason Moore proposes replacing the still dualistic discourse of the human-nature relationship with the concept of a ‘double internality’ within a comprehensive ‘web of life’ (Greek oikeios): ‘nature-in-humanity’, so that ‘nature’ encompasses and permeates all sides of metabolic processes and operates as ‘the matrix within which human activity unfolds’, and ‘humanity-in-nature’, which, e.g. in its capitalist form, does not simply ‘destroy’ nature, but organises it to the effect that it is ‘put to work’.[182]
We can leave aside here the eco-Marxist controversies between Moore’s ‘world-ecological’ approach and the ‘metabolic rift’ theory developed around John Bellamy Foster and others.[183] Instead, what interests us in this context is the argument of W.F. Haug that this ‘double interiority’ is also characterised by a particular asymmetry, because human labour plays a specific initiative and transformative role in the metabolic relationship, which is why a conceptual distinction is to be made between, on the one hand, human labour, praxis and agency, on the other hand, processes and activities of ‘effectiveness’ [Wirksamkeit] in non-human nature.[184]
Naming and researching this asymmetry must be clearly distinguished from an anthropocentrism that understands the development of humankind in a normative sense as the ‘crown’ of evolution (or of ‘creation’ for that matter). The specific capabilities of humans are uttermost ambivalent, their anticipation and planning abilities can, in principle, be embedded in cooperative relationships both among humans and with non-human nature, in the sense of what Ernst Bloch described as an ‘alliance technique’ capable of building ‘nature alliances’ that are mediated with the co-productivity of nature’;[185] but, in particular, in the framework of class societies, the productive forces connected to these capacities are accompanied by (or turn into) destructive forces that ‘[undermine] the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker’, as Marx observes in regards to agrarian capitalism.[186] We can borrow here from Horkheimer’s insight that ‘reason’, in this context, is being narrowed down to ‘instrumental reason’, which is ‘inseparable from the nature of reason in civilization as we have known it’, because it was born from our ‘urge to dominate nature’. As long as we do not understand our own reason, as long as we are not capable of self-critically transform it into a medium of reconciliation, the subjugation of nature reverts into the subjugation of humans, and vice versa.[187]
Without considering the asymmetry in the metabolic process as well as its ambivalence, it remains inexplicable why ‘humanity’ (i.e. in its modern-capitalist form) was able to become the primary geological power in the Capitalocene. It could not even be understood why much of ‘nature’ is co-produced by humans, as evidenced, for example, by the fact that with the current biomass distribution on earth, about 60% of all mammals and 70% of all birds have been bred or domesticated by humans.[188] Posthumanist attempts to invisibilise the specific potentials of humanity also have fatal consequences in terms of an ecological ethic. ‘A humanity that has been rendered oblivious to its own responsibility to evolution – a responsibility […] to foster diversity and to provide ecological guidance […] –, is a humanity that betrays its own evolutionary heritage’ and represses its ethical obligation to bring about ‘a creative, not destructive, metabolism with nature’.[189]
From here, we can see more clearly what is captured and what gets lost in Barad’s account: in the justified critique of an exceptionalism that detaches human beings from nature and opposes them to it dualistically, Barad emphasises the inseparable human-nature unity. This corresponds to what Andreas Malm describes as ‘substance monism’ and Schmied-Kowarzik as humans being ‘overarched’ by nature’. However, since Barad refuses to make analytical distinctions within what is empirically intertwined, she misses the historical and societal specifics of the human that is mediated by labour and language.
When Barad distances herself from Bohr’s ‘humanism’ and replaces it with her ‘posthumanist’ framework,[190] this is mainly the result her transfer of Butler’s ‘performative’ elimination of the subject to the quantum physics of the Copenhagen School. It is not covered by the quantum physics experiments that she refers to. We can see this in the example of ‘measurement interaction’ in the experiments on particle-wave oscillations, which represent one of the most difficult problems for theoretical physics. Barad extensively discusses the differences between Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’, in which the problem is located on the epistemological level as ‘ignorance’ of the exact state of the object or the measuring apparatus, and Bohr’s ‘complementarity principle’, which explains the problem on a ‘semantic-ontic’ level with the indeterminate nature of quantum objects.[191] But her ‘posthumanistic’ evaluation is contradicted by the fact that the measurement of protons, through which the researchers necessarily change the objects to be measured, as well as the shooting of photons in different directions, which reveals a seemingly fantastic inseparability of photons that are separated in space-time (Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’), are processes that are initiated by the researchers in the experiment. In other words, they are the outcomes of pro-actively intervening human arrangements.
