martes, 29 de septiembre de 2009

Work & Aura: Marxism meets Theology

Experience of the aura thus rests on the transposition of a response common to human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire

It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Maybe this is the most important point. A new relationship with 'the other', in which objects become 'subjects' to us. This entails a whole new relationship with the world that understands that the object of human labour is not the product of it, but man itself -as he 'creates' himself through his work.
All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, ‘exists gratis,’ is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor.
11th thesis (fragment).

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