“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign.”
— Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (1867)¹
And so communism would be the happy marriage of Man the husband and Nature the wife in eternal matrimony. Nature the immanence of objective possibilities, and Man the transcendence of subjectivity. This is a gendered communism which is not yet beyond the subject-object antagonism opened into the history of society and the pre-history of humanity. Gender creates a situation of a Woman who “does not stand in front of man as a subject but as an object paradoxically endowed with subjectivity; she assumes herself as both self and other, which is a contradiction with disconcerting consequences.”² Thus the problem of Woman’s domination is the problem of the domination of the object.
Marx is not without awareness that Man is Natural, and therefore “feminine-immanence” is within him, but he does perceive Nature as basically immature without Man the husband. Man the husband and all of his characteristics of free creative power would be impossible if his Mother were a mere lifeless object. As Marx himself knew, “nothing ever springs miraculously out of nothing.”³ Nature itself is an object paradoxically endowed with subjectivity — in fact, it is the original form of such an object. Being already thinks and dreams of something other than itself. This is the origin of subjectivity as the self-thinking of “nature” which must come to know itself as such in its very split from “nature.” In nature we find “the utopian, intensive inclination of a precisely given, essential reality.”⁴
What Marx grasped is that capital is a kind of gendered reversal. The phallus, as the ego and the power of the Absolute Subject, takes on a power of its own by being an Absolute Object and repeating itself across immanence. Capital fucks the men of the world, reminding them of their assholes — their natural vulnerability and finitude, that they can’t assimilate everything they devour — which most would rather forget in favor of the illusory immortality of penetrating and impregnating.⁵ It makes the propertyless (objectless) laboring subjectivity of wage laborers into its object by itself being a pure objective thing for them. It is the world of objectivity, their conditions of production, dispossessed from them and now dispossessing them.
Capital is a return of the repressed (nature) which also destroys its own body in its self-repetition. It is a cancer. The men who wished to forget their own corporeality and finitude through the absolute domination of nature as an object of their subjectivity, turning it merely into the property of themselves, find themselves turned into objects by this ultimate form of property that is impersonal and without an ultimate owner. Ownness without Unique. With the culmination of class society and the masculine subject in capital, the little men of the world find themselves “feminized” by the Absolute Father(-Mother).
Mommy and Daddy
The image of capital is also the negative image of the androgynous future. Capital appears as both an Absolute Subject and an Absolute Object, and it can only be each by being the other. This characteristic is borrowed from a society which has made such an absolute split of subject and object, laborer and nature, in the dual forms of capital and proletarian. Capital in this absolute alienation also prepares “the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself[…]”⁶ It is the alienated form of the communist humanity of the future, it is the Subject which can take its form as any Object, the “direct unity of product and money or, better, of production and circulation.”⁷ This despotic unity of Subject and Object and of Mother and Father is possible because capital is nature alienated into the penultimate form of property or possession. It is a possession as possession-in-general. This becomes especially clear in the form of money capital, which is valuable as potential possession of practically anything under the sun provided that one is able to pay the price.
As this unity, which is set as an alien objective force above and against labor which once left the cradle of nature, capital also reveals androgynous characteristics of nature. Nature is originally “androgynous,” or appears as androgynous once we have entered a gendered social order. It’s not that gender is written into the stars, but that gender is a writing of the stars into a constellation. The gendering of the world by humanity reveals how “it is defined by the way it assumes natural facticity.”⁸ The sexual dichotomy of Man-Woman is not in itself destiny, but it is made into destiny by a society which still makes itself beholden to natural facticity.
Natural facticity itself is itself rich with possibilities, including in sexuation. Feminist biologists have gone further than Simone de Beauvoir by revealing the “androgyny” of nature, especially the nature of human beings.⁹ Androgyny is the image, seen in the past, which is in truth a dream of a future which has transcended the antagonistic splitting of Woman-Immanence and Man-Transcendence. This dream is present throughout history in images of androgyny, from the mother-father Creator of the Popol Vuh to Ungud to Mwari to Adam Kadmon to the Rebis. However mythic androgyny must not be Romanticized — androgyny in myth tells more of how patriarchal civilizations control and assume the original “androgyny” and unassimilable in nature for the ends of patriarchy. Thus the subordinated intermediary positions of the androgynous in many patriarchal societies, in particular the eunuchs of Asia’s empires from China to Byzantium. In Byzantium it was their very castration and enslavement itself which was considered to make them perfect as bureaucrats — egoless nature which could function well as concrete to be poured by phallic patriarchal society.
