Franco ''Bifo'' Berardi - The Soul at Work From Alienation to Autonomy

matter that is important for us: the vitality of the philosophical
notion of alienation and its exhaustion during the historical and
political battles of the 1960s. Alienation is considered by the existentialist
formulations as an unavoidable and constitutive element
of the human condition, since otherness (condition of the social
relation) and reification (condition of the productive relation) both
become an unwitting apologist fo r the status quo. Arguing as
SarrIe 1
d'd that men chose their fate, even if it was a homble
one, was monstrous [ ... J. To Marcuse, the entire project of an
'existentialist' philosophy without an a priori idea of essence
'bl ",
was impOSSl e.
imply a loss of self. In the social relation, in the presence of otherness,
is implicit a certain form of alienation, of uneasiness. Lenfer
c'est les autres (Hell is other people), declares Existentialism. The
others are the hell of alienation, independently from the social condition
we are living in.
Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School, on the other hand,
share the belief that alienation is not ontologically identified with
otherness and reification, but constitutes instead a historically
determined form, and therefore it is possible to overcome it
historically.
On this matter, in his book on the Frankfurt School entitled
The Dialectical Imagination, Marrin Jay wrote:
"To Marcuse, Sarrre had erroneously made absurdity into an
ontological rather than a historical condition. As a result, he
fell back into an idealistic internalization of freedom as something
opposed to the outside, heteronomous world. Despite
his avowed revolutionary intentions, his politics and his
philosophy were totally at odds. By locating freedom in the
pour-soi could become en-soi (being-in-itself, or an-sieh),
Same severed subjectivity from objectivity in a way that
denied reconciliation even as a utopian possibility. Moreover,
by overemphasizing the freedom of the subject and ignoring
the constraints produced by historical condition, Same had
In Reason and Revolution, one of Herbert Marcuse's most important
textS, we read:
"The worker alienated from his product is at the same time
alienated from himself. His labor itself becomes no longer his
own, and the fact that it becomes the property of another
bespeaks an expropriation that touches the very essence of
man. Labor in its true form is a medium fo r man's true selffulfillment,
for the full development of his potentialities.""
Here Marcuse links two vety different topics as if they were the
same one: the development of potentialities (concretely detetmined
in the social and technical histoty of the conflict between workers
and capital) and human self-tealization.
.
The first is a material and precise issue, while the second IS
instead a quintessentially idealistic, essentialist issue.
On the conttary, according to what Sattre maintains in his
Critique of Dialectical Reason, alienation is nothing other than the
intrinsic modality of a1terity, which is the constitutive form of the
social relation and human condition.
While Marcuse considets alienation as a historical form that
could be ovetcome historically, Sartre wantS to ground anthropologically
the historic condition itself: he locates history's
anthtopological roots in scatcity and alterity.
42 I The Soul 2.t Work
Labor and Alienation in the philosophy of the 1960s / 43