In contrast, Barad sees the measurement neither as human intervention nor as inter-action, but as a ‘causal intra-action […] of the universe making itself intelligible to another part’.[192] Now it is the ‘agential cut’ itself that ‘enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy’.[193] In another formulation, it is the ‘larger material arrangement that ‘enacts a cut that resolves the inherent ontic-semantic indeterminacy through which the “subject” and the “object” emerge’.[194] Whereas, from a praxis-philosophical perspective, it is the researcher who initiates a ‘dialectical mediation between the human and nature’ in the experiment, a ‘new form of active unity’ between them,[195] Barad makes these practices, the human experimental arrangements, the conscious utilisation of the apparatuses disappear. What remains is the ‘cloudy suggestion that the phenomenon itself somehow produces the observer via intra-activity, through which the process of matter observes itself, as it were’.[196]
Outlook: Differences to and intersections with right-wing ‘transhumanism’
Our exploratory cross-drillings unearthed an anti-humanism, which manifests itself in Althusser’s reduction of subjects to effects of the structures of society and its ideology, which is generalised by the poststructuralist Nietzscheans Deleuze and Foucault to a critique of the human in the name of the ‘overman’, and which, in Butler’s case, refers to discursive chains and their (often incomplete) repetitions. It is this anti-humanist line that is then extended to ‘matter’ and its ‘intra-agential’ dynamics. In all the variants discussed, the intervening practices of the acting subjects are made to disappear. However, erasing human specificities ‘absolves humans from their responsibility for the way in which they co-construct themselves through nature’[197] and thus paralyses human agency in the midst of the ecological catastrophe.
Looking at the current hegemonic conjuncture, we can observe a bifurcation between ‘posthumanism’ and ‘transhumanism’, which, in turn, corresponds, to a large extent, to the differences between a ‘leftist’ and a right-wing Nietzscheanism. Of course, the relationship between ‘posthumanism’ and ‘transhumanism’ is itself a highly disputed issue. Miguel Vedda draws a sharp demarcation line between ‘posthumanism’ as a sidearm of academic poststructuralism, which – following Nietzsche’s intuition – questions the human as an empty space which contains many intermingling selves, and ‘transhumanism’ as a techno-optimistic programme, which claims to enhance human life with the help of biogenetics and artificial intelligence and promises to overcome not only illness but also old age and death.[198] We encounter the latter predominantly under its right wing and techno-fascist forms of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Alexander Karp and others. Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto declares that Nietzsche’s Last Man is ‘our enemy’ and demands to become ‘technological supermen’.[199] Peter Thiel develops his techno-accelerationism in the form of a neo-Nietzschean transhumanism that denounces each and every hindrance to an AI propelled ‘progress’ as the ‘Antichrist’, defined by the principle of ‘peace and security’, whose exemplary embodiment is to be found in Greta Thunberg.[200]
Peter Sloterdijk, one of the most influential right-wing Nietzscheans in Germany,[201] asked in his speech at Schloss Elmau in 1999, titled ‘Rules for the Human Zoo’ (Regeln für den Menschenpark), what else could tame or educate people now that humanism has failed ‘as a school of human formation’.[202] Referring to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, he calls for the perspective of a new breeding to be understood as a ‘battleground’ and ‘place of decision and selection’[203], namely as a ‘struggle between the small breeders and the large breeders of man, […] between humanists and superhumanists, friends of man and friends of the overman’.[204] With reference to Plato’s breeding project, but without mentioning Plato’s ‘negative eugenics’, i.e. the killing of ‘weak’ offspring, he argues that the philosopher-king has the task of ‘weaving together in the most effective way the characteristics of voluntarily governable humans that are most favorable for the commonwealth, so that under his hand the human zoo reaches optimal homeostasis’.[205] Whether the development will advance to a ‘genetic reform of the characteristics of the species’, to ‘explicit trait planning’ and ‘prenatal selection’, is one of the questions in which ‘the evolutionary horizon is beginning to clear before us’.[206]
Stefan L. Sorgner, whom Wikipedia presents as ‘Germany’s leading post- and transhumanist philosopher’, envisions humanity ‘on the path to the overhuman. Either we evolve or we die out’.[207] For him, Nietzsche’s overman is important, because he gives transhumanism a perspective and provides it with a sense of meaning.[208] If humanity succeeds in opening up to further technical (including genetic) developments, it could enter a transitional phase of transhumanism and ultimately produce the overhuman as a new ‘posthuman’ species that, in contrast to the ‘transhumans’, will no longer be able to interbreed with humans.[209] As a post-humanist goal, the overhuman thus enables a perspective of salvation in this world, which – in contrast to the otherworldly redemption of Christianity – is also convincing for scientifically minded people.[210] Of course, this interpretation is only possible, because the author conceals the principle of social domination in Nietzsche’s overman, who, for him, signifies the ‘harmoniously formed Renaissance-genius’ as well as the multiple composition of the subject, which he celebrates as the ‘radical plurality of the good’.[211] When Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morals, for example, notes (and laments) a radical transvaluation of values from an aristocratic origin of domination to a Jewish ‘slave revolt in morality’,[212] Sorgner does not want to see anything other than values in general that change on a social, cultural and personal level.[213]
