ABSTRACT
“In 1845, Marx broke radically with every theory that based history and politics on an essence of man.… A radical critique of the theoretical pretensions of every philosophical humanism.… The definition of humanism as an ideology. …That there is a universal essence of man (sic) and that this essence is the attribute of each single individual who is its real subject.… [So] it is essential that each carries the whole human essence, if not in fact, at least in principle; this implies an idealism of the essence. So empiricism of the subject implies idealism of the essence and vice versa.… This was replaced… by a historico-dialectical materialism of practice (economic practice, political practice, ideological practice, scientific practice) in their characteristic articulations… a concrete conception of the specific differences that enable us to situate each particular practice in the specific differences of the social structure” (Althusser reduces, and “forgets” sexuality, does not (want to) understand domestic labour and patriarchal ideology). “For the corollary of theoretical Marxist anti-humanism is the recognition and knowledge of humanism itself: as an ideology. Marx never fell into the idealist illusion of believing that the knowledge of an object might ultimately replace the object or dissipate its existence.… Ideology is a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas, or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society.… In the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with “consciousness”: they are usually images and occasionally concepts, but it above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority.… In ideology, people do indeed express, not the relation between them and their conditions of existence, but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence.…
