Abstract
In recent years, many of us have experienced an overarching social, political, and economic constellation in which ‘life’ has emerged as a central stake for political protests and social struggles. The most obvious example is the climate movement that fights to preserve human life on this planet. Likewise, anti-racist struggles against police violence (‘Black Lives Matter’) center complex discussions concerning the protection of human life, especially amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. And protests against the oppression and murder of women, most recently and impressively in the Kurdish movement ‘Women, Life, Freedom’, place life quite literally at the center of the struggle. These ‘new forms of protest’ converge into a veritable ‘revolution for life’, as critical theorist Eva von Redecker (2020) puts it.
The topicality of ‘life’ in these social movements parallels current debates in the critical humanities. Both Foucault’s and Agamben’s well-known concepts of ‘biopower’ have provided crucial impulses for this, but there is a wealth of related studies independent of their work and terminologies. The spectrum of problems and topics ranges from the field of biomedical research and the emergence of new opportunities for exploitation and profit in the context of transplantation medicine, molecular genetics, and synthetic biology (Cooper, 2008; Sunder Rajan, 2006; Waldby and Mitchell, 2006), to the field of information capitalism and its reconfiguration of the ‘productive body’ or the productive subject (Deleule and Guéry, 2014; Macherey, 2015), to the globalized production of food, which entails a plethora of ecological, bacteriological, and epidemiological problems (Blanchette, 2020; Davis, 2005; Landecker, 2019).
In this paper, we argue that these social struggles and critical studies can be understood comprehensively and rooted in shared conceptual ground by relating them to a much-neglected undercurrent of European philosophy that we propose to call ‘vitalist Marxism’. With this term, we mean to designate a theoretical position that not only recognizes ‘life’ as an essential foundation of the production process in modern societies, but also considers it a critical resource for resistance to the capitalist logic of exploitation. More broadly speaking, we argue in favor of aligning Marxism, critical thought, and the philosophy of life.
Hannah Arendt is among the few contemporary philosophers who observed this alignment explicitly in Marx’s own work. At the very beginning of
Arendt was far from alone in recognizing the connection between Marx’s philosophy and the philosophy of life. As she acknowledges in a footnote in
The very same context was crucial for a philosopher and physician who, as we argue, is a key figure in pursuing and developing the critical affinities between Marxism and the philosophy of life. Georges Canguilhem not only shared many references with Arendt – from Febvre (Canguilhem, 2008:107, 109) to Friedmann (Canguilhem, 2015a) to Naville (Canguilhem, 2018: 443–4) and Weil (see below), but also exerted a still underestimated influence on generations of philosophical, sociological, and historical thinkers. Hitherto, scholars have only sporadically examined the extent to which Canguilhem’s work has been impacted by both these references and his own reception of Marx. Instead, Canguilhem is often sidelined as Foucault’s academic mentor, the author of
Only recently, however – not least on account of the ongoing publication of his multi-volume
Doubly motivated by a turn against what he experienced as a largely sterile academic milieu and the growing struggle against the rise of fascism in Europe, Canguilhem’s explicit discussion of Marx – similar to Simone Weil’s – began in the pages of
Canguilhem’s further interest in Marx is reflected in publications such as the anonymously issued
Our argument is that Canguilhem’s reception of Marx provides a decisive orientation for his own work and, by the same token, contributes to filling in long-standing lacunae, both in the study of Marx’s work and in the contemporary discussions concerning ‘biopower’ (Foucault) and the ‘revolution for life’ (von Redecker). The background against which we develop this argument is broad and complex.