It is obvious that my criticism of the anti- and posthumanist trajectory is not meant to blame the ‘left-wing’ varieties for the turn into a right-wing or techno-fascist ‘transhumanism’. The two strands are not to be equalised, the opposition, for example, between the speculative holism of ‘new materialism’ and the ecocidal supremacism of the tech-industry allied with Trumpism is not to be levelled down. What I criticise is, rather, that this left-Nietzschean erasure of human agency is undermining the foundations of a socialist humanism that is urgently needed for a broad and effective resistance against the current processes of fascisation.[214]
But there is more to it: as already showcased by the example of Stefan Sorgner, Miguel Vedda’s distinction is too clear-cut to be exhaustive. Right-wing transhumanism also feeds upon the impulses of a left-Nietzschean posthumanism, and there are multiple examples that show the latter flip into the former. One of the main starting points of both left-wing and right-wing ‘accelerationism’ is Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion to advance the process of ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘decoding’ conducted by capitalism: ‘Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it’, and this ‘to a point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of deterritorialization creates of necessity and by itself a new earth’.[215] Does the revolutionary attitude really consist of behaving in relation to earth as if we had a second one in the trunk (or in the internet)? How the artificial earth is supposed to morph into a ‘new earth’ remains, of course, obscure.
Nick Land’s switch from an esoteric Deleuzian discourse to this neo-reactionary project of a ‘dark enlightenment’ is a famous case in point. His essay ‘Meltdown’ of 1997 reads the accelerationism statement of Deleuze and Guattari in terms of a ‘meltdown acceleration’, by which ‘man is something […] to overcome’, to be dissipating through rhizomatics and connectionism.[216] The ‘revolutionary’ gesture is expressed by the claim of ‘replacing the politico-territorial imagery of conquest and resistance with nomad micromilitary sabotage and evasion’.[217] The transition to right-wing accelerationism can be observed, for example, in his ‘Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism’. It occurs when the subversive claim of overcoming the capitalist system is replaced with an equation of capitalism and subversion: ‘In this germinal accelerationist matrix, there is no distinction to be made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification.’[218] The illusory image of a ‘new earth’ is gone, the capitalist circle is closed. What follows is the attempt to free this closed system from any democratic mediation: inspired by Curtis Yarvin, Land proposes the model of a CEO monarchy based on Government Corporations (gov-corps), which replaces universal suffrage (‘no voice, free exit’) with the system of ‘each share has one vote’ and abolishes politics altogether, so that ‘any interest in politics […] would be to exhibit semi-criminal proclivities’.[219] Thus protected against any democratic challenge, Land’s fascist project of a hightech-capitalist fortress can replace ordinary racism with a ‘hyper-racism’: genomic manipulation, ‘assortative mating’ and space colonisation are to function as a ‘highly-selective genetic filter’. Since space colonists will be ‘smarter than average, healthier than average, saner than average’, this will lead to a ‘genetic diversification as a class-structured mechanism for population diremption’ and thus to a ‘disintegration of the human species’.[220]
We are confronted with the dystopia of a global class divide translated into and anchored in genetics: a new apartheid between those who can afford to select the favourable characteristics of their offspring, enhance their intelligence, their capacities, their ‘personalities’, and those who cannot. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor observe a transhumanist accelerationism in power that has essentially abandoned the idea of a liveable world here on earth, a kind of ‘apocalyptic fever’ that is both evangelical and secular.[221] Confronted with this corporate death drive, in a constellation where significant factions of the ruling class are burning up the planet, an effective antifascism needs to take up again the humanist thrust of the refrain of the Internationale: ‘L’Internationale sera le genre humain’, or, in another version: ‘The Internationale unites the human race.’ We need to develop new ways of assembling the fragmented humanity and all their ‘buon senso’ capabilities of anticipating, cooperative planning, resisting and self-reflection on a universalist level.
