Preface to the Second Edition

Summary

With the hindsight that is available to me today, at the moment of returning to a book which initially appeared in 2005, I can see that Marx with Spinoza: Production, Alienation, History (La production des hommes) began for me a path towards social criticism that found its complete realisation two books later, with La privation de monde (Vrin, 2011). This critical path was, in a sense, initially a negative path: it consisted in establishing a relation between the subjectivity of modernity, that is to the say the concept of the subject that has been elaborated by modern philosophy, and a negative and critical state, that is to say the general state of the crisis (certainly social and political, but without doubt also moral) that defines contemporary experience and that I conceive under the phrase ‘loss of the world’ or ‘the privation of the world’. The subject separated from the world, thought as separate from or to the side of the world, and thereby separated from the objective conditions that make possible its accomplishment and its realisation, this subject which appears to have been conceived by philosophy as something which is a priori, has been socially instituted by a certain number of apparatuses characteristic of capitalist society. That is such that social formations of this type make the mass production of subjects deprived of the world, deprived of the access to objective conditions of true affirmation of themselves, the condition of their functioning and reproduction. I tried to confirm this hypothesis and to examine at least certain aspects of these apparatuses in the book that appeared between the two just mentioned, Sans objet (Vrin, 2009, republished in 2012).

The principal philosophical figures I have referred in these books have been Spinoza, Marx and Heidegger: three thinkers who have explicitly refused the idea that one can arrive at a true understanding of human existence by beginning with a subject separated from the rest of the world, thinking of it ‘as a kingdom within a kingdom’, or a subject which is only a subject in being without an object and separated from objectivity in all of its forms (natural, historical, and social).