Vitalist Marxism: Georges Canguilhem and the Resistance of Life

Abstract

Following Hannah Arendt’s insights into the affinities between Marxism and the philosophy of life, this article reconstructs a theoretical position that we propose to call ‘vitalist Marxism’. This position conceives of life not only as an essential foundation of the production process, but also as a critical resource for resistance to the capitalist logic of exploitation. We highlight the role Georges Canguilhem (1904–95) played in developing this position, in particular by depicting tools and machines as ‘organs of life’. Drawing on Canguilhem’s early writings as well as unpublished manuscripts, we show that this ‘organological’ understanding of technology was rooted in the increasingly anti-fascist reception of Marx in France during the 1930s. Against the background of today’s protests against climate destruction, racism, and anti-feminist violence, all of which invoke the defense of basic living conditions, we argue that the critical position of vitalist Marxism acquires remarkable topicality.

In recent years, many of us have experienced an overarching social, political, and economic constellation in which ‘life’ has emerged as a central stake for political protests and social struggles. The most obvious example is the climate movement that fights to preserve human life on this planet. Likewise, anti-racist struggles against police violence (‘Black Lives Matter’) center complex discussions concerning the protection of human life, especially amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. And protests against the oppression and murder of women, most recently and impressively in the Kurdish movement ‘Women, Life, Freedom’, place life quite literally at the center of the struggle. These ‘new forms of protest’ converge into a veritable ‘revolution for life’, as critical theorist Eva von Redecker (2020) puts it.

The topicality of ‘life’ in these social movements parallels current debates in the critical humanities. Both Foucault’s and Agamben’s well-known concepts of ‘biopower’ have provided crucial impulses for this, but there is a wealth of related studies independent of their work and terminologies. The spectrum of problems and topics ranges from the field of biomedical research and the emergence of new opportunities for exploitation and profit in the context of transplantation medicine, molecular genetics, and synthetic biology (Cooper, 2008; Sunder Rajan, 2006; Waldby and Mitchell, 2006), to the field of information capitalism and its reconfiguration of the ‘productive body’ or the productive subject (Deleule and Guéry, 2014; Macherey, 2015), to the globalized production of food, which entails a plethora of ecological, bacteriological, and epidemiological problems (Blanchette, 2020; Davis, 2005; Landecker, 2019).

In this paper, we argue that these social struggles and critical studies can be understood comprehensively and rooted in shared conceptual ground by relating them to a much-neglected undercurrent of European philosophy that we propose to call ‘vitalist Marxism’. With this term, we mean to designate a theoretical position that not only recognizes ‘life’ as an essential foundation of the production process in modern societies, but also considers it a critical resource for resistance to the capitalist logic of exploitation. More broadly speaking, we argue in favor of aligning Marxism, critical thought, and the philosophy of life.

Hannah Arendt is among the few contemporary philosophers who observed this alignment explicitly in Marx’s own work. At the very beginning of The Human Condition, Arendt reminds us that, in Capital, Marx ‘defined labor as “man’s metabolism with nature,” in whose process “nature’s material [is] adapted by a change of form to the wants of man,” so that “labour has incorporated itself with its subject” [. . .]’ (Arendt, 1958: 26, 98–9; see Marx, 1996: 187, 190). For her, it is obvious that Marx embedded labor into ‘the ever-recurring cycle of biological life’ (Arendt, 1958: 99). Consequently, Marx’s philosophy appears to Arendt not so much as a social philosophy but as a philosophy of nature – more precisely, a philosophy of life.

Arendt was far from alone in recognizing the connection between Marx’s philosophy and the philosophy of life. As she acknowledges in a footnote in The Human Condition, ‘This connection was dimly perceived by Bergson’s pupils in France’ (Arendt, 1958: 117, n. 64), citing Berth (1914), Sorel (1935), and Vuillemin (1949). Even her own analyses of labor, which are rather critical of Marx, draw heavily on the French reception of his work (Arendt, 1958: 80, 98, 127, etc.), particularly Febvre (1948), Naville (1954), Friedmann (1955), and Weil (1951). Although first published in Chicago in 1958, The Human Condition thus still clearly bears the traces of the French exile in which Arendt found herself from 1933 to 1942.