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[1] Foucault 1994, p. 387.
[2] Althusser 2005/1965, p. 227.
[3] Althusser 2005/1965, p. 229.
[4] Althusser 2005/1965, p. 231.
[5] Althusser 2005/1965, pp. 245 et sq.
[6] Marx 1976, p. 172.
[7] Engels 1886, p. 381.
[8] For example, when Marx analyses how the ‘means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, […] they alienate [entfremden] from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process’ (Marx 1976, p. 799; cf. Marx/Engels 1957, Vol. 23, p. 674).
[9] Althusser 2005/1965, p. 231.
[10] Marx 1845, p. 5.
[11] PIT 1979, p. 127.
[12] Althusser 2005/1962, p. 167.
[13] Marx 1845, p. 4.
[14] Marx, Engels 1845, p. 54.
[15] Feuerbach 1989/1841, p. 3.
[16] Althusser 2001, p. 118.
[17] Althusser 2001, p. 123.
[18] Hall 1993, p. 517.
[19] Gramsci 1975, Q 10.II, § 48, pp. 1334-35; Q 11, §12, p. 1380.
[20] Cf. Rehmann 2014, pp. 177-78, 314-16; Also E.P. Thompson insists in his criticism of Althusser on the mediating concept of experience that allows to grasp the interactions between being and knowledge (Thompson 1978, pp. 4, 7-8, 97-98, 164-71).
[21] Holzkamp-Osterkamp 1975, pp. 239, 332; cf. Holzkamp 1985, pp. 178 et sqq., 186 et sqq.
[22] Marx 1976, p. 172.
[23] Marx 1845, p. 3
[24] West 1999, p. 283.
[25] Deleuze 2013, p. 9.
[26] Gramsci had termed as ‘Lorianism’ (derived from Achille Loria) the playful irresponsibility of intellectuals (e.g. Gramsci 1975, Q. 9, §28). Cf. also for this Reitz 1997, Pohn-Lauggas 2015.
[27] Nietzsche 2013, p. 15; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 5, p. 259.
[28] Nietzsche 2013, p. 17; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 5, p. 261.
[29] Nietzsche 2013, pp. 18 et sq.; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 5, pp. 263 et sq.
[30] Nietzsche 2013, p. 29; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 5, p. 275.
[31] Nietzsche 2013, p. 20; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 5, p. 265.
[32] Deleuze 2013, p. 2.
[33] Deleuze 2013, pp. 2, 51, 53
[34] Cf. Losurdo 2020, pp. 609 et sq., 612, 614 et sq., 738 et sqq., 743 et sqq., 814 et sqq., 991 etsqq., 1009 et sq.
[35] E.g. Spinoza 1996, IV P32-34, pp. 499 et sqq.
[36] Nietzsche 2013, pp. 63 et sq.; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 5, pp. 313 et sq.
[37] Nietzsche 1997, p. 126; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 5, p. 208; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 13, p. 258. = JGB
[38] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 10, p. 187.
[39] Deleuze 2013, pp. 57 et sq.
[40] Deleuze 2013, p. 198.
[41] Deleuze 1995, pp. 142, 149.
[42] Frank 1989, pp. 343 et sq.