On the one hand, it seems telling to us how rarely contributions to the discussion about ‘biopower’ take note of how closely their central questions are actually linked to Marx’s philosophy. Rose’s (2007) seminal study of
On the other hand, more than 20 years ago, Dipesh Chakrabarty, briefly discussing Marx’s repeated references to the phenomena of life, pointed out: ‘The connections between the language of classical political economy and the traditions of European thought that might be called vitalist are an under-explored area’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 60). 3 Meanwhile, there are numerous studies examining Marx’s ‘ecological’ or ‘romantic’ reception of Charles Darwin and Justus Liebig, none of which, however, pinpoint, as Canguilhem did, the critical potential of vitalism therein (see Foster, 2000; and, in particular, Saito, 2017; see also Moore, 2015; Naccache, 1980; Schmidt, 1993; Weatherby, 2016). Even Judith Butler contributed to the ecological reading of Marx and discussed his concept of the ‘inorganic body’. In this connection, Butler does allude to the notions of the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’ – without, on the one hand, mentioning Canguilhem’s crucial contribution to understanding these notions and, on the other, failing to draw connections to the vitalist Marxism implied in his work (Butler, 2019a: 56, 2019b).
In the following, we would like to contribute to these discussions by demonstrating the multi-layered facets of Marx’s reception in Canguilhem’s development of what he frames, from the 1940s onwards, as an ‘organological’ study of life, technology, and society. First, we show that Canguilhem’s interest in Marx is systematically and closely related to the question of technology, in particular to his conception of tools and machines as ‘organs’. We then reconstruct Canguilhem’s early reception of Marx, showing how crucial a role his reading of Marx played in his anti-fascist engagements in the early 1930s and in his active involvement in the resistance against the Nazis in France in the early 1940s in particular. By the same token, we draw attention to the fact that, as early as 1943, in his medical doctoral thesis, the famous
Machines as Organs of Life
If there is one text by Canguilhem in which the various strands of his complex work converge in exemplary ways, it is ‘Machine and Organism’, an essay that can be traced to lectures he gave at the Collège philosophique in Paris in 1946/7. In this programmatic essay, the philosopher and physician outlines the project of a ‘general organology’, in which he sees an important desideratum for the scientific and philosophical consideration of the machine and the organism: Indeed, the problem of the relations between machine and organism has generally been studied only in one direction: almost always, the attempt has been to explain the structure and function of the organism on the basis of the structure and function of an already-constructed machine. Only rarely has anyone sought to understand the very construction of the machine on the basis of the structure and function of the organism. (Canguilhem, 2008: 75–6)
Thus, if the aim is not to explain the mechanical functions of a given machine but to understand its emergence and evolution, then, according to Canguilhem, a double reversal of relations must be assumed, namely the primacy of the organism over the machine as well as the primacy of technology over science. In this way, he conceptually condenses what can already be found in his medical dissertation on
According to Canguilhem, the machine is an organ of life insofar as its construction results first and foremost from technically coping with vital problems – and not, for instance, from a direct application of abstract knowledge, which actually rationalizes and intensifies technology only when it already exists (Canguilhem, 2008: 95). Primarily, the organism strives to create its living conditions according to its own norms, and for this purpose it forms versatile organs – internal and external – by means of which it tries to shape its milieu technically (Muhle, 2017; more broadly, see also Webster, 2023).
In this connection, Canguilhem emphasizes that ‘machines can be considered as organs of the human species. A tool or a machine is an organ, and organs are tools or machines’ (Canguilhem, 2008: 87). It is rather obvious that these considerations translate a biophilosophical conception of technology, and it is not far-fetched to think of Bergson as a prominent representative of the intellectual tradition behind this conception. But, apart from Bergson, it is in fact Marx that Canguilhem credits for having ‘understood well the importance of Darwin’s ideas’ concerning an evolutionary conception of the emergence of technology (Canguilhem, 2008: 93, n. 50).