The very same context was crucial for a philosopher and physician who, as we argue, is a key figure in pursuing and developing the critical affinities between Marxism and the philosophy of life. Georges Canguilhem not only shared many references with Arendt – from Febvre (Canguilhem, 2008:107, 109) to Friedmann (Canguilhem, 2015a) to Naville (Canguilhem, 2018: 443–4) and Weil (see below), but also exerted a still underestimated influence on generations of philosophical, sociological, and historical thinkers. Hitherto, scholars have only sporadically examined the extent to which Canguilhem’s work has been impacted by both these references and his own reception of Marx. Instead, Canguilhem is often sidelined as Foucault’s academic mentor, the author of one famous book – The Normal and the Pathological – and a historian and philosopher of the biological and biomedical sciences (Gutting, 1989; Lepenies, 1979).

Only recently, however – not least on account of the ongoing publication of his multi-volume Œuvres complètes – has Canguilhem (2011–21) begun to be recognized as a philosopher in his own right, one who left behind an extensive body of work dedicated to examining the relationship between life, technology, and society from a vitalist angle. ¹ At the same time, recent scholarship is unanimous in noting Canguilhem’s interest in Marx’s philosophy in the 1930s (Talcott, 2019: 70–71, 108; see also Cammelli, 2006, 2011; Roth, 2013: 158–84; Schwartz, 2011: 91). ²

Doubly motivated by a turn against what he experienced as a largely sterile academic milieu and the growing struggle against the rise of fascism in Europe, Canguilhem’s explicit discussion of Marx – similar to Simone Weil’s – began in the pages of Libres Propos, the journal of Canguilhem’s and Weil’s academic mentor, Émile Chartier, aka Alain (Canguilhem, 2011a: 332–5).

Canguilhem’s further interest in Marx is reflected in publications such as the anonymously issued Le Fascisme and les paysans (1935) and the co-authored Traité de logique et de morale (1939, with Camille Planet). This interest proves decisive for Canguilhem’s discussion of Georges Friedmann’s studies in industrial sociology (Canguilhem, 2015a), as well as his reflections on the sociology of ‘ways of life’ (genres de vie), which Maurice Halbwachs developed following historian Lucien Febvre and geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache (Canguilhem, 2015b).

Our argument is that Canguilhem’s reception of Marx provides a decisive orientation for his own work and, by the same token, contributes to filling in long-standing lacunae, both in the study of Marx’s work and in the contemporary discussions concerning ‘biopower’ (Foucault) and the ‘revolution for life’ (von Redecker). The background against which we develop this argument is broad and complex.

On the one hand, it seems telling to us how rarely contributions to the discussion about ‘biopower’ take note of how closely their central questions are actually linked to Marx’s philosophy. Rose’s (2007) seminal study of The Politics of Life Itself, for example, was conducted without any explicit reference to Marx. This is all the more perplexing since even Canguilhem’s protégé Foucault, frequently cited by Rose, explicitly invoked Capital and its explorations of the factory system in his analyses of discipline. Indeed, Foucault’s recently published lectures on the Punitive Society (Foucault, 2015) demonstrate in rather striking ways that his dialogue with Marx was an essential aspect of the investigation he later published under the title Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1995). Even The Order of Things already contains an explicit discussion of Marx, especially when Foucault observes that the discovery of the modern concept of ‘labor’ emerges in parallel with that of the modern concept of ‘life’ (Cooper, 2008: 5–7).

On the other hand, more than 20 years ago, Dipesh Chakrabarty, briefly discussing Marx’s repeated references to the phenomena of life, pointed out: ‘The connections between the language of classical political economy and the traditions of European thought that might be called vitalist are an under-explored area’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 60). ³ Meanwhile, there are numerous studies examining Marx’s ‘ecological’ or ‘romantic’ reception of Charles Darwin and Justus Liebig, none of which, however, pinpoint, as Canguilhem did, the critical potential of vitalism therein (see Foster, 2000; and, in particular, Saito, 2017; see also Moore, 2015; Naccache, 1980; Schmidt, 1993; Weatherby, 2016). Even Judith Butler contributed to the ecological reading of Marx and discussed his concept of the ‘inorganic body’. In this connection, Butler does allude to the notions of the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’ – without, on the one hand, mentioning Canguilhem’s crucial contribution to understanding these notions and, on the other, failing to draw connections to the vitalist Marxism implied in his work (Butler, 2019a: 56, 2019b).