[43] Deleuze and Guattari 2009, p. 61
[44] ‘Nietzsche’s biologism becomes Deleuze’s machinism; Nietzsche’s ‘everything is will to power’ becomes Deleuze’s ‘everything is desire’’.’ (Schrift 1995, pp. 259 et sq.)
[45] Deleuze and Guattari 2009, p. 348; cf. pp. 63 et sq.
[46] Deleuze and Guattari 2009, p. 29.
[47] Deleuze and Guattari 2009, pp. 3 et sq., 24, 36 et sq.
[48] Deleuze and Guattari 2009, pp. 326 et sq.
[49] Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 40.
[50] Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 43.
[51] This is evident, for example, by the English booktitle of Latour’s introduction to ANT Reassembling the Social as well as by the frequent usage of the assemblage terminology (e.g. Latour 2005, pp. 2, 7f, 53, 86, 208).
[52] Cf the study of François Cusset (2003).
[53] Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 40 et sq.
[54] DeLanda 2016, p. 1.
[55] Nail 2017, p. 23.
[56] Folkers 2013, p. 27.
[57] Latour 2005, pp. 70 et sq.
[58] Latour 2005, p. 71.
[59] Such a wide definition ‘is hard to tell from the property of existing. […] “Agency” appears to lose meaning, the concept not enriched but eviscerated’ (Malm 2018, p. 89).
[60] Malm 2018, p. 144.
[61] Haug 2015, p. 318.
[62] Bennett 2010, pp. 4 et sq.
[63] Bennett 2010, p. 4.
[64] Bennet 2012, pp. 249, 252.
[65] Malm 2018, pp. 60 and sq.
[66] Cf. Rehmann 2023, pp. 142 et sqq. and 222 et sqq.
[67] Cf. Eribon 1994, pp. 333 et sqq.
[68] Althusser 1993, p. 176.
[69] Althusser 2006, pp. 218, 273.
[70] Althusser 2006, p. 226.
[71] Foucault 2001b, Nr. 354, p. 1522.
[72] Deleuze 2000, pp. 110 et sqq., 128 et sqq.
[73] Deleuze 2000, pp. 129, 159; cf. Deleuze 1986, pp. 137, 120 et sqq.
[74] Deleuze 2013, pp. 154, 156 et sqq.
[75] As shown by Ishay Landa, Nietzsche’s critique of the Jewish-Christian God is directed, first and foremost, against a leftist-Hegelian and Marxist critique of religion (Landa 2005).
[76] Deleuze 2013, pp. 158 et sq.
[77] Foucault 1994, pp. xxiii et sq., 387.
[78] Foucault 1994, p. 385.
[79] Foucault 1994, p. 342.
[80] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 4, p. 168.
[81] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 9, pp. 500 et sq.
[82] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 10, p. 372.
[83] Foucault 1994, p. 223.
[84] Foucault 1994, pp. 222 et sq.
[85] Foucault 1994, pp. 261 et sq.
[86] Foucault 1994, p. 262.
[87] Foucault 1994, pp. 248, 327,
[88] Marx 1845, p. 4.
[89] Foucault 1994, pp. 342 et sq. (translation modified)
[90] Sartre 1966, p. 88.
[91] However, the anti-Marxist stance emerged again explicitly when Foucault, in his enthusiastic review of André Glucksmann’s Les Maîtres penseurs, agreed with the assertion that Stalinism is the ‘truth’ of Marx (Foucault 2001b, p. 278).
[92] Foucault 1977, p. 221; Foucault 2001a, Nr. 98, p. 1094.
[93] Foucault 1977, p. 222; Foucault 2001a, Nr. 98, p. 1095 (translation modified).
[94] Foucault 1977, pp. 232 et sq.; Foucault 2001a, Nr. 98, pp. 1102 et sq.
[95] Foucault 1977, p. 233; Foucault 2001a, Nr. 98, p. 1103.
[96] Foucault 2000, p. 224; Foucault 2001b, Nr. 278, p. 840. In 1975, with the publication of Discipline and Punish, he had written that, if he were ambitious, he would place his work under the title The Genealogy of Morals (Foucault 1980, p. 53; Foucault 2001a, Nr. 156, p. 1621).