Specifically, Canguilhem refers to a note in Marx’s A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organization, deserve equal attention? (Marx, 1996: 375, n. 2)
In historical materialism, this quasi-biological understanding of technology is not merely metaphorical but downright methodical. Thus, Marx understands the machines and tools used in the labor process – the ‘means of labour’ (
In other words, the conception of tools and machines as organs of life is at least as familiar to Marx as it is to Bergson. But how significant was Marx’s influence, vis-à-vis Bergson’s, for Canguilhem? His 1943 commentary on the third chapter of Bergson’s
In his commentary, Canguilhem locates this argument succinctly in the context of earlier reflections by psychologist and philosopher William James and later positions, especially that developed by neurologist Kurt Goldstein, one of Canguilhem’s key references. In a passage that he deleted from the proofs of this text – presumably anticipating imminent censorship by the Vichy regime – Canguilhem adds: ‘And long before them [i.e. Bergson, James, and Goldstein], Marx noted that the simplest object of sensuous certainty, like that of a cherry tree, is not a natural given, but the product of an activity that refers us back to the history of human technology’ (2015d: 132, n. 2).
This remark is supplemented by Canguilhem’s transcription of a whole passage from Marx’s and Engels’s criticism of Feuerbach in
In other words, Canguilhem had no problems inscribing Bergson’s philosophy of life into the tradition of Marx’s historical materialism. What results are striking parallels between Canguilhem and Marx regarding the consideration of tools and machines as organs, parallels that turn out to be far more important than is suggested by the sporadic explicit references to Marx in Canguilhem’s major works after 1945.
Labor Process and Biological Activity
However, in Canguilhem’s writings from the 1930s, we find extensive discussions of Marx’s philosophy. In these early writings, Canguilhem seeks to understand Marx’s works as a comprehensive philosophical project that ought to be defended against the economic dogmatism of contemporary Marxism and communism (Canguilhem, 2011b: 480–2). The concrete problem to which Canguilhem tries to apply Marx’s philosophy is the relationship between technology and ‘ways of life’ (
With the term ‘way of life’ he is referring to the French school of human geography founded by Paul Vidal de la Blache around 1900. Vidal de la Blache understood a ‘way of life’ as the specific manner in which humans, as a ‘geographical factor’, make use of the soil, structures and resources of the landscapes they inhabit (Vidal de la Blache, 1911: 194). Shortly afterward, the notion of
Canguilhem’s biophilosophical understanding of technology is thus grounded in a specific conception of historical materialism. In contradistinction to vulgar Marxism, he defends the biological foundations of societies against reduction to mere economics. This permits him to conceive of historical materialism not primarily as a history of modes of production but, more profoundly and more concretely, as a human as well as geographical history of
History is possible only if the humans who make it can live. The history of the human conquest and transformation of the conditions of existence is therefore the fundamental history. The fundamental historical fact is thus the relation of the technical activity of human generations to their milieu (this milieu is at the same time natural, but above all social). (Canguilhem, 1939–40: 15)
Now, the technical and social impact of humans on their natural environment is indeed one of the most fundamental features implied in Marx’s concept of labor. In the very passage that Arendt cites in Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. (Marx, 1996: 187)
Canguilhem cites the same passage in his
Thus Canguilhem, following Marx, emphasizes that labor always aims at a purposeful appropriation of nature by technical means; it intervenes in the ‘natural forces’ that would otherwise leave things to decay without purpose, and instead consumes things purposefully as means of life or labor (Marx, 1996: 193; see also Canguilhem and Planet, 2011: 884–5). Marx characterizes this appropriation process in quasi-vitalistic, if not animistic, language, which Canguilhem also quotes: ‘Living labour must seize upon these things and rouse them from their death-sleep’ (Marx, 1996: 193; see also Canguilhem and Planet, 2011: 884–5). Hence, human things constitute no less than substrates and amplifications of the process of life itself.
