Inverted Forms and Heterotopian Homonymy: Althusser, Mamardashvili, and the Problem of "Man"

boundary 2 41:1 (2014) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2409784 © 2014 by Duke University Press

Inverted Forms and Heterotopian Homonymy: Althusser, Mamardashvili, and the Problem of “Man”

Miglena Nikolchina

The mostly long- distance friendship between Louis Althusser and Merab Mamardashvili will provide here a focusing lens that sharpens but also delimits a vast issue which seems to be gathering momentum once again today: the issue concerning “man,” vis- à- vis the shifting boundaries of the animal, the machine, and the divine. This issue—against the back-ground of radical social emancipatory projects—played a crucial role in French theoretical debates in the 1960s and took a turn to which Althus-ser contributed and which has been widely recognized as “antihuman-ist.” Under dissimilar economic, political, social, cultural, and ideological circumstances,1 concurrent developments in Eastern Europe followed a

Mamardachvili is the spelling used in Merab’s publications in French; Mamardashvili is the spelling used in English. If one followed the rules for transliteration, Mamardašvili would be the proper spelling. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.1. From abolishing private ownership of the “means of production” to (more or less suc-cessfully) reorganizing all spheres of life in accordance with radical theoretical premises, Eastern Europe staged a mass experiment whose scope, thoroughness, and sheer dura-tion cannot be overestimated. With its initial emphasis on the collective rather than the individual and on the inexorable machine of history rather than human will, this project could fairly accurately claim to be described as antihumanist.

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different logic. Politically, this logic surfaced in the events of the Prague Spring in 1968, with its slogan for “socialism with a human face.” Philo-sophically, but also in broader cultural terms, it brought up the notion of the human as its central concern. This tendency, for which the young Karl Marx ensured the necessary alibi, was shared and appropriated on a variety of levels, including reform- minded nomenclature. Overtly with, but in sub-stance against, nomenclature appropriations, the tendency was seized upon by critically minded East European intellectuals and artists as a plat-form for undermining and opposing the repressive ideological machine of the regime.

It thus came to pass that, by the end of the 1960s, critical and projec-tive thinking in the West (as represented by French theory) was taken up by antihumanist trends, while in Eastern Europe it began to unfold under the aegis of “man.” This East European inversion could easily be perceived—and dismissed—as déjà vu, a sort of “restoration,” a counterrevolutionary return to “bourgeois humanism.” Althusser, to be sure, did so. He even went so far as to claim that the “humanist ravings” of the liberalization in Eastern Europe, which he saw as a betrayal of both theory and the revolutionary project, were the reason he wrote his books at all.2 Bringing into consider-ation his encounters, biographical and philosophical, with Mamardashvili might shed a different light on the Eastern side of this theoretical deviation and reveal the complex and ambiguous nature of the very division it presup-poses between humanism and antihumanism.

Althusser is sufficiently well known both East and West for his influ-ential work on Marx and ideology. Russian Georgian philosopher Mamar-dashvili is little known, if at all, in the West but is a fairly big name in at least some of the former Eastern bloc countries.3 Meeting Althusser had dire

2. As he put it in retrospect, “I would never have written anything were it not for the Twen-tieth Congress and Khrushchev’s critique of Stalinism and the subsequent liberalization. But I would never have written these books if I had not seen this affair as a bungled de- Stalinization, a right- wing de- Stalinization which instead of analyses offered us only incantations; which instead of Marxist concepts had available only the poverty of bour-geois ideology. My target was therefore clear: these humanist ravings, these feeble dis-sertations on liberty, labor, or alienation, which were the effects of all this among French Party intellectuals. And my aim was equally clear: to make a start on the first left- wing cri-tique of Stalinism, a critique that would make it possible to reflect not only on Khrushchev and Stalin but also on Prague and Lin Piao: that would above all help put some substance back into the revolutionary project here in the West.” Louis Althusser, “Les communistes et la philosophie,” L’Humanité, July 5, 1975. Quoted in Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 1.3. So far as I know, the only book to appear in the West is Merab Mamardachvili, Médi-

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consequences for Mamardashvili. The two philosophers met in 1966, when, without asking the Soviet authorities for permission, Mamardashvili made a detour from Italy, which he visited at the invitation of the Italian Communist Party, to Paris. This was to be Mamardashvili’s last trip outside the Soviet Union until Gorbachev’s time (the second half of the 1980s, when the ban on his traveling outside the country was finally lifted). The meeting obvi-ously went well, as the two men stayed in contact through letters—which had to be delivered by friends rather than the mail—and met again in 1974, when Althusser attended a conference in Moscow.4

It should be noted at this point that the decades since the 1960s have also been accompanied, for reasons that still need to be analyzed (they might be part of the more general tendency toward “lobbyization” in the humanities), by an accelerating erosion of the shared East- West intel-lectual field. In the 1960s, older figures such as Alexandre Koyré, Alex-andre Kojève, and Roman Jakobson, and fresh arrivals such as Tzvetan Todorov and Julia Kristeva, among many others, provided a living intellec-tual link. The intense reception of Russian formalism and Mikhail Bakhtin (with his emphasis on dialogue) left its mark on the epoch. The early history of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, whose presidents and vice presidents included Jacobson, Kristeva, Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, Jurij M. Lotman, and Aleksandr Ljudskanov (some of them expats, some not), pro-vides an eloquent example for the East- West openness of the theoretical discussion in spite of ideological repression in Eastern Europe.5 Over the course of the 1970s, things changed drastically, and when, in the 1980s, George Soros began organizing his East- Meets- West conferences in Dubrovnik, Western scholars no longer came with the intention to discuss but to teach and collect empirical material.

tations cartésiennes, trans. Tanya Page and Luba Jurgenson (Arles: Solin–Actes Sud, 1997). Of course, efforts are being made to bring attention to his work. The task is not easy for various reasons, one of which is the fact that a large part of Mamardashvili’s work appeared (and keeps appearing) posthumously and is comprised of unfinished manuscripts or recorded oral presentations. For more information on his reception East and West, see Slobodanka Vladiv- Glover, “Post- structuralism in Georgia,” Angelaki 15, no. 3 (2010): 27–39.4. There is the view expressed by Annie Epelboin that the meeting between Althusser and Mamardashvili did not result in a meaningful conversation (Vladiv- Glover, “Post- structuralism in Georgia,” 36n4). Clearly, I cannot accept this. Whatever their theoretical differences, I believe in this case one philosophical animal (as Mamardashvili called him-self) recognized another: Althusser’s letter, from which I will quote later on, speaks vol-umes of tacit empathy.5. For a brief history of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, see iass- ais.org/.


