Is Marx’s Philosophy of Labor Soluble in an Ontology of Life? Michel Henry’s Rereading of Marx

Abstract

This essay exposes the radicality of the subjective philosophy of living labor that Michel Henry (1922–2002) developed, following Marx. It suggests starting from the problem of the status of this interpretation as such. As an interpretation inhabiting the center of what it is interpreting while seeking to prolong it through clarification, how exactly does the philosophy of living labor enhance Marx’s critique of capitalism? If it goes beyond what it is interpreting, how and to what degree does it modify the critique of capitalism? The present contribution clarifies this modified critique in stages to defend the explanation overall despite that—as enlightening as this modification might be—it ends up shifting the overall perspective.

Key Words:

• Capitalism
• Living Labor
• Phenomenology
• Philosophy
• Subjectivity

Notes

1 Michel Henry (1922–2002) studied at the École Normale Supérieure. In June 1943, he joined the Resistance against the Nazi occupation of France (his code name: “Kant”). This experience of clandestine combat had a profound effect on his philosophy. After the war, he prepared his two doctoral theses in philosophy. His main thesis, L’essence de la manifestation, was published in 1963, his secondary thesis, Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps, in 1965. His archives are kept at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), where a research center is dedicated to his work. Although his work belongs to the phenomenology of the twentieth century, it is very different, as we shall see in this essay, particularly in its interpretation of Marx. For a general perspective on Henry, see David and Greisch (2001), which notably includes a complete bibliography of his work.

Although Henry’s fame in philosophy has been established in the global phenomenological-philosophy community, his work has not been completely translated into English. This essay refers to all of Michel Henry’s texts (those that were written in French and the English translations that are available) but only mentions texts accessible in English in the body of the essay. Of course, some introductory pieces have appeared for twenty years: in particular, O’Sullivan (2006), Kuhn, Hatem, and Ciocan (2009), and Rebidoux (2012). Nonetheless, they are not specifically devoted to Michel Henry’s interpretation of Marx and the radical critique of capitalism stemming from this interpretation, which is the specific focus of this essay on the history of ideas and of economic philosophy. As the secondary literature is still mainly in French, I have chosen to limit myself to a few essential references.

2 That is to say: merchandise, use value, exchange value, abstract work, concrete work, value, constant capital, variable capital, the value of labor power, surplus value, etc. For the rest, as many concepts as structuralist Marxism (Althusser [1965] 1969) meant to hypostasize and systematize to establish historical materialism as a science of “continent history” (a science at the same epistemological level as sciences of the “continent nature”).

3 Unlike other Marxist philosophers, Michel Henry is not interested in the historical and empirical questions concerning the world of work in societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production. This is a notable difference from another Marxist and Christian philosopher of work Simone Weil (1973). It also differs from Operaism, the Italian Marxist movement of the 1960s, which developed the method of “workers’ surveys” conducted at factory gates (Tronti 2006). This also differs from the French philosopher Robert Linhart (1978), who took part in the French Maoist movement identified as les établis. As far as we know, Michel Henry’s philosophy of work was not used by the social sciences during his lifetime. But in recent years, in France at least, we have seen a reversal of this trend, for example in work psychodynamics and ergonomics (Dejours 2009).

4 Neither in Aron (1970), of course, since the essence of Henry’s interpretation of Marx was not yet published, nor, to our knowledge, in any previous works.

5 Although it is not clearly indicated in his book, the phenomenological reading of Marx that Henry targets is that of Merleau-Ponty (1973) and Sartre (1991). As for his criticism of the structuralist reading of Marx, it is clearly aimed at the interpretation of Althusser and his students at the École Normale Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm in Paris (Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière and Pierre Macherey). Henry criticized Althusser for deliberately dismissing certain texts by Marx as “ideological” or prescientific. This is particularly true of philosophical texts written before 1845 (such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts) and of ambiguity concerning the “Theses on Feuerbach” and The German Ideology. For Michel Henry, Althusser’s method consists in saying that Marx’s thought is not the criterion of his evaluation, that it is not the judge, but that it must be judged and subjected to the criterion of a foreign thought. Michel Henry seeks, on the contrary, account for the uniqueness of Marx’s philosophical project based on an interpretative principle that he draws from Marx’s own work: namely, living subjectivity, a concept that has nothing to do with the idealist concept of consciousness of traditional phenomenological approaches.