[97] Foucault 1995, pp. 77, 80 et sqq.
[98] Cf. the comparative analysis in Rehmann 2023, pp. 186-212.
[99] Since Foucault refers to Rusche und Kirchheimer’s classic study (cf. Foucault 1995, pp. 24 et sqq.), he could have benefited from their insightful comparison betweeen attempts of a prison reform between 1875 and 1932 and fascist paradigms of punishment (Rusche, Kirchheimer 2009/1939, pp. 138 et sqq., 143, 150, 178, Note 4).
[100] Cf. Parenti 1999, p. 135; Wacquant 2009, p. 312.
[101] Foucault 2008, p. 258; Foucault 2004, p. 264.
[102] Foucault 2008, pp. 259 et sq.
[103] Cf. on Foucault’s affinity to neoliberalism, see the analysis of Zamora/Behrent 2016 and of Rehmann 2024, pp. 258 et sqq.
[104] Haug 1999, p. 409.
[105] Marx 1976, p. 172.
[106] Foucault 1994, p. 263.
[107] Foucault 1994, p. 385.
[108] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 12, p. 404.
[109] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 9, p. 604; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 10, p. 244.
[110] Ottmann 1999, pp. 239 et sq.
[111] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 10, p. 516.
[112] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 10, p. 529.
[113] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 10, p. 530.
[114] Nietzsche 2006, pp. 6, 177, 232 et sq.; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 4, pp. 15, 274, 357 et sq.
[115] Cf. Nietzsche 1968a, pp. 99 et sqq., Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 6, pp. 134 et sqq.; Nietzsche 1968b, p. 131; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 6, p. 174.
[116] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 10, p. 637; Nietzsche 2006, p. 172; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 4, p. 268.
[117] Nietzsche 2003, p. 176; Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 12, pp. 462 et sq.
[118] Althusser and Balibar 2009, pp. 28 et sq.
[119] Deleuze 2013, p. 163.
[120] Deleuze 2013, p. 169.
[121] Deleuze 2013, p. 163.
[122] Deleuze 2013, p. 166.
[123] Deleuze 2010, p. 89.
[124] Deleuze 2010, pp. 131 et sq.
[125] Deleuze 2010, p. 132.
[126] Butler proposes in Precarious Life ‘to start, and to end, with the question of the human […], not because there is a human condition that is universally shared – this is surely not yet the case’, but because of the question: ‘Who counts as human.’ (Butler 2004, p. 20)
[127] Butler 1999, p. xxixs.
[128] Butler 1999, p. 27. Barad has adopted this expression verbatim and without indicating its origin (Barad 2007, p. 133).
[129] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 5, p. 278.
[130] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 5, p. 279.
[131] Nietzsche 1999, Vol. 5, p. 279 et sq.
[132] Haar, cited in Butler 1990, p. 28.
[133] Butler 1990, p. 33.
[134] Butler 1997, p. 66.
[135] Butler 1997, p. 63.
[136] Butler 1997, pp. 97 et sq.
[137] Butler 1997, p. 107.
[138] Butler 1997, p. 108.
[139] Butler 1997, pp. 111-12.
[140] Butler 1997, p. 118.
[141] Cf. the critique of Lacan in Rehmann 2014, pp. 165-173.
[142] Butler 1993, p. 122.
[143] Butler 1993, p. 2.
[144] Butler 1993, p. 124.
[145] Butler 1993, p. 122.
[146] Ibid.
[147] Butler 1993, p. 124.
[148] Ibid.
[149] Cf. Hall 1993, p. 517.
[150] Althusser 2001, p. 114;
[151] Butler 1993, p. 2.
[152] Bordo 2003, pp. 288, 291.
[153] Bordo 2003, p. 292.
[154] Vasquez 2011, p. 146.
[155] Hennesy 2000, pp. 56 et sq., 59 et sqq.
[156] Hennessy 2000, pp. 120 et sq.
[157] ‘The process of […] materialization will be a kind of citationality, the acquisition of being through the citing of power, a citing that establishes an originary complicity with power in the formation of the “I”’. (Butler 1993, p. 15)
[158] Barad 2007, pp. 63 et sqq., 132 et sqq., 151, 184, 208.
[159] Barad 2007, p. 66.