The connection between Althusser and Mamardashvili cuts across this history. Foregrounding the East- West divergence between humanist and antihumanist trends, their encounter brings into focus the processes that ultimately led to the political changes in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s: Althusser was right in his fears and the Prague Spring was right in its hopes. However, it could also be argued that the historical events, the way they happened, obscured the precise conceptual and political stakes of the divergence and that this divergence has a bearing on contemporary philo-sophical debates and, beyond them, on the new dilemmas facing the world.

Today, the field of the controversy surrounding the human appears to be split between what Alain Badiou has aptly termed “animal humanism”6 and the “antihumanist programme,” which prevails and persists since the end of the 1960s because “it is the bearer of the coupled ideas of the void and the beginning.”7 “Animal humanism” regards the human as one organic species among others and, one might argue, is subtended by anxieties concerning the identity of the human with respect to technological change.8 Antihumanism, whether it cares about some beginning or not, declares the end of man, who, to quote Michel Foucault’s famous concluding phrase in The Order of Things, will be “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”9

At the time Althusser and Mamardashvili first met, they were both the authors of rigorously antihumanist Marxian analyses; in subsequent years, however, while antihumanism became ever more stringently pro-claimed in the context of French poststructuralism (Althusser’s uneasy positioning in this process being part of it), Mamardashvili’s philosophical stance underwent a series of shifts apparently in the opposite direction. My wager here will be that the perspective exemplified by Mamardashvili is not simply a matter of historical reconstruction but might provide a viable reshuffling of the various facets that go into present- day humanism/anti-humanism divisions.

6. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. A. Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 175.7. Badiou, The Century, 173.8. I explore these anxieties in Miglena Nikolchina, Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions: Heterotopias of the Seminar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), in the chapter “Аn Unfinished Project: Man as Comedy,” 88–108, which also deals with Mamardash-vili’s views on the human. See also my “The Concave Mirror: Notes on the Parahuman in Kleist and Rilke,” in “Justice and Communicative Freedom: The Recognition Paradigm in a Post- socialist Context,” special bilingual issue, Kritika i humanism 22 (2006): 75–92.9. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Lon-don: Routledge, 2001), 423.


Heterotopian Homonymy

The personal rapport between the two philosophers—in conjunction with the distances and the risks involved, the philosophical drifting apart, and individual drama, be it psychological or professional—is especially interesting as a sort of biographical endorsement to a phenomenon I have come to describe as “heterotopian homonymy.” Heterotopian homonymy designates a reversal in the meaning of key theoretical and political con-cepts due to geopolitical divisions and the traffic of fantasies of the Other that such divisions involve. In the context of the Cold War, the reversal took a specular turn in the spirit of Foucault’s definition of heterotopia: as if look-ing at a mirror image, heterotopian homonyms represent, invert, and chal-lenge each other. The concepts of the human and, by an always problematic extension, the problem of humanism provide examples for such homonymy.

It is perhaps worth remembering at this point that vertical reversal or inversion, in the sense of putting something that was upside down on its feet or, in case you did it wrongly, on its head, became a recurring metaphor and a legendary (since its precise origin or genealogy is seldom remem-bered) reference point in Marxist thought. The most popular reference, per-haps, is Friedrich Engels’s claim that, with Marx, “the dialectic of Hegel was placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing before, and placed upon its feet again.”10 Before that, the image appears in Marx’s own afterword to the second German edition of Capital, where he notes, apropos of Hegel’s dialectic, that it is standing on its head and that it must be turned up on its feet again in order to reach the rational kernel within the mystical shell.11 However, even before that, in The Holy Family (coauthored with Engels), Marx already states that Hegel “stands the world on its head.”12 The Holy Family was the first book by Marx or Engels that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ever read: he was quick to grasp the hint and became especially fond of the idea of correcting Hegel’s improper standing.13

10. Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philoso-phy, trans. and ed. C. P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1941), 44.11. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Das Kapital, vol. 23, Werke (Berlin/DDR: Dietz Verlag, 1968), 25.12. “He stands the world on its head and can therefore in his head also dissolve all limi-tations, which nevertheless remain in existence for bad sensuousness, for real man” (chap. 8, the part entitled “Revealed Mystery of the Standpoint”). See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik: gegen Bruno Bauer und Kunsorten, vol. 2, Werke (Berlin/DDR: Dietz Verlag, 1972), 203.13. V. I. Lenin, Filosofskie tetrady, vol. 2, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij (Moscow: Idatel’stvo političeskoj literatury, 1969), 37. See also p. 93.


Adequate or not, the image proved to be very tenacious. It makes its appearance in both Althusser’s and Mamardashvili’s writing. I will return to Mamardashvili later. As for Althusser, in an early text, he expounds this claim referring to Marx, Engels, and Lenin.14 In a text on Ludwig Feuerbach, the reference to this image as used by Engels is still positive, breathing an “echo of relief and enthusiasm.”15 In a later text on Lenin, however, Althus-ser’s central claim is that Lenin did not read Hegel in terms of inversion but, rather, of “laying bare,” which of course takes us back to Marx’s taking to task the “mystical shell” of dialectics. Althusser’s observation that “for his reading of Hegel [Lenin] adopted a new philosophical practice” might be more to the point if we remember that the Bolshevik Revolution came to be this new philosophical practice.16 “Down with Heaven: materialism” reads one of Lenin’s cryptic notes on Hegelian dialectics in his Philosophi-cal Notebooks.17

