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Title: Gloss On Humanism Author: Gianni Carchia Language: en Topics: Vitalist International, humanism Source: Retrieved on 2020-05-03 from http://vitalist.in/archive/gloss-on-humanism
Carchia’s “Gloss on Humanism” moves us in too many ways to list below,
but here are two. First, as Marcello notes in his introduction,
Carchia’s text can be read as an elaboration on the idea of
“destitution,” which (in part) helps us imagine a revolutionary force
after the end of the workers’ movement. Second, Carchia raises the
concern that vitalism might be humanism in disguise. Carchia’s text
allows us to imagine a vitalism that expands the idea of life rather
than limiting itself to human life, which always depends on an exclusion
of the inhuman, and of that which can never be humanized.
– Vitalist International, Atlanta Faction, January 2019
At the end of 2017, which must be soberly described as the celebration
of a double anniversary — 1917 and 1977 — we want to conclude our
“celebration” with a writing that was published in the autumn of 1977 in
one of the most important magazines of the Autonomia movement of those
years, L’erba voglio, a writing that was signed by one of the most
profound and luminous presences of Italian thought of our time, and to
whom it is worth returning: Gianni Carchia.
We do so because the considerations that were developed in this text are
relevant to both events in question: both the Soviet ‘17 and the ‘77 of
Autonomia. A fortiori, to our present.
I don’t think many people “suspect” that Carchia, known mainly for his
aesthetic studies, was committed to the subversive movement of those
years. A translator of Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Warburg, Schürmann,
but also Jacques Camatte, for example. In fact, the same issue of L’erba
voglio contains, in addition to his own article, his translation of a
paper by Camatte, which commented on the Italian events of those years.
The paper supported a thesis that was in many ways provocative and, we
can imagine, even scandalous for the militants of the time. It was
evident that the Italian ‘77 was ending “with a bang.” The crisis season
of capital and of the representation of civilization, and consequently,
the decomposition of all identities – inaugurated by the French May also
signaled (perhaps in a less evident way) the dissolution of culture as a
place for the exchange of women, goods and words. The Italian revolt did
not reach its objective precisely because, at least in its “official”
voices, they not only claimed an identity — “we are the true
proletarians” — but in their organized forms they wanted to represent
themselves and even fight for the proletariat to find the mythical unity
attributed to it, ignoring the true Marxian objective, which was
precisely the self-negation of the proletariat as a class.
The problem, Camatte said, was visible in the theorization of the social
worker who seemed to operate in the opposite direction by believing that
everyone had virtually become proletarians. But now, the animator of
Invariance (Camatte) maintained, it was useless to appeal to a “class”
that had disappeared and it was especially useless to think of fighting
against capitalism while remaining on its terrain, that is, within the
relations of production, or even wanting to become its true
interpreters, a desire that became increasingly evident in the following
years. The real enjeu, the real challenge, Camatte said, “lay in the
explosion of identity — and the Italian situation was a sublime diorama
of this, with all those singular characters: feminists, Indians,
homosexuals, armatisti, dreamers, freaks — but also in the elaboration
of other relationships, specifically affective relationships that, in
his opinion, could have allowed the free development of women and men.
Carchia’s brief and fulminating writing seems to implicitly support this
analysis, but it goes even further: it probes the abyss in which it
becomes evident that the critique of capitalism, which is also the
hegemonic critique in contemporary protest movements, proved to be
nothing more than its reverse [rovescio], incapable of truly escaping
from an idealistic representation of itself, but especially from its
mortal chain of material effects, which bears a name engraved in blood:
humanity.
And the question, says Carchia, is not resolved by opposing
anti-humanism to humanism, but rather by exploring the non-human, the
non-human that stands as a stop in history. Rejection of revanchism,
rejection of praxis, rejection of progressivism, rejection of
politicking: in a word, the suspension of the “human” subject.
Liberation begins with the disaggregation of the whole and the emergence
of a world with its identities reduced to fragments.
In this small “gloss,” which anticipates the crisis that would begin to
affect the movement in September of the same year, Gianni Carchia begins
to really sketch out the possibility of thinking a non-human gesture
traversed by a singular energy, which in recent years we have learned to
call a destituent power.
– Marcello Tari
---
Since the emergence of bourgeois society and throughout the course of
its existence, the emphasis on man has been the price paid for the
development and the autonomization of exchange value as well as for the
progressive reification of human relations. The more capitalist
dehumanization – the ‘organic composition’ of society and of individuals
– developed, the more the reference point for ideology, regardless under
which sign, became – in opposition to the artificial, the fictitious and
the despotic of these relations — the natural, the genuine, the human.
But if the bourgeois apologists held the invariance of human nature as
an obvious guarantee for the planetary system of exploitation, the same
terrain was misunderstood within the proletarian movement, causing them
to exalt – against capital and the injustice of the relations of
production – work and the mere unfolding of productive forces, which
were posited as the general equivalent of man and the emancipated
subject.
This misunderstanding would prove to be fatal for the movement. Marx’s
reminders and warnings in the Critique of Gotha Programme were not
enough — by virtue of a theory tenaciously rooted in a naturalist and
positive, albeit critical, option – to illustrate to the proletariat
that, as it had been written in all the letters unmasking political
economy, capital and labor are two poles of a single relationship, which
must be taken or left in tandem rather than as isolated components.