By the same token, however, Canguilhem defines the way in which labor makes instrumental use of things as ‘a cunning by which we obtain indirectly what is inaccessible to us directly’ (Canguilhem and Planet, 2011: 884). He borrows this from Hegel’s
Referring to the same paragraph in Hegel’s
In other words, the
Accordingly, it is no coincidence that the organological conception of humans and their milieu, as it later appears in Canguilhem’s major works, is strikingly similar to that of Marx’s notion of the relation between laborer and nature. In
In the same passage on the labor process which Canguilhem cites in the
Both Canguilhem and Marx thus describe a deep entanglement of the living being (the ‘organism’ or ‘labourer’) with its environment (the ‘milieu’ or ‘Nature’), an entanglement that is mediated through organs (‘tools and machines’ or ‘means of labour’,
Ambivalence of the Machine
The intermediary position of technology as a mechanical intensification of the organic, however, becomes a complicated matter where the entanglement of living beings with the environment is mediated by the social division of labor. In his 1955 essay on ‘The Problem of Regulation in the Organism and in Society’, as well as in the expanded version of
At this point, Canguilhem – again in a similar vein as Bergson – refines his terminology in comparison to Marx, who indeed spoke of ‘social organisms of production’ (Marx, 1996: 90). In Canguilhem’s view, the essential feature of an organism lies in the
Canguilhem first sketches this kind of social organization of organs in his 1935 pamphlet
Marx himself was no stranger to the analysis of French peasantry. In The peasant is kept in the field by electricity [instead of leaving and going to work in the city], but thereby he tends to be enslaved on the spot. The rural smallholding is subjected to industrial centralization from afar. The baker’s engine, the water pump, the milkhouse, or the cooperative wine press are nowadays moved by the city and can therefore be shut down by it, too. [. . .] The tentacular city is no longer a myth. (Canguilhem, 2011d: 546; alluding to Verhaeren, 1895)
A few years later, in the
In his extensive review of Georges Friedmann’s sociological study concerning human problems of automation, published in French in the same period (Friedmann, 1955), Canguilhem finds even sharper words of criticism. In a remarkable parallel to the arguments put forth by the Frankfurt School, Canguilhem explicitly labels economic rationalization through labor physiology and applied psychology as ‘man’s enslavement by reason and not the reign of reason in man’ (Canguilhem, 2015a: 293). 9
Hence, Taylorist rationalized factory work appears, just as in Weil’s ‘Factory Journal’ (originally published posthumously in primacy of the vital over the mechanical, the primacy of values over life. According to us, life is, strictly speaking, nothing but the mediation between mechanisms and values; it is from life that result – by means of abstraction, as terms of an always open conflict and thereby as generator of all experience and all history – mechanisms and values. (Canguilhem, 2015a: 306)
Far from consisting of seamlessly joined organs that follow uniform purposes, society for Canguilhem ‘is both machine and organism’ (Canguilhem, 1989: 252). On the one hand, it is partly organism, since its living members strive for a collective shaping of the milieu according to their own set of values. On the other hand, it is partly machine, because the underlying division of labor is a conflicted product of mechanist cunning and technological rationality. The ‘distance between social organs’ leaves room for their interplay and coordination, room in which new organs can spread and develop, while their interplay is increasingly ‘regulated from without and from above’, i.e. by closing the gaps between the organs according to mechanist reasoning (pp 252, 255).
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Or, as Marx says about the ‘cooperation of wage labourers’: Their union into one single productive body and the establishment of a connexion between their individual functions, are matters foreign and external to them, are not their own act, but the act of the capital that brings and keeps them together. Hence the connexion existing between their various labours appears to them, ideally, in the shape of a preconceived plan of the capitalist, and practically in the shape of the authority of the same capitalist, in the shape of the powerful will of another, who subjects their activity to his aims. (Marx, 1996: 336–7)
The organs formed in a society based on the division of labor can thus extend the vital capacities of one activity while simultaneously suppressing that of the other. This can be read as not only a philosophy of life but, in a narrower sense, a vitalist interpretation of the master-slave dialectic. The critical potential of Canguilhem’s organology at this point is to map the relationship of purpose-defining organism and purpose-serving machine onto the social relations arising from the engagement with the milieu and thus, in other words, to reveal the role played by ‘power apparatuses’ (
Pathology, Alienation, and the Milieu
Against this background, it becomes clear that there is far more behind Canguilhem’s reflections on the normal and the pathological than a plea for holistic medicine. Early discussions of the question concerning disease and health can be found in his writings from the 1930s. In an essay that Canguilhem dedicates to Maurice Halbwachs’ studies on suicide in 1931, he claims that these studies are not merely grounded in sociology and/or human geography; rather, he qualifies them as essentially ‘Marxist’ in orientation (Canguilhem, 2011c: 379).