And down it went. We might posit the myth of origins of hetero-topian homonymy in the divergence of translations of the central concept of Hegel’s dialectics, Aufhebung, which illustrates the mysterious cross-ing point of vertical and horizontal inversion. Down it went in the Russian translation (as snytie), and up in the French relever or in the English sub-lation. In the inverted translations, the vertical struggle between material-ism and idealism took an additional, horizontal geopolitical twist. It should be stressed that heterotopian homonymy denotes a linguistic occurrence, which, once we are on the lookout for it, is not that difficult to observe. It is not necessary (although this would be the true challenge) to attempt unpacking the node of materiality and fantasy that produces the inversion in heterotopian homonyms in order to notice its confounding operations.18

The very term transition, which had to name the metamorphosis of former communist societies into liberal democracies, is an astonishing example of homonymous inversions—in its genealogy from Marx via the Soviet ideologues of Joseph Stalin’s epoch to the post- Stalinist aporias of

14. Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1997), 241–47.15. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 41.16. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (Lon-don: New Left Books, 1971), 114.17. Lenin, Filosofskie tetrady, 330.18. See my Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions, the chapter “The West as Intellectual Utopia,” where I address the traffic of fantasies, and “Between Irony and Revolution: The Case of Aufhebung,” which deals with the translations of Hegel’s term, 43–87.


the transition to communism.19 The net result was that, after the Berlin Wall fell, Eastern Europe’s march away from communism was designated by an (unwitting) Marxist term, which used to designate a march in quite the opposite direction. While it is obvious that this confusion was not the fruit of ingenious machinations, it does demonstrate one of the mechanisms through which Eastern Europe was deprived of the language of any spe-cific worldview that would have been bound up with the experience of living in (anti)utopia.20 And yet, theoretical narratives, like the one about the for-tunes of transition, or philosophical drama, like the one I conjure up here, might provide the chance to retrieve a missed turn for thinking.

“Man”: Constantly Reborn

The heterotopian divergence in the concept of “man” appears plainly in a talk entitled “The European Responsibility,” which Mamardashvili deliv-ered at an international symposium in Paris, in 1988, on the eve of the political changes in Eastern Europe.21 Before I proceed with this story of seduction and betrayal, however, an aside on two adjacent linguistic issues. First, there is the problem of the word man, central to Mamardashvili’s talk. In Russian, there exists a regular word for human being (čelovek), in which

19. Nicolas Guilhot, “‘The Transition to the Human World of Democracy’: Notes for a His-tory of the Concept of Transition, from Early Marxism to 1989,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 2 (May 2002): 219–43.20. A comparatively simple case that nevertheless posed insurmountable difficulties con-cerned gender equality. The equality of women was instituted overnight and inscribed in the constitution from the inception of the communist regimes. This solution “from above” produced problems of its own, but they were neither the problems of Western women, who had to fight “from below,” at grass roots level, through movements, et cetera, nor the prob-lems of Third World women. Explaining this proved to be a tough task. Some years ago, I took part in a European Commission project, which had to study the political representa-tion of women in eight accession countries. The scholars from these eight countries spent quite some time trying to articulate to our Western partners the specific problems facing women in Eastern Europe. We thought we were making progress when, at some point, there were local elections in one of the Eastern European countries. Our partners were in shock. “Please, explain the high percentage of women who were elected,” they asked. Well, we thought we did! The book that came out of this study was coauthored by the West-ern partners. See Yvonne Galligan, Sara Clavero, and Marina Calloni, Gender Politics and Democracy in Post- Socialist Europe (Farmington Hills, MI: Barbara Budrich, 2007).21. Merab Mamardachvili, “La responsabilité européenne,” in Europe sans rivage: De l’identité culturelle européenne; Symposium international Paris 1988 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988), 201–5.


the traditional humanist values of “man” have been invested without pro-ducing, at least on a linguistic level, the exclusion of woman.22 For Mamar-dashvili, then, there would be no discrepancy between the historical con-notations invested in man and the twentieth- century gender troubles that transferred to human being the generic pretensions ascribed traditionally to man. In this text, I will use predominantly human being, noting, never-theless, that while this phrase gains in terms of getting rid of sexism, it also loses in terms of the historical memory and philosophical debates that went into the making of the concept of “man.” Still worse, human evokes in more immediate ways the derivative humanism and the notion of one species among the others: it is as if the linguistic shift from man to human already contains the kernel of “animal humanism.”

Another awkward designation is the term Europe. In one of his texts dealing with the problem of the human, Mamardashvili notes that Europe is not a geographical concept and that it might very well be found in Tokyo and not the places where Mamardashvili usually taught and met his audi-ences, Moscow or Tbilisi.23 So what is Europe if not a geographical con-cept? Europe is shorthand for human being, čelovek. It comprises, to begin with, two major legacies: the state of rightful rule (l’État de droit) inherited from Roman law; and the inner voice that was discovered with the Gospels (in fact, Saint Paul seems to be Mamardashvili’s more obvious reference) and that allows one to walk without external support and without guaran-tees, thus opening the way for an unsettling element, the element that cre-ates history.24 Mamardashvili explicitly points out that the idea of law and rights inherited from Roman law was never properly assimilated in his own country, which thus remains on the fringe of Europe. Yet, he also opposes the external law and the inner voice in favor of interiority so that, he claims, “European culture is antimoralizing and antilegalist, because the power of the language, which comes from the inner principle, is more important, it is the thing that leads the human effort and struggle.”25

22. Mamardashvili’s native language is Georgian, yet much of his writing as well as his immediate philosophical milieu is Russian. Here I will simply point out that in Georgian, with some interesting complications, the linguistic situation with regard to man/woman/human seems to be closer to the situation in Russian than what we have in English or French.23. Merab Mamardashvili, Neobkhodimost’ sebya: Lektsii; Stat’i; Filosofskiye zametki (Moscow: Labirint, 1996), 358.24. Mamardachvili, “La responsabilité européenne,” 202–3.25. Mamardachvili, “La responsabilité européenne,” 203.