In the following, we would like to contribute to these discussions by demonstrating the multi-layered facets of Marx’s reception in Canguilhem’s development of what he frames, from the 1940s onwards, as an ‘organological’ study of life, technology, and society. First, we show that Canguilhem’s interest in Marx is systematically and closely related to the question of technology, in particular to his conception of tools and machines as ‘organs’. We then reconstruct Canguilhem’s early reception of Marx, showing how crucial a role his reading of Marx played in his anti-fascist engagements in the early 1930s and in his active involvement in the resistance against the Nazis in France in the early 1940s in particular. By the same token, we draw attention to the fact that, as early as 1943, in his medical doctoral thesis, the famous Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological, Canguilhem is already developing a Marx-inspired concept of the ‘environment’ or milieu, defined as a human sphere profoundly shaped by the use of technology. ⁴ Finally, we discuss the theoretical perspectives that can be developed from a vitalist Marxism that is both critically oriented to the question of the environment and committed to contemporary movements focused on ecological problems, planetary health issues, racism, etc.

Machines as Organs of Life

If there is one text by Canguilhem in which the various strands of his complex work converge in exemplary ways, it is ‘Machine and Organism’, an essay that can be traced to lectures he gave at the Collège philosophique in Paris in 1946/7. In this programmatic essay, the philosopher and physician outlines the project of a ‘general organology’, in which he sees an important desideratum for the scientific and philosophical consideration of the machine and the organism:

Indeed, the problem of the relations between machine and organism has generally been studied only in one direction: almost always, the attempt has been to explain the structure and function of the organism on the basis of the structure and function of an already-constructed machine. Only rarely has anyone sought to understand the very construction of the machine on the basis of the structure and function of the organism. (Canguilhem, 2008: 75–6)

Thus, if the aim is not to explain the mechanical functions of a given machine but to understand its emergence and evolution, then, according to Canguilhem, a double reversal of relations must be assumed, namely the primacy of the organism over the machine as well as the primacy of technology over science. In this way, he conceptually condenses what can already be found in his medical dissertation on The Normal and the Pathological, ⁵ namely a biological philosophy of technology that ‘inscribe[s] the mechanical within the organic’ (Canguilhem, 2008: 96). More concretely, this means to assume that life evolves through creating vital forms, and that, in the course of this evolution, organs, including human-made tools and machines, emerge as the instrumental outgrowth of the organism’s striving toward autonomy. This is the background against which Canguilhem conceives of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution as the ‘foundations of a general organology’ which ‘treats machines as organs of life’ (Canguilhem, 2015c: 319; 2008: 95, n. 64; see also Hacking, 1998, who draws a parallel between Canguilhem’s organology and Haraway’s cyborgs).

According to Canguilhem, the machine is an organ of life insofar as its construction results first and foremost from technically coping with vital problems – and not, for instance, from a direct application of abstract knowledge, which actually rationalizes and intensifies technology only when it already exists (Canguilhem, 2008: 95). Primarily, the organism strives to create its living conditions according to its own norms, and for this purpose it forms versatile organs – internal and external – by means of which it tries to shape its milieu technically (Muhle, 2017; more broadly, see also Webster, 2023).

In this connection, Canguilhem emphasizes that ‘machines can be considered as organs of the human species. A tool or a machine is an organ, and organs are tools or machines’ (Canguilhem, 2008: 87). It is rather obvious that these considerations translate a biophilosophical conception of technology, and it is not far-fetched to think of Bergson as a prominent representative of the intellectual tradition behind this conception. But, apart from Bergson, it is in fact Marx that Canguilhem credits for having ‘understood well the importance of Darwin’s ideas’ concerning an evolutionary conception of the emergence of technology (Canguilhem, 2008: 93, n. 50).

Specifically, Canguilhem refers to a note in Marx’s Capital addressing the emergence and evolution of spinning machines, which can be read as programmatic for the organology in question. Marx says:

A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organization, deserve equal attention? (Marx, 1996: 375, n. 2)

In historical materialism, this quasi-biological understanding of technology is not merely metaphorical but downright methodical. Thus, Marx understands the machines and tools used in the labor process – the ‘means of labour’ (Arbeitsmittel) – as characteristic manifestations of the corresponding economic epochs. By the same token, he considers the investigation of these machines and tools analogous to the study of bones and other relics in zoology and/or paleontology (Marx, 1996: 189). The history that can be deduced from such ‘[r]elics of bygone instruments of labour’ (p. 189) culminates, according to Marx, in the cooperative labor of the modern factory system, which he describes as an increasingly automated machinery whose ‘unconscious organs’ (in the form of machine parts) coordinate as well as subordinate the workers’ own functioning, where workers themselves have become ‘merely conscious organs’ (p. 422).