Of particular interest to Canguilhem is Halbwachs’ finding of an increased suicide rate in the industrialized, commercialized milieus of the city compared to those of the countryside. Seeking a philosophical interpretation of this phenomenon, Canguilhem reads suicide as a ‘social verdict’ (Canguilhem, 2011c: 377) to which the urban
Canguilhem goes on to argue that the urban factory worker is disproportionately at the mercy of the ‘social verdict’, since he or she ‘participates in an immense coercion that mankind imposes on things. [. . .] But even the ever more advanced technology turns the activity of the worker into an endeavor whose results are temporary and relative’ (Canguilhem, 2011c: 382). Thus, as early as 1931, Canguilhem links the question of health and disease to the technically mediated relationship between organism and milieu, and, in view of the ‘results’ – i.e. the products – of factory work, he does so with clear parallels to Marx’s concept of ‘alienated’ or ‘estranged labour’ (
As Marx explains in his early Economy of the social means of production, matured and forced as in a hothouse by the factory system, is turned, in the hands of capital, into systematic robbery of what is necessary for the life of the workman while he is at work, robbery of space, light, air, and of protection to his person against the dangerous and unwholesome accompaniments of the productive process. (Marx, 1996: 429)
According to Marx, the connection between disease and work environment goes so far that it not only produces specific pathologies, such as ‘lockjaw [. . .], a disease peculiar to lucifer-matchmakers’, but even causes dramatic reductions in life span, for example in English ‘pottery districts’ (pp. 253–4). As a consequence, Marx also cites reports about factory workers driven to suicide (p. 746).
For Canguilhem, the lifespan in its relation to specific milieus, or environments, and their corresponding ways of life becomes a central concern in
Instead, Canguilhem proposes that health has to be judged by the organism’s ability to shape its milieu in self-determined ways: ‘The healthy organism tries less to maintain itself in its present state and environment than to realize its nature’ (Canguilhem, 1989: 199). Disease, conversely, means being confined to limited conditions for the simple maintenance of life (p. 183). As in Canguilhem’s earlier discussion of suicide, this definition of disease echoes the Marxist theme of estrangement, or alienation (see also Benmakhlouf, 2000: 70).
In his natural ‘species-life’, ‘man’, according to Marx, ‘sees himself in a world that he has created’ (Marx, 1975: 277) and ‘realises a purpose of his own’ (Marx, 1996: 188). In the degraded state of alienation, however, ‘
Hence, when Canguilhem (1989: 126) in
Accordingly, it is impossible to truly overcome capitalist relations of exploitation whilst allowing the toxic milieus of industrial production to persist, even if in socialized form.
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What is primarily at stake, and weighs heavier than the issue of property regimes, is nothing less than a revolution at the level of the most fundamental conditions of life. Two decades before Arendt chose her book title
Conclusion
By following Arendt’s insights into the connections between the French reception of Marx and the philosophy of life, we have uncovered an undercurrent of European philosophy that engages in critical reflections upon the societal shaping of the environment by means of technology. We argue that it is Canguilhem’s organology where this current of vitalist Marxism finds its most dense and nuanced expression. Our previous sections make evident that his interest in Marx’s philosophy does not stop with the end of the 1930s. Though his vitalist reading of Marx becomes more implicit, it nonetheless provides a fundamental inspiration for the core concepts of Canguilhem’s major works – from his conception of technology as organs of life, to the biological activity in the milieu, the ambivalent relation between machine and organism, and, not least, his notions of the normal and pathological.