Hegel defined (and glorified) the unfolding of the essence of capitalist
society as a process in which substance becomes subject. His immediate
adversaries, materialists and existentialists, sought out the true and
authentic subject on the reverse side of the “automatic” subject of
capital, proceeding through alienation, which was highlighted by the
Hegelian dialectic; such a subject would again become, sometimes
mythically, substance, human nature, only no longer falsified and
disfigured. Here the human was configured as something subterranean, a
substratum temporarily lost and covered up by the exteriorization of
every immediate, vital relationship, but destined, after the pain of
alienation, after the odyssey of history as “prehistory” or as “fall,”
as “exteriority,” to resurface and to triumph. Hence the blind
abandonment, both hopeful and desperate, to the forces of objective
reason, of progress, of history. The theory that revindicated the human
in the face of its alienation and capitalization could only do so by
neglecting the fact that precisely such corruption, far from being in
conflict with the human essence that was historically revealed, was no
more and no less than the result of its exaltation, the prolongation of
its natural features, exterminators and bearers of death.
Thus when fully decoded, humanistic and anti-humanistic demeanors do not
reveal themselves as alternatives, but as immediately identical. If, by
bitter irony, the Stalinist reproach of idealism directed at the Lukács
of History and Class Consciousness and at radical communism is correct,
this is so because such dangerous idealism results not in the impatience
of the revolutionary gesture, but in the insistence on alienation and a
renewal of the human as the cornerstone of the critique of capitalism,
an insistence which will later be common – as a critique of fetishism
and a call for “experience” – to phenomenology and existentialism.
Nothing is more paradoxical than the demand to return to the human
subject in order to overcome alienation and to make him, if possible,
more of a proprietor than he already is [più proprietario di quanto già
non sia], as if anti-humanism, the final union between capitalism and
barbarism, were not inscribed in the mechanism of generalized
self-preservation whereby the universal human being cancels and
eradicates everything that does not reflect it. Today it has finally
become clear that the humanist reference point, even in its most radical
forms, is nothing more than the inverted expression of the
“anthropomorphosis of capital,” of the “death of man.” But the
anti-humanism professed by the dominant modes of thought and above all
by structuralism – which, with an irony as profound as it is
involuntary, replaces philosophy with the “human sciences” — always
continues, precisely as the “mimesis of the dead,” addressing the
objectives of self-preservation and of the subject: humanism in
disguise. This is evident in the fact that it raises the problem of a
shift in thinking — as a problem of “decision,” “choice,” “will” — in
highly subjective terms. To really think in a way that is no longer
humanistic does not mean, then, to think in anti-humanistic terms, which
are still always despotic, arbitrary, violent: in a word, humanistic. We
cannot get out of the dialectic, out of the damage of a bad history,
just by changing its sign, by “turning it upside down”: every determined
attempt at a reversal only results in its umpteenth confirmation. To
distance oneself from man, from his history as a possessive subject in
which irreconciled nature persists without being recognized, does not
mean to identify with the aggressor, or to surrender oneself to the
ongoing dehumanization, to the objectivity of a straight path, to seeing
well, even if this refers to impersonal subjects in the last instance.
The critique of ideology, confronting reality with its ideal premises,
the unmasking of false consciousness and false reconciliations – even in
the extreme forms adopted by “Critical Theory” – these have all been
rendered vain by late-capitalist society’s absolute integration of the
proper spheres of appearance and of the human, which are outside of
domination and reification: culture, criticism, democracy. However, even
if this integration has shown that the reference to meaning, to
fullness, to use value — in a word, to man, is nothing more than an
alibi for barbarism and one can no longer invoke man except with a bad
conscience, the consequence of all this is not to abandon oneself to the
truth of the facts, to the inhumanity of survival. The non-human, that
which has remained outside the dialectic and the false alternative
between humanism and anti-humanism, is perhaps the utopia of thought:
something that does not lie in the affirmation or, vice versa, in the
violent death of man and appearance, but rather in their suspension and
dispersal. What would be the profile of a thought that nourishes itself
from the non-human, from the trace of what no longer exists or does not
yet exist, from what is no longer, what never was human, from that which
is not impiously subjective and natural in the human? Even if this omen
— as limit, anxiety or promise — nourishes all idealism, from the
doctrine of the intelligible in Kant to the self-recognition of the
absolute spirit in Hegel, up to the realm of freedom in Marx, it still
has the function of reparation, compensation, reintegration. Built on
the pain of appearance, of self-recognition, of history, in idealism the
non-human never seems to be able to truly free itself from its evil and
guilty roots: in its fulfillment it still maintains all the
characteristics of its odyssey, only under an inverted sign.
The non-human, the radically different, would instead perhaps be a
moment disclosed in a gesture of farewell addressed to idealistic
dynamics, a goodbye to the exaltation of the human brought to its
explosion point. It would be the renunciation of the replacement of a
dead god with a human who, losing the sense of its identity, expands
according to a devouring impulse until it empties and annexes – as a
totality – all limits, all transcendence, all infinity. It would be the
refusal of the subject to claim, to demand, to do; a willingness to give
oneself to that which is repressed and imprisoned in and outside of
oneself, receiving them and thus ridding oneself of any malign,
immediate urgency. It would be – as a difference – that line where the
impure mixture of subject and object, which is the character of the
dialectic completed, finally dissolves and separates. Since it does not
fall under the movement of history, the non-human is not the immobility
of myth: rather, it is the stopping of history; it does not coincide
with the expansion of the subject nor with its mere annihilation, but
rather with its fracturing; since it does not correspond to the
exaltation of consciousness, it is not the formless silence of the
unconscious: rather, its irreducible voice. To disintegrate identities,
to unmake totalities — not because their fragments, those formless
asymmetries forced to “go outside of themselves [uscir fuori[1]]” — will
once again become contradictions, driving moments of the world’s
destiny, nor because they are abandoned to their blind drift, becoming
easy targets for the verdict of dialectics, but rather because they
persist in their non-identity.
[1] This has the connotation of the Hegelian ‘Aussersichgehens,’ [going
outside of oneself] which is how I have translated the phrase here, even
though the original Italian does not contain the reflexive pronoun. The
meaning seems to me to be a bit more clear this way.