This bifurcation between the law and the inner voice does not end here; it is the prerequisite for further developments. First, the human implies a history: not just any history but the history of creating history as the organ of the human (and vice versa, the human being is the creature whose spe-cific organ is history). Second, it implies language, where language is not just any system of communication but is equivalent to the political. Lan-guage is the humming and the shouting of the agora, of discussing the mat-ters of the polis: outside of this, there can be only barbarians in the original Old Greek sense of the word qua people without language. Third, although the human being is the creature whose organ is history, the human has no past and no future, as it always happens now. It is, hence, an apocalyptic dimension to the now and is anything but the “natural” human being studied by anthropology. This apocalyptic dimension—this kairos, we might say, with a view of more recent writing by Giorgio Agamben—happens, when and if it happens, only through thinking in the space of the possible human being. The human being is always a possible human being that unpredict-ably appears in an act of thought now. The human is, hence, the object of a negative ontology. It is an absence. It never is but is always becoming,26 always being reborn, which gives the human its fourth major aspect, effort. The human is the effort and the labor to be human, a failing effort in most cases, a frequently abortive effort, to be sure, but an effort nonetheless. And finally, when and if it happens, the human is artificial, it is born “at the second step,” it has nothing to do with some natural man or human nature.

Now, whatever we may think of Mamardashvili’s definition of the human, we may not like its being synonymous with European. This might take us into deliberations of the type that Jacques Lacan’s phallus elicits: if it is not the male anatomical organ, why call it that? If European might refer to Tokyo rather than Europe, why call it that? Why insist that Europe

26. “Becoming” (devenir) human is the word that appears in “The European Responsi-bility”: its gloss is that the human is “a creature in the state of making itself” and that it is a “very long effort.” On the other hand, in his more rigorous philosophical texts, Mamar-dashvili prefers “happening”: man is impossible but he happens. This is precisely the way that the possible man should be understood: as an impossibility that happens through the uncertainty of a continuous effort. See Mamardashvili, Neobkhodimost’ sebya, 7–154. Another interesting point in this context is the appearance of an “apocalyptic” dimension, which, apropos of Sartre, Mamardashvili criticizes in his early works. See Merab Mamar-dashvili, “Kategorija social’nogo bytija i metod ego analiza v èkzistencializme Sartra” [The category of social being and its analysis in Sartre’s existentialism], in Sovremennyj èkzistencializm: Krit. Očerki, ed. T. I. Oyzernan (Moscow: Mysl’, 1966), 149–204.


offers the only acceptable answer to the question of whether change is still possible in the world? What interests me at this point, however—this point rather late in the moribund East European communist system and, as it would turn out to be, in Mamardasvhili’s life27—is Mamardashvili’s claim that Europeans have disavowed their responsibility to be European in this very specific sense he invests in the word:

You Europeans take too many things for granted. You never stop to think about what is the very essence of your existence, and you also lack the keen awareness that the human being is, in the first place, an effort spread out in time, a constant effort to become a human being. The human being is not a natural given, it is not a natural state but a state that is continually created . . . a creature, which is always in the process of becoming, so that history can be defined as history of the human effort to become human. The human being does not exist: she or he is becoming. . . . [But] there may be a fatigue and a forgetfulness of one’s beginnings; one might no longer be able to sustain this effort. Herein resides the danger for Europe: the fatigue with the historical effort, the incapacity to sustain the effort to found it, to make it be reborn in each instant, to be suspended in the air without guarantees and without hierarchies.28

“Man”: Dead End(s)

While Mamardashvili never stops to tell us who, precisely, are those Europeans who are forgetful of the effort to be human, there is little doubt that he is challenging the trend, exemplified by Foucault’s concluding lines in The Order of Things or by Jacques Derrida’s terse formulation in “The Ends of Man”: “Man is that which is relative to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word.”29 By the mid- 1960s, this trend, positing man as finished, had acquired the name “antihumanism” and “had become an almost official face of French thought.”30 One usually finds enlisted among the texts that played a pivotal role in this trend Martin Heidegger’s 1947

27. Mamardashvili died suddenly on November 25, 1990, in the Moscow airport, about a month after Althusser.28. Mamardachvili, “La responsabilité européenne,” 203.29. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 123.30. Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 2.


“Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Kojève’s second note on “the end of history,” writ-ten in 1961 and published in 1968, Althusser’s contributions to the humanist controversy in Marxism, as well as Foucault’s and Derrida’s texts referred to above. In a recent study, which illustrates both the newly rising interest in the problem of the human and the confusion surrounding it, Stefanos Geroulanos takes the trend further back in time, to the 1930s and even the 1920s, bringing together various philosophers and writers in whose works he observes the emergence of a “negative anthropology.” While most inter-esting in terms of its scope and in terms of revisiting figures rarely evoked now in such contexts (as is the case with Koyré), Geroulanos’s study also exemplifies and magnifies some of the major problems of the antihuman-ism debate, most notably the vagueness and multifariousness of the “man” and the “humanism” that are being bashed and declared dead. His own approach is divided between, on the one hand, the reduction of humanism to “conceptions in which man was based on a human ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ that is given or immutable, or served as his own highest being and ideal,”31 and, on the other hand, the claim, which Geroulanos would justifiably make every now and then, that his frequent refusal to offer a rigorous concep-tual framework corresponds to the lack of rigorousness in the authors and the controversies that he explores. He works, consequently, either with a rather general concept of “human nature,” as if there ever were an uncon-tested consensus about what this means, or with no defined concept at all. As a result, Geroulanos enlists in the ranks of antihumanism authors who explicitly conceived their task as elaborating the right sort of human-ism against improper humanisms or who envisioned various projects for the “New Man.” Merely contesting the meaning of the human is already, according to Geroulanos, an indication of antihumanism.

Such an account would clearly go against the grain of “The Ends of Man”: where Derrida deconstructs the surreptitious returns of “human-ist metaphysics” in outlooks ostensibly pursuing the critique of such meta-physics, Geroulanos sees a massive, already accomplished de(con)struc-tion of humanism in cases where it is still actually being upheld. To put it differently, while Derrida laments the end of man as never sufficiently ending, Geroulanos takes Derrida’s formulation of the end of man to be the late fruition of a process that had been long in the making. Jean- Paul Sartre’s work, especially “Existentialism Is Humanism,” provides another

31. Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist, 12, 14, and throughout the whole study.


eloquent example of this divergence: Sartre marks the point of departure as, and forms a major target of, Derrida’s critique in “The Ends of Man”; Geroulanos, for his part, includes Sartre’s work in the overall thrust toward antihumanism.