As we have seen, Arendt and Canguilhem share numerous Marx-related references. However, their respective conclusions diverge in rather striking ways. While acknowledging the ‘depth of experience’ reached by Marx’s biologically grounded theory, Arendt (1958: 106, 322) also criticizes Marx as the preeminent philosopher of an economistic modernity that glorifies labor to the extent of ‘a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species’ (Arendt, 1958: 322). Canguilhem shares with Arendt an aversion when it comes to the economism and the ‘deliberating hostility against [. . .] all individualism’ (Canguilhem and Planet, 2011: 849) inherent in contemporary Marxism. He goes so far as to accuse rationalist versions of Marxism of perpetuating ‘a way of life bound to the economic rise of the capitalist class, a class of which the principles of self-justification consist in considering the totality of experience, living beings and humans included, as objects whose technical use presupposes their prior reduction to mechanisms’ (Canguilhem, 2015c: 318–19).
For Canguilhem, though, it is precisely the vitalist foundation in Marx’s original philosophy that distinguishes it from the economistic misreading in certain strands of reception. Only by viewing the living being as an individual willing and working to create a milieu according to its own norms can we escape the mechanist conception of the subject, which is complicit in exploitative forms of power, and perform what is key to Canguilhem’s organology: ‘a dialectical reversal of the relation mechanism-organism’ (Canguilhem, 2015c: 318).
What this reversal brings to bear is no less than the resistance of life to the formation of capitalist societies. Unlike Arendt, who only goes so far as to observe that modern technology unleashed ‘an enormously intensified life process’ (Arendt, 1958: 132), Canguilhem repeatedly refers to the double-edged potentials that certain ways of life produce in modern societies. As in Marx’s analyses of the pathological changes to the muscles and nerves of the human body on account of the production process, life thus becomes recognizable as the agent of a resistance that is deeply inscribed in the bodies of every individual involved in and affected by the production process. Life marks, as it were, the limit for submission to the production process of capitalism.
Conversely, vitalism becomes a position that experiences, recognizes, and highlights precisely this resistance – not at all in the sense of an uncritical profession of faith in the metaphysical quality of life, but as historically and sociologically grounded proof of the ‘chronologically irrevocable anticipation of life vis-à-vis mechanical theory and technology as well as vis-à-vis intelligence and the simulation of life’ (Canguilhem, 2021: 737).
In this view, vitalist Marxism can also serve as a philosophical backbone to conclusions feminist scholars have derived more recently from their respective readings of Marx. Consistent with Canguilhem, Butler (2019b: 15) concludes from the early Marx that ‘there are conditions under which the desire to live becomes more possible, conditions of labour that sustain or fail to sustain, forms of labouring that sustain or fail to sustain, and that the desire to live is always a desire to live in this world, and in a specific way’. Similarly, when Haraway (2008: 46, 65) points to Marx’s blind spot of human exceptionalism and calls for ‘making companions’ among various species rather than commodifying them, this arguably implies a much more profound revolution in terms of ways of life than any form of energy transition advocated today.
In a nutshell, it is the vitalist reversal of the relationship between machine and organism that we believe is crucial to current debates concerning societal life on an increasingly exploited and exhausted planet – not in order to unify the political and social movements that invoke and claim life in quite different ways, but in order to provide these various approaches with an overarching orientation. Vitalist Marxism, in our reading of Canguilhem, means not remaining satisfied with clinical descriptions of bio-capitalist devastation, but reclaiming a normative foothold on behalf of living beings, a defined position from which to speak and act in resistance, rather than perpetuate the ever more fashionable guises assumed by toxic ways of life. This critical approach to
Footnotes
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