[lbo-talk] Marx as Essentialist ; contra Foucault

Charles Brown cb31450 at gmail.com
Wed Apr 13 06:58:18 PDT 2016


Contra Foucault, Marx expresses his essentialism in species-being terms here; philosophy and poetry :

"In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm

Here's Foucault formulating the false and anti-scientific , anti-Marxist , anti-essentialist , post-modern thesis that sexual preference or attraction is absolutely socially constructed .

Foucault is wrong . Heterosexual instinct does exist. :

/////

"Foucault’s Discursive Subject

Foucault is credited ( Foucault should get demerits , not credits for this) with “deconstruction of the subject,” but in reality what Foucault has given us is a critique of the Cartesian subject, the intuitively-given individual subject deemed the original site of all cognitive representation and social action. Foucault’s critique is a continuation of the structuralist project of weakening the concept of agency, a critique which has contributed to the actual demolition of subjectivity since the 1980s. In The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Foucault demonstrates that even such a basic human need as sexuality is socially constructed; there is no “pre-social” sex drive. Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power. [p. 106] As I read this then, even if deep down in the human organism there is some need for food, warmth, love and sexual intercourse, psychoanalysis notwithstanding, it has been amply demonstrated that such ‘essential’ drives and needs are buried so deep beneath elastic and socially constructed interpretations, that the constructivist hypothesis is by far the more relevant as opposed to the essentialist, at least for the purposes of understanding modern society. Human beings are their own product; our essence is nothing but the need to negate and produce our own being; humanity is essentially non-essential."

http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/foucault.htm

Foucault had previously arrived at the irrational and crazy conclusion that biology, natural history , Darwinism , anthropology had discovered no valid scientific theories and laws. So, Foucault took license to erase the scientific fact of heterosexual instinct from anthropology and the philosophy of human nature. Foul deed ! Anti-Marxist big lie !

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