The questions raised by this disparity—between a humanism that never seems to go away and an antihumanism that seems always to have already arrived—have been resolved by Badiou’s juxtaposing radical humanism (represented by Sartre) and radical antihumanism (represented by Foucault). However contrasting, both orientations treat the same ques-tion (What becomes of man without God?), and they both “agree on the theme of Godless man as opening, possibility, programme of thought.”32 There is, therefore, a unity of the two conflicting orientations: a unity in their programmatic turn toward the possible. Of the two, nevertheless, Badiou definitely gives his preference to Foucault’s solution: “a thinking which lets an inhuman beginning arrive.” To put it differently—and by way of a confir-mation of Geroulanos’s perspective—radical humanism is almost, although not quite, as good as radical antihumanism. Says Badiou, “If, at the end of the sixties, the antihumanist programme prevails (and, in my view, persists as our starting point) it is because it is the bearer of the coupled ideas of the void and the beginning.”33

Going back to Mamardashvili, we have to ask, therefore, why is “the bearer of the coupled ideas of the void and the beginning” (which seem to fit rather well Mamardashvili’s “negative ontology” of the human) called human in the one case and inhuman in the other? Why is man, on the one hand, finished, and, on the other, constantly reborn? Why does Mamar-dashvili’s persistent emphasis on the artificiality of the human risk being linguistically synonymous with “animal humanism”?

The mystery is further aggravated by the following details, which will bring us back to Mamardashvili’s encounter with Althusser. At the time when he made his detour to Paris in order to meet Althusser—a meet-ing that would change his career and life for good—Mamardashvili had recently published a critique34 of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, targeting Sartre’s inability to exit the “labyrinth of humanist ideology,”35 and

32. Badiou, The Century, 171.33. Badiou, The Century, 173.34. Merab Mamardashvili, “K kritike èkzistencialistskogo ponimanija dialektiki” [Toward a critique of the existentialist understanding of dialectics], Voprosy filosofii, no. 6 (1963): 108–20.35. Emil Grigorov, Dramata na cogito: edna săvremenna versija. Opit vărhu filosofijata na


a second critique appeared in 1966, the year Mamardashvili and Althusser met, charging Sartre with the anthropologization of “social being.”36 For his part, Althusser had already published a large part of his major works by the time of this meeting.37 He already had dealt, to quote Jean- Claude Milner, a “fatal blow” to “hegelo- marxism” by radically disconnecting Marx from Hegel and by passing a split across Marx’s works separating the young from the mature Marx.38 More pertinent to the Mamardashvili case, in texts such as “On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions”39 and “Marxism and Humanism,”40 Althusser had addressed critically the turn to “bourgeois humanism”—to the ideas of young Marx on “man” and “human nature”—in the official line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Mamardash-vili’s adventure, hence, so ripe with risk and heavy consequences, was clearly indicative of a choice against Sartre’s “radical humanism” (which, as events would show, and as Badiou does not fail to note, appealed to the Soviet authorities) and in favor of (Althusser’s) no less radical anti-humanism. And yet, by the end of the 1980s, Mamardashvili appears as a

Merab Mamardašvili [The drama of cogito: A contemporary version; An essay on Merab Mamardashvili’s philosophy] (Sofia: Sofia University, 2009), 52.36. Mamardashvili, “Kategorija social’nogo bytija,” 149–204.37. According to Gregory Elliott, Althusser failed “to produce anything comparable to For Marx and Reading ‘Capital’ after 1965” (Althusser: The Detour of Theory [Leiden: Brill, 2006], xx).38. Jean- Claude Milner, “La petite bourgeoisie intellectuelle en France: d’un rêve l’autre,” in Le Moment philosophique des années 1960 en France, ed. Patrice Maniglier (Paris: PUF, 2011), 187.39. Althusser, For Marx, 49–86 and 219–41. Pierre Macherey observes that “On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions” is the first important text by Althusser (apart from his book on Montesquieu, which appeared the previous year) and that its subtitle, Questions de théorie (theoretical questions) is a parody of Question de method (methodological question), which appears as the subtitle of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. See Pierre Macherey, “Althusser et le jeune Marx,” Actuel Marx, no. 31 (March 2002): 159–75. In this text, Althusser approaches critically an issue of Recherches Internationales dedi-cated to the young Marx. A number of the studies in this issue were by Soviet scholars. Althusser remarks in a footnote, “The interest shown in the study of Marx’s early works by young Soviet scholars is particularly noteworthy. It is an important sign of the present direction of cultural development in the U.S.S.R.” Althusser singles out favorably the text by Nikolaj Lapin, a classmate of Mamardashvili from Moscow State University since 1949 with whom he worked in a variety of contexts. See N. I. Lapin, “Rannij Mamardashvili” [The early Mamardashvili], in Byt’ filosofom—eto sud’ba [Being a philosopher], ed. Neli Motroshilova (Moscow: Progress, 2011), 50–63.40. Louis Althusser, “Marxism and Humanism,” Cahiers de l’Institut de science écono-mique appliquée, no. 20 (June 1964): 9–33.


spokesperson for the human. The question is—to put it in Mamardashvili’s words—how did this happen?

Event and Actuality

I will say it once again, in case the realities of Mamardashvili’s con-text have become too obscure: Mamardashvili’s meeting with Althusser involved at least two transgressions with respect to the Soviet regime. Not only was he not supposed to travel without official permission, but his detour to Paris was in order to meet someone who had explicitly criticized the official ideological standing of the regime. The fact that Althusser was a member of the French Communist Party made things even worse.41 That part of the drama involved philosophical subtleties—like the question of whether there was a break or continuity between the young and the mature Marx—speaks volumes of the nature of the regime itself and the theoretical constraints with which thinkers in Eastern Europe had to grapple. So if the turn to “man” and humanism was undertaken by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, could it be possible that Mamardashvili came somehow in agreement or gave in to the party line? Did he turn to the young Marx in congruence with the party’s turn?

