You're obviously tired of trying to drive the obvious through this particularly thick head (I may just never get it, as I don't get half of what passes on this dizzying list). So, I'll just address a coupla points in themselves.
I'd asked:
>> If there be no human essence, what's being alienated by the prevailing
>exchange relation?
To which you responded:
>labour-power.
Well, we're obviously talking the post-1857, Althusser-approved Marx here, so I'd ask you to accept that there is at least sustenance for the humanist in that section on Alienated Labour in The Grundrisse. Beaut stuff about how the exchange relation can only frame human labour as a negative - has value only in its negativity, in a world where inactivity is the presumed natural state of us all. So he reprimands Adam Smith for forgetting that "the individual, 'in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skill, and efficiency', might also require a normal portion of work, and of cessation from rest," indeed, that this would "constitute an exercise in liberty ... the self-realisation and objectification of the subject, therefore real freedom, whose activity is precisely labour." There's a human essence implicit in that proposition, for mine - and 'creativity' is not a bad word for it. Still, mebbe our differences don't matter here, whereas they do seem to when we come to:
>sexuality, romantic love, platonic love, desire ... these are all very
>recent ways of making sense of and framing the reality of 'sexuality'; as
>is the claim that to deny the essence of someone's sexuality a recent claim
>made on the terrain of, more recently, a geneticism where genes are figured
>as both origin and destiny. i couldn't think of a more conservative
>approach to sexuality.
Which is not easy to parse, but suggests to me I'm no longer on your Chrissy card list. All I actually thought I said was that sexuality is part of the human essence, and that any denial of its expression might therefore constitute a denial of something importantly human. I can think of more conservative approaches to sexuality than that. Can't you? And whilst I grant genes an originary significance, and hold that they still express themselves in human affairs (albeit in many and varied contingent forms), I certainly don't hold that they write the destiny of a conscious, languaged, social species like ours!
Look, I reckon Dawkins is a clever bloke, that's all. Sure, read Lewontin and Gould for the context Dawkins has hitherto merely mentioned in passing, so to speak (although his new edition is an improvement, I think), but have a peek at Dawkins, too, I reckon.
Back to t' mill.
Cheers, Rob.