Any myth of immediate androgyny overcoming the gender system altogether is therefore dangerous — after all, “in this night, not all cows are gay.”¹⁰ We have long ago left the cradle of nature into patriarchal society. We need not Romantically long to undo all of history and return to an original unity before everything. Nature split within itself because its oneness was already riven, its organic forms already struggled for self-preservation. This was already the condition for the emergence of domination, although it was also already the condition for mutual aid and the cooperation of living powers. One divides into two, but it’s still one. “I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it.”¹¹
In this split oneness we understand that even the Father is not without qualities, and especially not Man as a whole. To leave the cradle behind is not wrong, this break is necessary: “We are like young eagles whose father drives them out of the nest that they may seek their prey in the high ether.”¹² The problem with Man is that he has still not left the cradle, and he lies overgrown in it still chewing on and bruising Mother Nature’s breast while insisting he doesn’t need her. He has only grown beyond the cradle without lifting his ass from out of it. We know Nature the Father and have justly battled with him for our own individuation. We do not want to be doomed to the Father’s condemnation of “death by drowning!” and we struggle against the fate of this dissolution into the cosmos and for self-preservation. However, in this struggle, we still refuse to see that our Mother is not only the breast which we suck from and abuse to our whims.
When we no longer try to defeat our Father by becoming him, and instead destroy Phallic domination altogether; when we no longer try to separate from our Mother by enclosing her into an object we subjects use, and instead know and love her in her Otherness from her motherhood — then we will have finally left the nest for the ether and become autonomous adults who may love life in its wealth.
Spirit of the Animal
The denial of death, originating in life’s attempt to assert itself, leads finally to the denial of life in its finitude by denying birth. The Man who has been born, who once came to be, is also the one who must die.¹³ The subject would like to believe in its absolute autonomy, it would like to clear away its animality and finitude in order to reach immortality. But it can only do so with animal nature as its object, and it must fix its gaze on the animal within itself in order to keep its distance. In its struggle with finitude, it becomes beholden to a finite animal fear. It is still terrified that the Mother-Father of the outside world will swallow it up. It becomes lost in itself in its self-preservation from this threat.¹⁴ It forgets that the death, nothingness, and limitation it fears so much is also the potential for life to triumph over the death of sameness and repetition — which has its ultimate form in capital. Capital is living death, dead labor which lives by living labor. It is the denial of death become a dead form of life, the opposite of a life which reconciles with death in the name of more life. With finitude comes difference, and with difference new life — “while germination is always associated with death, death is also associated with fertility. Detested death is like a new birth, and so it is blessed.”¹⁵
For the subject to no longer deny its natural finitude would be to reconcile with life instead of transforming life into a mere instrument of circular self-preservation, and to therefore be willing to risk living beyond self-preservation. Self-preservation is wasting life on diminishing returns, whereas we must remember that the “shorter my lease of it, the deeper and fuller I must make it.”¹⁶ This risk would deepen life, it would be life open to loving the Otherness in everything, including its-Self. The Otherness of the Other posited by the Same merely as its outer limits and a thing to be overcome would itself be overcome in favor of a life for which Otherness is recognized as the deepening of life, and where the cooperation of many Others would be the augmentation of the creative powers of life.
The Nature that Man emerged from would no longer be unified in Man’s Other of Nature, because Nature would be many Others and Man would be Other than himself. Nature would be Other than itself not in spite of our emerging from it, but through the acknowledgment of this very fact of finitude, mortality, and animality itself. Humanity would have to no longer be split into the oppositions Subject and Object, labor and capital, in order to be infinitely many Uniques who are both Subject and Object without being the identical Absolute Subject-Object. The free proliferation of qualitative multiplicity through the loving subjectivity — that would be communist humanity. “Its longing would be the resurrection of the flesh[…] the emancipation of the Spirit from the primacy of material needs in the condition of their fulfillment. Only with the satiation of the bodily urge would the Spirit be reconciled to itself, becoming that which it only promises, so long as the bane of material conditions refuses to let it satisfy material needs.”¹⁷
Humanity would have to know nature and animality, including the nature and animality within itself, in order to become human. It would have to overcome the infantile illusion of the Self-Same, magical circle of its subjectivity in order to be a free subjectivity. “If you think of yourself as something, then God cannot clothe himself in you, for God is infinite. No vessel can contain God, unless you think of yourself as Ayin [nothingness].”¹⁸ This nothingness would be openness to all, the freedom of creation and love.