In concrete practical and biographical terms, this question is easy to answer: whatever efforts Mamardashvili committed to making his philo-sophical investigations acceptable to the authorities, he was not very suc-cessful; and whatever overlapping there was between official humanism and the philosophical, literary, and artistic tackling of the problem of the human during the later decades of the regime, it did not work too well for many intellectuals, Mamardashvili included.42 In fact, the focus on the

41. In Althusser: The Detour of Theory, Gregory Elliott provides the contemporaneous political background to the theoretical dissent, including in his analysis the positions of various communist parties, the Soviet Union–China divergence, and the like.42. Beginning with the mid- 1950s, there is a complicated history of informal circles with which Mamardashvili was involved (such as the Gnoseology Group and the Moscow Circle of Logic [later Methodology]). Such intellectual activities were ripe with risk, and many of their members sooner or later ran into trouble with the authorities. To give an example of two of Mamardashvili’s close friends: by the end of the 1970s, Alexander Piati-gorsky (1929–2009) had defected to the West, and Evald Ilyenkov (1924–79) had com-mitted suicide. Here, it is impossible to follow the philosophical and theoretical facets of their dissent, the role that Marx’s early writing played as inspiration and justification, or, indeed, the infiltration of ideas from stranger sources, such as Russian cosmism. Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Solaris and Stalker are very much imbued with the radical questioning


human brought about a theoretical fracture in the ideological monolith of the system, which allowed its internal erosion. This was, no doubt, due to the mythologization of Marx—a paradox, since a critical thinker was sub-jected to ideological mummification, and a fatal weakness, which internal opponents of the system were quick to exploit. In purely theoretical terms, therefore, as well as in terms of the traffic of ideas between independently thinking intellectuals and the efforts of the nomenclature to adjust,43 the situation might turn out to be more complicated, with the young Marx play-ing the role of a Trojan horse in the citadel of official Marxism. In late inter-views, Mamardashvili asserts his involvement with Marx rather than Marx-ism44 and the influence of Marx, as early as the 1950s, in his own struggle for internal freedom because, in his youth, Marx “tried to craft a proce-dure for exorcising the social ghosts from thinking and from the study of society.”45

Mamardashvili calls Marx a tragic thinker because he did not live up to his own philosophical standards: he created a fundamental method-ology for removing “the poison from the poisoned, socially determined and alienated consciousness” but, later on, fell victim to a poison of his own making.46 Marx thus seems to have stayed with Mamardashvili ever since his youth, in a manner that implies a break in Marx’s own work (thus agree-ing with Althusser’s rigorous separation of the young from the mature Marx) but also a break from the mature Marx in Mamardashvili’s thinking.

This thinking, as already suggested, initially unfolded in the concep-tual framework of Capital and very much in the vein of Althusser’s claim that “any thought that appeals to Marx for any kind of restoration of a theoreti-cal anthropology or humanism is no more than ashes.”47 Mamardashvili’s 1963 critique of Sartre’s humanism states that Sartre reversed Marx’s per-spective, putting it—and here we are back to inversion and standing things

of human cognition and will, which characterized this philosophical agenda (as is the writ-ing of Polish writer and philosopher Stanislaw Lem, who is comparatively well known in the West, an indication that the agenda I am talking about was not confined to Moscow or the Soviet Union).43. It matters little whether in good or bad faith. See Merab Mamardashvili, “Moj opyt netipičen” [My experience is not typical], in Soznaniye i tsivilizatsiya (Moskva: Azbuka, 2011), 87–98.44. Mamardashvili, “Moj opyt netipičen.”45. Merab Mamardashvili, “Mysl’ pod zapretom (Besedy s A. Èpel’buèn)” [Thinking under a ban: Interviews with Annie Epelboin], Voprosy filosofii, no. 5 (May 1992): 102.46. Mamardashvili, “Mysl’ pod zapretom,” 102.47. Althusser, For Marx, 230.


up and down—on its head.48 Marx, Mamardashvili points out, “explicitly expounds the fact that, on the surface of capitalist life processes, the real social connections between people take on inverted, irrational forms, which often ‘say exactly the opposite of what actually is.’”49 A few years later, the idea of saying exactly the opposite, never so simple even in the earlier text, is transformed in Mamardashvili’s conceptualization of inverted forms—Marx’s verwandelte Form—as not only irrational but also totally nontrans-parent and cleanly cut off from the connections and processes that pro-duced them. Inverted forms erase the processes that bring them forth. True, we are once again dealing here with “an enchanted world, placed on its head and densely populated with ghosts and miracles” (my emphasis). However, these ghosts and miracles are immune to a reversal, a backward inversion, so to speak, that would reveal their truth. The arguments as to what lies “behind” them is irrelevant: “the inverted form exemplifies the workings of the system from the inside and is the objectified orientation of the cohesion of atomic conscious acts in the system; it is an object really posited outside of subjects, determined by the relationships in the system as a whole, and drawing its life from them—and not from the act of the com-prehending individual.” For the latter, this objectified orientation “induces a field of comprehension and of a possible movement of thought; it creates a space devoid of horizon, which in principle can be traversed by the gaze, while, on the other hand, it throws something like a shadow over various regions of the system inducing zones of non- comprehension, ‘dead space,’ impenetrable to the ray of consciousness.”50

We are dealing, therefore, with a seamless imprisonment of the “comprehending individual” in the matrix of inverted forms. In this perspec-tive, Mamardashvili’s later preoccupation with the happening of the human (akin to the young Marx’s procedure for taking out the poison from the “poisoned, socially determined and alienated consciousness”) raises yet another question. If his turn to “man” was not dictated by a political compro-mise and a surrender to the official party line, and if, in fact, “man” acted like a virus in the communist ideological system, might Mamardashvili’s resort to this problematic have been the fruit of an inverse compromise, a theo-

48. The image of turning something on its head appears three times in this text. See Mamardašvili, “K kritike èkzistencialistskogo ponimanija dialektiki,” 6, 109, 111, 114.49. Mamardašvili, “K kritike èkzistencialistskogo ponimanija dialektiki,” 114.50. Merab Mamardashvili, “Prevrasennye formy: O neobhodimosti irracional’nyh vyra-ženij” [Inverted forms: On the necessity of irrational expressions], in Formy i soderzha-niye myshleniya (Moscow: Azbuka, 2011), 248.