In other words, the conception of tools and machines as organs of life is at least as familiar to Marx as it is to Bergson. But how significant was Marx’s influence, vis-à-vis Bergson’s, for Canguilhem? His 1943 commentary on the third chapter of Bergson’s Creative Evolution provides some clues – or, more precisely, the manuscript version of this commentary. There, Canguilhem approvingly refers to Bergson’s biological and philosophical criticism of Herbert Spencer’s psychology. Against Spencer, Bergson had argued that the sensually perceptible distinctions and divisions among objects are not a timeless and essential characteristic of their own, but only emerge as such through the active influence of the perceiving living being (Canguilhem, 2015d: 131–2).

In his commentary, Canguilhem locates this argument succinctly in the context of earlier reflections by psychologist and philosopher William James and later positions, especially that developed by neurologist Kurt Goldstein, one of Canguilhem’s key references. In a passage that he deleted from the proofs of this text – presumably anticipating imminent censorship by the Vichy regime – Canguilhem adds: ‘And long before them [i.e. Bergson, James, and Goldstein], Marx noted that the simplest object of sensuous certainty, like that of a cherry tree, is not a natural given, but the product of an activity that refers us back to the history of human technology’ (2015d: 132, n. 2).

This remark is supplemented by Canguilhem’s transcription of a whole passage from Marx’s and Engels’s criticism of Feuerbach in The German Ideology: ‘The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become “sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach’ (Marx and Engels, 1976: 39; see also Canguilhem, 2015d: 132, n. 2). Here, the seemingly natural – the human perception of a tree – turns out to be a product of social labor, which, already in the 19th century, was to a considerable degree internationalized.

In other words, Canguilhem had no problems inscribing Bergson’s philosophy of life into the tradition of Marx’s historical materialism. What results are striking parallels between Canguilhem and Marx regarding the consideration of tools and machines as organs, parallels that turn out to be far more important than is suggested by the sporadic explicit references to Marx in Canguilhem’s major works after 1945.

Labor Process and Biological Activity

However, in Canguilhem’s writings from the 1930s, we find extensive discussions of Marx’s philosophy. In these early writings, Canguilhem seeks to understand Marx’s works as a comprehensive philosophical project that ought to be defended against the economic dogmatism of contemporary Marxism and communism (Canguilhem, 2011b: 480–2). The concrete problem to which Canguilhem tries to apply Marx’s philosophy is the relationship between technology and ‘ways of life’ (genre de vie) (Cammelli, 2011: 527).

With the term ‘way of life’ he is referring to the French school of human geography founded by Paul Vidal de la Blache around 1900. Vidal de la Blache understood a ‘way of life’ as the specific manner in which humans, as a ‘geographical factor’, make use of the soil, structures and resources of the landscapes they inhabit (Vidal de la Blache, 1911: 194). Shortly afterward, the notion of genres de vie was taken up and developed by representatives of the Annales School such as Lucien Febvre (also quoted by Arendt), as well as by sociologists like Maurice Halbwachs, a former student of Bergson’s and a later colleague of Febvre’s in Strasbourg. For our purposes, it is telling that Canguilhem identifies ‘without hesitation’ the perspective developed in Halbwachs’ sociological works as a Marxist perspective (Canguilhem, 2011c: 379). He recognizes, with approval, Far from consisting of the common, overarching project of both Halbwachs’ sociology and Febvre’s historiography as ‘nothing less than putting society back into nature’ (p. 378).

Canguilhem’s biophilosophical understanding of technology is thus grounded in a specific conception of historical materialism. In contradistinction to vulgar Marxism, he defends the biological foundations of societies against reduction to mere economics. This permits him to conceive of historical materialism not primarily as a history of modes of production but, more profoundly and more concretely, as a human as well as geographical history of ways of life. Along these lines, Canguilhem writes in the manuscripts for a course that he taught at the Institut Agronomique de Toulouse in 1939/40:

History is possible only if the humans who make it can live. The history of the human conquest and transformation of the conditions of existence is therefore the fundamental history. The fundamental historical fact is thus the relation of the technical activity of human generations to their milieu (this milieu is at the same time natural, but above all social). (Canguilhem, 1939–40: 15)