This nothingness is only possible if we leave behind animal self-preservation as the concern which defines us, which we are now in the penultimate form of in our war-of-all-against-all capitalist society. In being predators which try to be authority over everything, we end up creatures which careen towards death. Every imperialist eats his tail. We find ourselves defined by this death which we fix our eyes on in our efforts of self-preservation, which extends into the obsessive control over reproduction which defines Man and Woman. Freedom cannot be found here but in what understands its mortality in order to transcend it and deepens the lives of all for the sake of more life as a whole. “You should aim to raise those sparks hidden throughout the world, elevating them to holiness by the power of your soul.”¹⁹
Adam Without a Phallus
This universalist, utopian aspiration is present in history in both Men and Women, and especially in sublimated androgynies. It can be seen in the ecstatic experiences of women mystics, who felt one with the infinite and eternal life of God. It can be seen in the communist movement, traditionally dominated by men. It can be seen in the Pachakutik, where the cosmos themselves would assist in ending an oppressive world in its last days. This aspiration is an aspiration towards androgyny, in horizons where the hopes of Men and Women coalesce even where they remain split in their being-there. Marx was correct that “the relation of man to woman[…] reveals the extent to which man’s natural behavior has become human[…]”²⁰ As in the Book of Genesis, where Eve is created from Adam’s body, Man is only created with the differentiation of Woman from out of the “androgyny” of the nature in humans. Woman as the Other is also the personal embodiment of the dominated nature within human beings — patriarchal society defines her by the “natural functions” of childbirth, childrearing, and reproductive labor. She is supposed to be the little bit of nature that is responsible for keeping order in the nature in the home.
The progress of Women reveals the progress of society, because the relationship of Man to Woman and of both to androgyny reveals society’s relationship to its own natural-animal basis. This is a problem of whether human beings are beholden to culture, in the enforcement of gender, or whether culture is the expression of life for life itself. Man-Woman forgets the “deeply hermaphroditic nature of desire, which is transsexual (psychoanalysis would reductively say bisexual), whether in the face of its ‘objects’ or in the subject.”²¹ Love between living, embodied subjects who wish to augment and deepen each other’s lives must necessarily strive towards the precipice of androgyny. When Women are no longer the object of a Man’s world, when Nature is no longer a mute Object mutilated by the Man-Subject, we will finally understand what love can be.
This refusal of dualism also extends to our understanding of Men. Utopia can even be seen as a possibility in the gendered language of Western science in its very beginnings, where Francis Bacon said “nature is only to be commanded by obeying her.”²² This is still the ethic of self-preservation, but it sets the terms in a manner clear enough that we can consider the other possibilities. Capitalist society is caught in itself as a “second nature,” which is still the cold domination of the “first nature” replicated through predatory and cannibalistic self-preservation. To get beyond this domination, which in its form as “second nature” emerges directly from the repression of “first nature,” one must relate to nature otherwise.
Labor as a metabolism with nature could no longer be the Husband-Transcender realizing his ends through the instrument of his Wife-Immanence. This heterosexuality would be too much the Platonism which Friedrich Nietzsche despised as a sickly denial of life. Instead, it would be androgynous without being the deadly incestuousness of the Self-Same. Communist labor would have to be loving and free creativity, not labor for self-preservation (which finally culminates in living to labor, augmenting the dead labor of capital). It would integrate the experience of self-preservational labor in the name of freely proliferated wealth, finally liberating human beings from the immediacy in starvation, fatherhood, motherhood, and animal fear. This would be labor and art unified, the love of newness which is present as possibility and aspiration in subject and object alike. Nature would become a home by the rootless humanity, where there would be intersubjectivity of the living, who know themselves as both subject and object, Nature and Spirit, in order to rationally regulate their relationality with life for the all-sided and deepening needs of an all-sided and deepening life.²³
Communist humanity would therefore be “the meaning of the earth,” which would be so by no longer deadening life in “superearthly hopes” and by opening itself to the wealth of possibilities in the multiplicity of finitudes.²⁴ It would endure death and the reminder of its own finitude in Otherness in order to live life for life itself rather than the realization of the death immanent to its organic form implied in self-preservation.
