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but a philosophy of subjectivity (which is clearly expressed in the decisive importance assumed by the notion of consciousness). Marx thought that the subjective activity of which idealism speaks is, at bottom, the trace, the denegation (the simultaneous recognition and misrecognition) of a more real activity, an activity that is more ‘effective’, if we may venture the expression: an activity which would be at one and the same time the constitution of the external world and the formation (Bildung) or transformation of self. Witness the insistent way in which the vocabulary of the act, of action and activity (Tat, Tätigkeit, Handlung) recurs in the writings of Kant and, even more markedly, of Fichte (this is, in reality, where the ‘philosophy of action’ extolled by the Young Hegelians comes from). Witness also the way Hegel describes the mode of being of consciousness as an active experience and the function of the concept as a labour (the ‘labour of the negative’). All in all, then, it is not difficult to derive the following hypothesis from Marx’s aphorisms: just as traditional materialism in reality conceals an idealist foundation (representation, contemplation), so modern idealism in reality conceals a materialist orientation in the function it attributes to the acting subject, at least if one accepts that there is a latent conflict between the idea of representation (interpretation, contemplation) and that of activity (labour, practice, transformation, change). And what he proposes is quite simply to explode the contradiction, to dissociate representation and subjectivity and allow the category of practical activity to emerge in its own right.

       The subject is practice

      Did he succeed in this undertaking? In a sense, completely, since it is perfectly possible to argue that the only true subject is the practical subject or the subject of practice or, better still, that the subject is nothing other than practice which has always already begun and continues indefinitely. But does this get us out of idealism? Nothing could be less certain, precisely because, historically speaking, ‘idealism’ covers both the point of view of representation and that of subjectivity. In reality, what we have here is a circle or a theoretical interchange which functions in both directions. It is possible to say that, by identifying the essence of subjectivity with practice, and the reality of practice with the revolutionary activity of the proletariat (which is one with its very existence), Marx transferred the category of subject from idealism to materialism. But it is equally possible to assert that, precisely by so doing, he set up the permanent possibility of representing the proletariat to itself as a ‘subject’ in the idealist sense of the term (and hence, ultimately, as a representation or an abstraction by means of which the world, or the transformation of the world, is once again ‘interpreted’: is this not exactly what happened when, later, Marxist theorists, armed with the idea of class struggle, were to deduce from it a priori the ‘meaning of history’?).

      There is nothing gratuitous about these dialectical games. They are closely linked to the history of the notion of revolution and, consequently, have a political aspect as well as a philosophical one. From the beginning of the modern period – that of the revolutions which are termed bourgeois, the Anglo-American and the French – the invention of the subject as the central category of philosophy, which relates to all fields of concrete experience (science, morality, law, religion, aesthetics) and makes possible their unification, is linked to the idea that humanity moulds or educates itself, to the idea that it gives itself laws and, therefore, finally to the idea that it liberates itself from the various forms of oppression, ignorance or superstition, poverty etc.¹⁰ And the generic subject of this activity always has two sides to it: the one theoretical, the other concrete and practical. In Kant, that subject was humanity; in Fichte it became at a certain point the people, the nation; and in Hegel, lastly, it was the historical peoples as successive embodiments of the ‘world-spirit’, i.e. the progress of civilization.

      The fact that Marx, in his turn, recognized the proletariat as the true practical subject (we have seen above that it is the ‘people of the people’, authentically human and communal) – the subject which ‘dissolves the existing order’ and thus changes itself (Selbsttätigkeit, Selbstveränderung), while at the same time changing the world – and that he used this recognition (in which the lesson of immediate experience and the most ancient speculative tradition are superimposed in a remarkable way) to assert, in his turn, that the subject is practice, does not, however, genuinely remove him from the history of idealism. Fichte had said precisely the same thing. Without playing with words, one might even go so far as to suggest that this is what makes of Marx and his ‘materialism of practice’ the most accomplished form of the idealist tradition, the form which enables us to understand more than any other the lasting vitality of idealism right up to the present, precisely because that transposition is closely linked to the attempt to prolong the revolutionary experience and embody it in modern society, with its classes and social conflicts.

      To do so would be to prepare to understand that adopting the standpoint of the proletarians in a state of ‘permanent’ insurrection resulted not so much in putting an end to idealism, but in installing the materialism/idealism dilemma – the perennial question of their difference – at the very heart of the theory of the proletariat and its privileged historical role. But, with this dilemma, we may confidently expect that philosophy, having been chased out of the door, will come back in by the window …

       The reality of the ‘human essence’

      Let us return to the letter of the Theses to evoke the other great question they pose: that of the human essence. The two are clearly linked. ‘Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence’, i.e. he shows, particularly in The Essence of Christianity of 1841, that the idea of God is merely a synthesis of human perfections, personified and projected out of the world. ‘But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations’ (in a sort of mixture of French and German, Marx writes das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse): this thesis has been the cause of as much debate as the eleventh. There are many things worthy of comment here, if we take care to follow the letter of the text.

      Marx poses the question of the essence of man, or, at least, answers that question. What could be more natural? Yet that question, which we might regard as being constitutive of anthropology, is not at all straightforward. In a sense, it is as old as philosophy. But when, in our own day, Claude Lévi-Strauss explains that the essence of man is the conflict between nature and culture; or when Lacan coins the word parlêtre to say that the essence of man is constituted through and through by language, they place themselves in the same tradition as Aristotle defining man by the fact of his having the power of speech and being a member of the polis, or St. Augustine defining man as the ‘image and resemblance of God on earth’. Moreover, if we take things at a sufficient level of generality, they are all dealing with the same question. From Antiquity to our own times, there is a long succession of definitions of human nature or the human essence. Marx himself will advance several, each of them revolving around the relation between labour and consciousness. In Volume 1 of Capital he will cite a very characteristic definition by Benjamin Franklin (man is ‘a toolmaking animal’), not to reject it, but to complement it by specifying that technology has a history which is dependent on the ‘mode of production’, and going on to recall that neither technology nor technical progress can exist without consciousness, reflection, experimentation and knowledge.¹¹ And in The German Ideology, not long after the formulation we are examining here, he wrote:

      Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.¹²

      This is a way of seeking the answer to the question of the essence of man in things themselves – which has, indeed, provided a starting-point for a whole biological and technological anthropology, both Marxist and non-Marxist alike.

       Theoretical humanism

      Yet a nuance crucial to

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