retical compromise, dictated by the exigency to use any possible means for undermining the regime? If this were the case, the very risk that such thinking involved would serve as an indicator of its adequacy. One might be reminded at this point of Foucault’s late writing on parrhesia, where “truth” is guaranteed with one’s body and one’s life, or of the manner in which, in The Samurai, Julia Kristeva’s character Dan (representing Bulgarian theo-retician Tzvetan Stoyanov) tries to convince Olga (Kristeva’s youthful alter ego, freshly arrived in Paris) to go back to her despotic motherland rather than defect to the West, where intellectual turmoil is “just a game. They protest because they’re quite safe. You’ve lost the sense of death—both as a threat and as a motivating force.”51 Staying in the East would hence amount to keeping death as a “threat and a motivating force,” or, as Althus-ser comments in his letter to Mamardashvili from 1978, “a duty of the intel-lect, but one that must come at a high price.”52

And yet, the stakes for Mamardashvili’s swerve to the human were not exactly parrhesiastic; he was certainly not concerned with a coinci-dence between truth and risking one’s life. In the same letter from 1978, Althusser quotes Mamardashvili as saying, “I’m staying put, because it’s here that one sees things bare, and right to the bottom” (PE, 2). It would seem that Mamardashvili’s decision not to defect to the West as many of his friends and colleagues did (to be exhibited, Althusser comments, “like the ‘wolf- children’ who can tell us a thing or two about the woods” [PE, 2]) was subtended by a philosophical impulse, which might be unraveled in the following way: a repressive regime with its blunt recourse to power allows a more transparent—naked—access to truth. Rather than distort thinking one way or another, through this or that compromise, tyranny seems to facilitate it. It is conducive to “seeing”; its cracks and crevices reveal “things bare, and right to the bottom.”

Now, the idea of such access, the idea that it is possible to “see things bare, and right to the bottom,” is clearly a paradox in the face of the irrevocable irrationality of inverted forms and the positioning of the “com-prehending individual” within their horizonless space. In his letter, Althus-ser mentions a couple of times the phrase “metaphysical depths”—“so as

51. Julia Kristeva, The Samurai, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 45.52. Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, ed. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet (London: Verso, 2006), 2. Here-after, this work is cited parenthetically as PE. Sadly, in the same letter, Althusser notes that Mamardashvili, unlike him, has people to talk with.


to know how you do it and in order to guess from the answers you seek the questions that are troubling you,” but also in conjunction with the tempta-tion to, like Marx in 1852, “begin again from the very beginning” (PE, 4–5). For him, he adds, “it’s very late, given my age, fatigue, lassitude, and, also, my isolation” (PE, 5). The implication seems to be that Mamardashvili did “begin again from the beginning,” which amounts to a division between an early and a late Mamardashvili. Not unlike the issues we face with Foucault or, indeed, Marx, we will have to juxtapose Mamardashvili’s writing from the 1960s and early 1970s—his critique of Sartre, his unorthodox Marxian analyses, and especially his article on the inverted forms—to his later work, written and oral, with an unfinished 1970s manuscript called The Arrow of Knowledge occupying the uneasy period of transition. The problem of “man” in Mamardashvili’s later writing would then appear out of a return to the young Marx and then abandoning Marx altogether for a “metaphysi-cal turn”—the “belated flowers of metaphysics.”53 This turn, moreover, was accompanied by a refusal to publish, or a decision to give up on publish-ing, which is also discussed in Althusser’s letter: “The only answer I find for the moment is silence. And despite all the differences, I understand yours, which has quite other reasons.” Between the answer of silence and the resignation to age, fatigue, lassitude, and solitude, Althusser nevertheless mentions the temptation to publish something on Machiavelli: such a book did appear posthumously and is, according to Étienne Balibar, “probably his great book,” where Althusser tries to explain what it means to act politi-cally in the space of ideology.54 For his part, Mamardashvili’s “silence” in the aftermath of this letter took the form of a veritable political acting out, which left behind the complexities of his written work and took the form of a series of lectures and oral communications, a tremendous output that coincided with the turbulent 1980s in Eastern Europe. Much of this has been published posthumously, but more keeps appearing. Its impact at the time was so powerful that it imposed Mamardashvili’s image as an “oral” philosopher, a sort of modern Socrates, and all but erased the memory of his former writing.

The idea of a “metaphysical turn” in Mamardashvili’s work, however,

53. There is an anecdote that Derrida was asked to write a foreword to the French edi-tion of Mamardashvili’s Cartesian Meditations. Derrida’s answer is supposed to have been, “He stands for everything that I am against.” See Mamardachvili, Méditations cartésiennes.54. Étienne Balibar, “La philosophie et l’actualité: au- delá de l’événement?,” in Le Moment philosophique des années 1960 en France, ed. Patrice Maniglier (Paris: PUF, 2011), 215.


and his image as a charismatic but inconsistent Socratic thinker, cannot take into consideration his continuous effort—to use the word he empha-sizes so heavily in “The European Responsibility”—to retrieve the “human” from the enchanted realm of the verwandelte Form without falling back to the anthropologism he criticized in his early work. This means thinking the horizonless realm of objectified “atomic conscious acts” not simply as impenetrable and poisoned obscurity but also as a “creating created.”55 How does the created create? In view of this circularity, how is change at all possible? How does this impossible thing—the human being, čelovek—happen? Whatever his steps in this direction are, there is the certainty that Mamardashvili never went back to the idea of human “nature” (be it of the kind we find in the young Marx or elsewhere). The human being is an unnatural, artificial being: it is born “at the second step,” it is the unfore-seeable product of its own effort. Or, as Mamardashvili puts it, “All philo-sophical claims containing the term ‘man’ cannot be resolved on the basis of some anthropological attributes, of some concrete image of man, insofar as they always speak of the possible man, which is never some sort of prior or future state but is always an actual state, although one that cannot be reduced to what exists.”56

This “event- al” approach to the human opens up a third possibility for understanding Mamardashvili’s oeuvre, one that sets aside consider-ations of break versus continuity. Such a possibility emerges from a recent study by Balibar. Balibar takes as his point of departure the “stunning way” in which, in The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler uncovers, through the pragmatic category of “performative contradiction,” a formal similarity in the treatment of the “paradox of the event” in Althusser and Foucault.57 In Butler’s analysis,58 Balibar points out, this paradox involves a circularity where the subject is both produced and presupposed by the conditions that produce it. She studies this circularity not as a weakness and not as an error but as the very object of the philosophical inquiry regarding ide-ology in the case of Althusser and power in the case of Foucault. For Bali-bar, Butler’s analysis foregrounds the question of knowing how one can

55. Merab Mamardashvili, Strela poznaniya: Nabrosok yestestvenoistoricheskoy gnoseo-logii [The arrow of knowledge: Toward the gnoseology of natural history] (Moscow: Shkola, 1996), 105.56. Mamardashvili, Neobkhodimost’ sebya.57. Balibar, “La philosophie et l’actualité,” 225.58. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stan-ford University Press, 1997), 106–31.