[160] Bloch 1985, p. 17.; Bloch 1986, p. 208;
[161] Cited in Bloch 1985, p. 355.
[162] Bloch 1985, p. 356.
[163] Bloch 1985, p. 358.
[164] Barad 2007, p. 137.
[165] Barad 2007, p. 151.
[166] Haug 2016, p. 50.
[167] Haug 2016, p. 37.
[168] Barad 2007, p. 135.
[169] Barad 2007, p. 208.
[170] Similarly to Latour, Barad uses the term ‘agency’ without any connection to specifically human intentionality and deliberate planning (Barad 2007, p. 177).
[171] Barad 2007, p. 135.
[172] Barad 2007, pp. 146, 153, 168 et sq.
[173] Barad 2007, pp. 171 et sq.
[174] Marx 1976, pp. 283 et sq.
[175] Marx 1976, p. 284.
[176] Benton 1989, pp. 64 et sqq.
[177] Certainly, the use of tools, anticipation and intention can be found in non-human animals as well, but it is beyond doubt that human evolution could develop these capacities in a more extended, goal-oriented and more conscious way (see e.g. Tomasello 2022, chapt. 6).
[178] Cf. Holzkamp 1985, pp. 176 et sqq., 354 et sqq.
[179] Schmied-Kowarzik 2022, pp. 160 et sq.
[180] Malm 2018, pp. 52 et sqq.
[181] ‘The sophisticated materialist position would then seem to be a property pluralism. […] We may then treat property dualism as a special case […] of a wider pluralism’. (Malm 2018, p. 71).
[182] Moore 2015, pp. 5, 13, 35 et sq.
[183] Cf. the criticisms of Moore by Foster 2022, pp. 258-267; Malm 2018, pp. 179-183; Fraser 2023, pp. 89-92, 175 n2.
[184] Haug 2020, pp. 93f, 102, 113.
[185] Bloch 1986, pp. 690 et sq., 695 et sq.
[186] Marx 1976, p. 638.
[187] Cf. Horkheimer 1974/1946, pp. 176 et sq. For a critique of Horkheimer/Adorno’s one-sided and totalising critique of reason, cf. Rehmann 2014, pp. 95 et sqq.
[188] About 60% of mammals are bred or domesticated by humans, 36% of mamals are human beings, only 4% are wild; for birds, 70% are domesticated and 30% wild. See, for example, https://mercyforanimals.org/blog/study-60-percent-of-all-mammals-are-farmed/.
[189] Bookchin 1995, pp. 83 et sq., 90.
[190] E.g. Barad 2007, pp. 26 et sq., 32.
[191] E.g. Barad 2007, pp. 20, 116 et sqq., 261 et sqq.
[192] Barad 2007, pp. 176; cf. ibid. 140, 356.
[193] Barad 2007, p. 140.
[194] Barad 2007, p. 143.
[195] Gramsci 1975, Q 11, §34, p. 1449.
[196] Haug 2016, p. 40.
[197] Räthzel 2021, p. 798.
[198] Vedda 2025, pp. 387-89.
[199] Andreessen 2023.
[200] Cf. Thiel 2026.
[201] Cf. the critique of Rehmann/Wagner 2022, pp. 60-75.
[202] Sloterdijk 2001, p. 319.
[203] Sloterdijk 2001, pp. 318, 323.
[204] Sloterdijk 2001, pp. 325 et sq.
[205] Sloterdijk 2001, p. 334.
[206] Sloterdijk 2001, p. 330.
[207] Sorgner 2019, p. 105.
[208] Sorgner 2009, pp. 39 et sq.
[209] Sorgner 2009, p. 36.
[210] Sorgner 2009, p. 40.
[211] Sorgner 2019, pp. 51, 53.
[212] Nietzsche 1999, vol 5, p. 267.
[213] Sorgner 2019, p. 53.
[214] Cf. Rehmann 2026.
[215] Deleuze/Guattari 2009, 239f, 321.
[216] Land 1997, pp. 445 et sq., 449.
[217] Land 1997, p. 459
[218] Land 2017, p. 4.
[219] Land 2023 [2012], pp. 11 et sq., 13.
[220] Land 2014.
[221] Klein/Taylor 2025.