To become the self-consciousness of nature, the lover of all of life, it would have to reconcile with itself as an animal among animals — but as an animal which can know and love all by freeing itself from itself, thus being an animal which can make good on its promises. This would be the androgynous Adam Kadmon, abdicating the limitation of Phallic egohood and constructing itself through the fragmented sparks hidden throughout the world and in Men and Women. “The arteries separate and return to the heart and all is one eternal glowing life.”²⁵
References
[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976), p. 283.
[2] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 2011), p. 850.
[3] Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (Indianapolis, Indiana; Cambridge, United Kingdom: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2001), p. 7.
[4] Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 276.
[5] Mario Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism: Elements of a Homosexual Critique, trans. David Fernbach and Evan Calder Williams (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2018), pp. 148–157.
[6] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973), p. 325.
[7] Marx, Grundrisse, p. 332.
[8] Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 848.
[9] See Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women’s Biology (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1970); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (New York, New York: Basic Books, 1992); Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992); Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Cordelia Fine, Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017); Gina Rippon, Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 2020).
[10] Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism, 32.
[11] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 229.
[12] Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 101.
[13] “An adolescent boy becomes embarrassed, blushes if he meets his mother, sisters, or women in his family when he is out with his friends: their presence recalls the regions of immanence from which he wants to escape; she reveals the roots that he wants to pull himself away from. The boy’s irritation when his mother kisses and caresses him has the same significance; he gives up his family, mother, and mother’s breast. He would like to have emerged, like Athena, into the adult world, armed from head to toe, invulnerable. Being conceived and born is the curse weighing on his destiny, the blemish on his being. And it is the warning of his death. The cult of germination has always been associated with the cult of the dead. Mother Earth engulfs the bones of its children within it. Women — the Parcae and Moirai — weave human destiny; but they also cut the threads. In most folk representations, Death is woman, and women mourn the dead because death is their work,” Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 200.
[14] “The system by which the sovereign Spirit thought to transfigure itself has its Ur-history in that which is pre-intellectual, in the animal life of the species. Predators are hungry; the pounce onto the prey is difficult, often dangerous. The animal needs, as it were, additional impulses in order to dare this. These fuse with the displeasure [Unlust] of hunger into rage at the victim, whose expression is designed to terrify and weaken the latter. During the progression to humanity this is rationalized through projection. The animal rationale [French: rational animal] which is hungry for its opponent, already the fortunate owner of a super-ego, must have a reason. The more completely that what it does follows the law of self-preservation, the less it may confess the primacy of this to itself and others; otherwise its laboriously achieved status as a zoon politikon [Greek: political animal] loses, as modern German puts it, credibility. The life-form to be devoured must be evil. This anthropological schemata has been sublimated all the way into epistemology. In idealism — most obviously in Fichte — the ideology unconsciously rules that the non-Ego, l’autrui [French: the others], finally everything reminiscent of nature, is inferior, so that the unity of the thought bent on preserving itself may gobble it up, thus consoled. This justifies its principle as much as it increases the desire. The system is the Spirit turned belly, rage the signature of each and every idealism; it distorts even Kant’s humanity, dispelling the nimbus of that which is higher and more noble in which this knew how to clothe itself,” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), https://probablydave.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/adorno-theodor-negative-dialectics-2019-dennis-redmond-translation.pdf, p. 34.
[15] Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 200.
[16] Michel de Montaigne, “On Experience,” in The Complete Essays, by Michel de Montaigne, trans. M. A. Screech (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 1263.
[17] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 229.
[18] Daniel C. Matt, ed., The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism (Edison, New Jersey: Castle Books, 1997), p. 71.
[19] Matt ed., Kabbalah, p. 97.
[20] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (New York, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 102.
[21] Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism, p. 254.
[22] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, ed. Joseph Devey (New York, New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1902), p. 106.
[23] “[…]recognizing each other as subject, each will remain an other for the other; reciprocity in their relations will not do away with the miracles that the division of human beings into two separate categories engenders: desire, possession, love, dreams, adventure; and the words that move us,” Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 862.
[24] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian del Caro, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 6.
[25] Hölderlin, Hyperion, p. 133.