Now, the technical and social impact of humans on their natural environment is indeed one of the most fundamental features implied in Marx’s concept of labor. In the very passage that Arendt cites in The Human Condition as evidence for the affinities between Marx’s philosophy and the philosophy of life, Marx defines the labor process in its general form as follows:

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. (Marx, 1996: 187)

Canguilhem cites the same passage in his Traité de logique et de morale, written in 1939 together with his friend and colleague Camille Planet. He then goes on to paraphrase core arguments from the chapter on the labor process in Capital (see Canguilhem and Planet, 2011: 883–4). ⁶ Going further than Arendt, however, Canguilhem does not restrict himself to stating the parallels between Marx’s philosophy and the philosophy of life but insists on a crucial tension inherent in the labor process – the tension between biological foundation and mechanical calculation.

Thus Canguilhem, following Marx, emphasizes that labor always aims at a purposeful appropriation of nature by technical means; it intervenes in the ‘natural forces’ that would otherwise leave things to decay without purpose, and instead consumes things purposefully as means of life or labor (Marx, 1996: 193; see also Canguilhem and Planet, 2011: 884–5). Marx characterizes this appropriation process in quasi-vitalistic, if not animistic, language, which Canguilhem also quotes: ‘Living labour must seize upon these things and rouse them from their death-sleep’ (Marx, 1996: 193; see also Canguilhem and Planet, 2011: 884–5). Hence, human things constitute no less than substrates and amplifications of the process of life itself.

By the same token, however, Canguilhem defines the way in which labor makes instrumental use of things as ‘a cunning by which we obtain indirectly what is inaccessible to us directly’ (Canguilhem and Planet, 2011: 884). He borrows this from Hegel’s Encyclopedia, where it is a question of the ‘Cunning of Reason’ – incidentally the very passage on which Marx bases his definition of the ‘instrument of labour’ when he describes it as ‘a thing, or a complex of things, which the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour, and which serves as the conductor of his activity. He makes use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of some substances in order to make other substances subservient to his aims’ (Marx, 1996: 189).

Referring to the same paragraph in Hegel’s Encyclopedia, Canguilhem later, in Knowledge of Life, a collection of articles published in French in 1952, defines a mechanism quite in this sense as an assemblage of objects whose actions serve purposes that are external to themselves: ‘A mechanism does not create anything – and therein lies its merit (in ars) – but it can be constructed only through art, and it is a ruse. Thus mechanism, as a scientific method and as a philosophy, is the implicit postulate of all usage of machines’ (Canguilhem, 2008: 63).

In other words, the Traité closely follows Marx’s conception in order to elaborate the foundations of an ‘organological’ inscription of the mechanical into the organic, of technology into life, as highlighted later in Knowledge of Life, in the essay ‘Machine and Organism’. Already in 1939, then, Canguilhem sees the labor process as the prototype of what for him becomes more generally – and in more Bergsonian terms – the formation process of life that manifests itself in and by the biological activity of individual organisms. Labor is the paradigmatic life process, which unfolds as mediated through the use of mechanically assembled things, in particular tools and machines.

Accordingly, it is no coincidence that the organological conception of humans and their milieu, as it later appears in Canguilhem’s major works, is strikingly similar to that of Marx’s notion of the relation between laborer and nature. In The Normal and the Pathological, for example, Canguilhem writes: ‘Man, even physical man, is not limited to his organism. Having extended his organs by means of tools, man sees in his body only the means to all possible means of action’ (Canguilhem, 1989: 200). And in Knowledge of Life, he adds: ‘Man first experiences and experiments with biological activity in his relation of technical adaption to the milieu. Such technique is heteropoetic, adjusted to the outside, and it takes from the outside its means, or the means to its means’ (Canguilhem, 2008: 9).

In the same passage on the labor process which Canguilhem cites in the Traité, Marx similarly argues that the laborer – ‘[l]eaving out of consideration such ready-made means of subsistence as fruits, in gathering which a man’s own limbs serve as the instruments of his labour’ – seizes means of labor taken from nature: ‘Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible. As the earth is his original larder, so too it is his original tool house’ (Marx, 1996: 189).

