7 - Subjectivity and Alienation (or the Impotence of the Subject)

Summary

It is in this spirit that one can understand something of the theory of alienation that Marx develops in the 1844 Manuscripts. Taking the word alienation from Hegel, Marx nevertheless radically changes its sense, because for him it no longer makes sense to say that, for a being conceived as a subject, the relation to objectivity is itself alienating and that this relation can only be overcome through the abolition of the alienating exteriority of objectivity, that is to say, through the ‘return of the object into the self’. In order to think in these terms it is necessary to posit, as Hegel does, that ‘human nature, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness’, that is, to the consciousness of the self or the consciousness of self as a singular subject. But if one begins instead to consider human beings as finite modes – that is, as objective and natural beings whose actual essence consists in the effort they make to persevere in their being – then one perceives that it is not the fact of being in a necessary relation to the exteriority of objective nature that is alienating, but on the contrary the fact of being separated from the vital and necessary relation that such a natural being depends on necessarily and essentially. According to Marx, this necessary relation to an exterior nature is far from being an alienating one; it is on the contrary the relation through which human beings prove themselves to be what they are in truth, that is to say, living beings. ‘A being that does not have nature outside of itself’, Marx writes, ‘is not a natural being and plays no part in the system of nature’. In other words, it simply does not exist. A being which does not know relations of necessary composition with essential objects exterior to it is not itself an objective being: or, ‘a non-objective being is a non-being’. Briefly, for a natural and living being, it is not the fact that it has a relation with nature that is alienating, but the fact that it is a separate being: for an objective being it is alienating not to be in an essential relation to objects, to be removed from or restricted from accessing its essential objects.