“actualize” (actualiser) the thinking of the event or think philosophically the event as actuality (actualité).59 In this understanding, the notion of actuality (actualité) is not another name for event but, rather, indicates a modality in which philosophy could try to not so much think the event as such but, rather, write in harmony (en rapport) with the event, in an oblique manner, which is in itself event- al (événementielle).60 The Butlerian performative contradiction “allows placing the notion of actuality at the crossing point of a certain historical situation, a certain ensemble of determined conditions (subjected to the ‘process’ of their emergence and transformation), and a certain intemporality, or transtemporality, or, still better, certain event- al repetition which is at the same time by definition a continuous variation or an incessant reproduction of singularities.”61

My point is obvious. Balibar’s understanding of actuality as event- al repetition provides the key to understanding Mamardashvili’s philosophi-cal effort. We might understand this effort to be a demand for, as the Bul-garian Mamardashvili scholar Deyan Dyanov puts it, “positively enlightened regress: regress not in the sense of renouncing modernity but in the sense of back- tracing the steps of modernity in order to resolve the contradictions we inherited from it.”62 For, Mamardashvili insists, “dead knowledge is of no importance to us—we turn to the past and we understand it only to the degree that we can restore what used to be thought in our own capacity to think and in what we can think now.”63

The question is, is there a point in actualizing “man” today?

Organic, Too Organic

By way of answering this question, I will present an example for a contemporary aporia. Mass Effect is a huge, epic, three- part (for the time being) sci- fi game, whose plot is structured by a conflict between the so- called organics—an assortment of various galactic races, more or less bizarre in appearance, where humans struggle for interstellar recognition—

59. Balibar, “La philosophie et l’actualité,” 223.60. Balibar, “La philosophie et l’actualité,” 215.61. Balibar, “La philosophie et l’actualité,” 232.62. Deyan Dyanov, “Mamardašvili i evropejskata filosofija na xx vek” [Mamardashvili and twentieth- century European philosophy], afterword to Merab Mamardashvili, Izbrano [Selected works], vol. 1 (Sofia: Iztok- Zapad, 2004), 361.63. Merab Mamardashvili, Lektsii po antichnoi filosofii [Lectures in ancient Greek philoso-phy] (Moscow: Agraf, 1997), 8.


and a mysterious and very evil artificial intelligence. For a number of messy philosophical reasons with which the creators of the game struggle until the end (a struggle that might also be seen as part of the history of a genre somehow propelled into outgrowing its modest intellectual beginnings), this artificial intelligence organizes the kidnapping of the populations of entire planets in order to—in the second part of the game—construct a gigan-tic golem out of their bodies. Apart from this evil power, called the Reap-ers, there are, however, other kinds of artificial intelligence, notably the Geth, who are not so completely evil and, in fact, might be (if the gamer so chooses) recruited in the fight against the Reapers. Says a participant in a Mass Effect forum, “The Geth might take a Nietzschean turn and decide they’ve been betrayed/misled by their [Reaper] god(s), and need to destroy them. And almost every interaction with the Geth shows they have inclina-tions towards philosophical (Why do I exist?), artistic (they listen to opera), and religious (praying at their altars) ideals, which the Reapers would con-sider either inefficient or organic qualities.” To this, another forum partici-pant sullenly responds, “The ME [Mass Effect] universe needs a Butlerian Jihad.” Here, Butlerian Jihad (referring to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, where machines are presented as the next step in evolution) alludes to the out-lawing of thinking machines and all kinds of artificial intelligence in Frank Herbert’s Dune.64

The game and this knowledgeable debate, with its casual references to rebellious robots and organic jihads against them, reflect on a fictional war that has been raging for about two hundred years now: at first in litera-ture, then in film, and, most recently, as illustrated above, in video games. The new twist in this war is foregrounded in Mass Effect through the fact that the protagonist—who is given the bucolic surname of Shepard—is left practically dead at the end of Mass Effect 1, and then again at the end of Mass Effect 2, so at the beginning of every next part he or she is supposed to have been brought back to life through advanced methods of biotechno-logical montage. Shepard—whose name as the savior of humanity acquires not only pastoral but also evangelical connotations—is to fight the Reapers, whose harvesting of organic bodies evokes traditional representations of death but whose name also refers to some of the newest developments in unmanned military aircraft. Since the galactic confrontation is designed as

64. BioWare, Social Network Forums, “I Have This Theory (Geth/Organics/Reaper Related),” accessed August 22, 2013, social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/103/index /686723.


a confrontation between the organic and the ar1tificial, however, the high- tech medium of the game, in conjunction with the high- tech assumptions of its plot, generates a conceptual knot that wreaks havoc across gamers’ forums. The impasse comes to a head after the third part of the game: con-troversies are so heated that it is best to let them be. The aporia is already sufficiently demonstrated by the fact that the Reapers’ monster, comprised of recycled human parts, mimics and grotesquely reduplicates the engi-neering bricolage that brings Shepard back to life. Just how do they differ? In what way is Shepard organic and the Reapers’ monster artificial? Why do gamers tend to rally organic Jihads?

The game articulates ever so clearly this problem without being able to offer a conceptual resolution. What it achieves through the juxtaposition of the hero and the monster amounts to eloquently laying bare the need that mobilizes the term organic in the first place. Organic has to, and yet no longer can, mark the difference between the human and the machine. I will leave things at that for the time being by simply pointing out that regard-ing the human as finished and investing the “coupling of the void and the beginning” in the inhuman is precisely the move that turns “man” into a conceptual prey to the animal and the machine.

Inverted Forms and Heterotopian Homonymy: Althusser, Mamardashvili, and the Problem of "Man"

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