Both Canguilhem and Marx thus describe a deep entanglement of the living being (the ‘organism’ or ‘labourer’) with its environment (the ‘milieu’ or ‘Nature’), an entanglement that is mediated through organs (‘tools and machines’ or ‘means of labour’, Arbeitsmittel) and can thus be described as organological. From this perspective, organs appear as ‘means’ (moyen or Mittel) in a double sense: first, organs function as intermediaries between the living being and the environment, consisting of materials that transition from one to the other within the cycle of life; secondly, organs are means in terms of instrumental extensions of biological activity, since the living being appropriates materials from the environment and directs them (with mechanist cunning and/or calculation) towards or against it. ⁷

Ambivalence of the Machine

The intermediary position of technology as a mechanical intensification of the organic, however, becomes a complicated matter where the entanglement of living beings with the environment is mediated by the social division of labor. In his 1955 essay on ‘The Problem of Regulation in the Organism and in Society’, as well as in the expanded version of The Normal and the Pathological (published in 1966), Canguilhem explicitly refuses any attempt to equate organism and society – ‘the consequences you can guess’ (Canguilhem, 2012: 78; trans. amended). Canguilhem’s allusion can be understood to mean that such equations, be it in their Nazi or Stalinist version, lead to totalitarianism and, in their (proto)cybernetic version, to an apolitical image of society that affirms the status quo. ⁸

At this point, Canguilhem – again in a similar vein as Bergson – refines his terminology in comparison to Marx, who indeed spoke of ‘social organisms of production’ (Marx, 1996: 90). In Canguilhem’s view, the essential feature of an organism lies in the spontaneous cooperation of its integrated organs according to the immanent purpose. ‘By the sole fact of its existence’, he underscores, ‘the organism resolves on its own a kind of contradiction, the contradiction between stability and modification’ (Canguilhem, 2012: 72), since its integrated organs spontaneously cooperate according to an immanent purpose. In contrast, society, through its technical means and institutions, represents an ‘externality of organs’. But to what purpose and in whose service these external organs should be directed is always a matter of political debate (Canguilhem, 1989: 255).

Canguilhem first sketches this kind of social organization of organs in his 1935 pamphlet Le fascisme et les paysans, which is essentially a Marxist analysis of the French peasantry. Similar to Weil’s (1987) contemporaneous investigations of the factory system, Canguilhem’s analysis is largely inspired by Alain’s philosophy. The latter was also co-founder of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, which encouraged Canguilhem’s investigation and published it anonymously. Very much like the slightly younger Weil’s investigation, Canguilhem’s study is distinguished by its concrete and experiential approach to its subject. Indeed, Canguilhem had worked on and off on his family’s farm in the 1920s and 1930s. Like Weil, who had worked in industrial factories between 1934 and 1935 in order to better understand the situation and concerns of the working class, Canguilhem thus knew firsthand what he was talking about. If lived experience is a crucial foundation of Alain’s philosophy, it’s entirely plausible to read Canguilhem’s and Weil’s studies as mutually complementary echoes of the reflections unfolded in Alain’s magnum opus, Les idées et les âges, concerning the central social significance of both peasantry and proletariat (Alain, 1927).

Marx himself was no stranger to the analysis of French peasantry. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he describes the ‘small-holding peasantry’ of mid-19th century France as a ‘vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with one another’ (Marx, 1979: 187). Following Marx’s observations, Canguilhem deploys his own analysis of French peasantry in the 1930s. In addition to the rise of fascism, he recognizes the new ‘organs’ of rural life – e.g., electrified machines – that push this way of life into destabilizing relations of dependence:

The peasant is kept in the field by electricity [instead of leaving and going to work in the city], but thereby he tends to be enslaved on the spot. The rural smallholding is subjected to industrial centralization from afar. The baker’s engine, the water pump, the milkhouse, or the cooperative wine press are nowadays moved by the city and can therefore be shut down by it, too. [. . .] The tentacular city is no longer a myth. (Canguilhem, 2011d: 546; alluding to Verhaeren, 1895)

A few years later, in the Traité, Canguilhem logically concludes that the machine can potentially be used in liberating as well as in exploitative, oppressive ways. As a negative example, he quotes Marx’s analysis of the factory system: ‘In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him’ (Marx, 1996: 425; see also Canguilhem and Planet, 2011: 890). After 1945, Canguilhem takes up this theme again in his essay ‘Machine and Organism’, wherein Taylorist rationalization is described as ‘a mechanization of the organism’. In other words, the living being finds itself appropriated for alien purposes, ‘aligned, so to speak, with the functioning of the machine’ (Canguilhem, 2008: 96).