6 Criticism of abstract individualism does not lead Michel Henry to adopt a relational conception of the individual (in the wake of the sixth thesis on Feuerbach: the human is not something abstract that resides in the single individual). Rather, the individual is the totality of social relationships. In Henry’s view, this intersubjective conception runs the risk of relegating the specificity of the human condition to a holistic approach and of missing its essence, which is life. Conversely, Étienne Balibar (2014) seeks to extricate Marxism from a holistic approach by developing a relational anthropology based on an interpretation of the sixth thesis.

7 By general anthropology we mean the philosophical discourse that offers to clarify the salient traits of the human condition, independently of sociohistorical forms to which it finds itself subject and by which it allows itself concretely to see. By ontology, we refer to a level of philosophical discourse more profound than the anthropological level, which no longer simply focuses on the particular being that is human but on being in general—in other words, on the being in general of all that is in the world.

8 The English translation of these two volumes is partial, leaving out almost a third of the French text.

9 The critique of the truth as abstraction is permanent in Michel Henry’s work. This critique is at the heart of what is doubtless his most polemical essay, La barbarie (Henry 1987). Marx’s critique is radical because it is not primarily a critique of political economy but rather a critique of economic reality itself.

10 Notably, see Henry (2003a) and especially Henry (1990).

11 In which—this must be stressed—Henry’s “vitalist” ontology should not be understood as an interpretation of Marx stemming from a philosophy that had simply imported a biological concept!

12 A few clarifications on the notion of dialectic are necessary here. It should be noted that Henry’s analysis of the origins of capitalism and the transformations of the capital/labor relation is carried out without mobilizing a truly dialectical interpretation of history. Not only does Henry’s interpretation criticize the Hegelian reading of Marx, but more broadly he completely rejects any recourse to the idea of dialectics, and therefore to the notion of the dialectics of nature as put forward by Friedrich Engels’s (1976) “dialectical materialism.” The core of dialectics is the notion of contradictions (Arthur 1986), but we can distinguish between a “logical” conception of the notion of contradiction and a “materialist” conception (Colletti 1973). Strictly speaking, contradiction only exists in language. Our saying that there are contradictions in reality is a misuse of language: we should be talking about “real oppositions” (between two forces or two powers, as is the case when Marx uses the concept of class struggle to analyze the dynamics of capitalism). If Henry seems to side with the nonlogicist interpretation of contradiction (i.e., contradiction understood as real opposition), in fact he ends up emptying the interpretation of its content and doing away with any idea of dialectic in his vitalist ontological approach to capital.

13 By this typography, we are attempting to signify the power and the continuity of the process.

14 Even if they do not claim that plus value has no foundation and stems ultimately from arbitrary sociopolitical factors, Marxist theoreticians never go back to the roots of plus value, contenting themselves with having it stem from this “fools’ bargain” so that salaried workers sell their labor power according to its exchange value while the capitalist buys it for its use value. There again we understand the necessary role of an economic philosophy in clarifying what economic “theory” quickly did to qualify the problem as “metaphysical” in dimension and, therefore, not stemming from its competence. Yet, for Henry reinterpreting Marx, this compartmentalization of “theory” and “philosophy” (we could add “politics”) is not “Marxist,” in the sense that Marx’s work integrates, unifies, and takes on these different types of discourse.

15 Of course, from a diachronic perspective, the historian can try to date primitive accumulation (variable according to the country and part of different temporalities); yet from the synchronic perspective and for the social actors who experience it, the wage-earning relationship seems to have no history and thus appears “natural.”

16 In the sense where it does not provide any enlightenment, as could certain commentators (historians, sociologists, economists, epistemologists, and political theoreticians), but it confronts that which constitutes the heart of this philosophy, that which it identifies—rightly or wrongly is another question—as its root and that it asks to be perceived and discussed at this radical level (from radix, “root” in Latin).