In his extensive review of Georges Friedmann’s sociological study concerning human problems of automation, published in French in the same period (Friedmann, 1955), Canguilhem finds even sharper words of criticism. In a remarkable parallel to the arguments put forth by the Frankfurt School, Canguilhem explicitly labels economic rationalization through labor physiology and applied psychology as ‘man’s enslavement by reason and not the reign of reason in man’ (Canguilhem, 2015a: 293). ⁹

Hence, Taylorist rationalized factory work appears, just as in Weil’s ‘Factory Journal’ (originally published posthumously in La condition ouvrière in 1951), as an enterprise directed against life. And this enterprise encounters the resistance of life, as Canguilhem emphasizes, not least since the organism ‘spontaneously defends itself against any exclusive subordination of the biological to the mechanical’ (Canguilhem, 2008: 96). The resulting readjustments of the machine to the organism, for Canguilhem, prove the

primacy of the vital over the mechanical, the primacy of values over life. According to us, life is, strictly speaking, nothing but the mediation between mechanisms and values; it is from life that result – by means of abstraction, as terms of an always open conflict and thereby as generator of all experience and all history – mechanisms and values. (Canguilhem, 2015a: 306)

Far from consisting of seamlessly joined organs that follow uniform purposes, society for Canguilhem ‘is both machine and organism’ (Canguilhem, 1989: 252). On the one hand, it is partly organism, since its living members strive for a collective shaping of the milieu according to their own set of values. On the other hand, it is partly machine, because the underlying division of labor is a conflicted product of mechanist cunning and technological rationality. The ‘distance between social organs’ leaves room for their interplay and coordination, room in which new organs can spread and develop, while their interplay is increasingly ‘regulated from without and from above’, i.e. by closing the gaps between the organs according to mechanist reasoning (pp 252, 255). ¹⁰ Or, as Marx says about the ‘cooperation of wage labourers’:

Their union into one single productive body and the establishment of a connexion between their individual functions, are matters foreign and external to them, are not their own act, but the act of the capital that brings and keeps them together. Hence the connexion existing between their various labours appears to them, ideally, in the shape of a preconceived plan of the capitalist, and practically in the shape of the authority of the same capitalist, in the shape of the powerful will of another, who subjects their activity to his aims. (Marx, 1996: 336–7)

The organs formed in a society based on the division of labor can thus extend the vital capacities of one activity while simultaneously suppressing that of the other. This can be read as not only a philosophy of life but, in a narrower sense, a vitalist interpretation of the master-slave dialectic. The critical potential of Canguilhem’s organology at this point is to map the relationship of purpose-defining organism and purpose-serving machine onto the social relations arising from the engagement with the milieu and thus, in other words, to reveal the role played by ‘power apparatuses’ (dispositifs) in the organization of specific ways of life. ¹¹

Pathology, Alienation, and the Milieu

Against this background, it becomes clear that there is far more behind Canguilhem’s reflections on the normal and the pathological than a plea for holistic medicine. Early discussions of the question concerning disease and health can be found in his writings from the 1930s. In an essay that Canguilhem dedicates to Maurice Halbwachs’ studies on suicide in 1931, he claims that these studies are not merely grounded in sociology and/or human geography; rather, he qualifies them as essentially ‘Marxist’ in orientation (Canguilhem, 2011c: 379).

Of particular interest to Canguilhem is Halbwachs’ finding of an increased suicide rate in the industrialized, commercialized milieus of the city compared to those of the countryside. Seeking a philosophical interpretation of this phenomenon, Canguilhem reads suicide as a ‘social verdict’ (Canguilhem, 2011c: 377) to which the urban way of life is more susceptible than the rural one. ‘The peasant forgets man in favor of the earth and its products’, he writes, echoing Marx’s own analysis of French peasantry, according to which ‘[e]ach individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient; it itself directly produces the major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society’ (Marx, 1979: 187).

Canguilhem goes on to argue that the urban factory worker is disproportionately at the mercy of the ‘social verdict’, since he or she ‘participates in an immense coercion that mankind imposes on things. [. . .] But even the ever more advanced technology turns the activity of the worker into an endeavor whose results are temporary and relative’ (Canguilhem, 2011c: 382). Thus, as early as 1931, Canguilhem links the question of health and disease to the technically mediated relationship between organism and milieu, and, in view of the ‘results’ – i.e. the products – of factory work, he does so with clear parallels to Marx’s concept of ‘alienated’ or ‘estranged labour’ (entfremdete Arbeit).

As Marx explains in his early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, urban capitalism results in a world in which ‘man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life activity, from his species-being’. The more general result is ‘the estrangement of man from man’ (Marx, 1975: 277). Moreover, Marx clearly relates the industrialized, urban environment to symptoms of disease among workers, which he summarizes in Capital as follows:

Economy of the social means of production, matured and forced as in a hothouse by the factory system, is turned, in the hands of capital, into systematic robbery of what is necessary for the life of the workman while he is at work, robbery of space, light, air, and of protection to his person against the dangerous and unwholesome accompaniments of the productive process. (Marx, 1996: 429)

According to Marx, the connection between disease and work environment goes so far that it not only produces specific pathologies, such as ‘lockjaw [. . .], a disease peculiar to lucifer-matchmakers’, but even causes dramatic reductions in life span, for example in English ‘pottery districts’ (pp. 253–4). As a consequence, Marx also cites reports about factory workers driven to suicide (p. 746).

For Canguilhem, the lifespan in its relation to specific milieus, or environments, and their corresponding ways of life becomes a central concern in The Normal and the Pathological. Again relying on Halbwachs, Canguilhem argues in 1943 in his medical thesis that in certain geographic regions, typical physiological characteristics and even the general life expectancy are not given by nature but constitute the result of a specific way of life: ‘A human trait would not be normal because frequent but frequent because normal, that is, normative in one given way of life’ (Canguilhem, 1989: 160; trans. amended). This leads directly to one of the core arguments of his medical thesis, namely that the distinction between the normal and the pathological cannot be judged on the basis of statistical averages.

Instead, Canguilhem proposes that health has to be judged by the organism’s ability to shape its milieu in self-determined ways: ‘The healthy organism tries less to maintain itself in its present state and environment than to realize its nature’ (Canguilhem, 1989: 199). Disease, conversely, means being confined to limited conditions for the simple maintenance of life (p. 183). As in Canguilhem’s earlier discussion of suicide, this definition of disease echoes the Marxist theme of estrangement, or alienation (see also Benmakhlouf, 2000: 70).

In his natural ‘species-life’, ‘man’, according to Marx, ‘sees himself in a world that he has created’ (Marx, 1975: 277) and ‘realises a purpose of his own’ (Marx, 1996: 188). In the degraded state of alienation, however, ‘life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence’ (Marx, 1975: 276). Just like Canguilhem’s understanding of disease, Marx’s concept of alienation refers to the reduction of life to its mere maintenance in an environment determined by abstract laws.

Hence, when Canguilhem (1989: 126) in The Normal and the Pathological defines life in general terms as ‘not indifferent to the conditions in which it is possible’ and accordingly as ‘a normative activity’, this definition not only reflects medical concerns but social ones as well. For Canguilhem, the core question of Marx’s philosophy comes down to the ways in which technology mediates this ‘normative activity’ between organism and milieu. In his 1947 ‘Note sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique’, Canguilhem leaves no doubt that, regardless of specific property regimes, alienated or pathological ways of life will continue to exist as long as the mediation between organism and milieu is designed to exploit the worker’s body as a mere technical means of exploiting nature. ‘The redemption from alienation’, Canguilhem thus argues, ‘is incomplete unless human beings reconstitute not only their political dignity but also their fullness of life by reigning over the universal mechanism – in which the machine-like form of technology is only one aspect – instead of being enslaved by it’ (Canguilhem, 2015c: 318).

Accordingly, it is impossible to truly overcome capitalist relations of exploitation whilst allowing the toxic milieus of industrial production to persist, even if in socialized form. ¹² What is primarily at stake, and weighs heavier than the issue of property regimes, is nothing less than a revolution at the level of the most fundamental conditions of life. Two decades before Arendt chose her book title The Human Condition, Canguilhem therefore corrects the course of the contemporary Marxist debate as follows: ‘The ultimate goal of Marxism is not so much the socialization of means of production as the reintegration of the laborer into the human condition’ (Canguilhem, 2011d: 547).

Conclusion

By following Arendt’s insights into the connections between the French reception of Marx and the philosophy of life, we have uncovered an undercurrent of European philosophy that engages in critical reflections upon the societal shaping of the environment by means of technology. We argue that it is Canguilhem’s organology where this current of vitalist Marxism finds its most dense and nuanced expression. Our previous sections make evident that his interest in Marx’s philosophy does not stop with the end of the 1930s. Though his vitalist reading of Marx becomes more implicit, it nonetheless provides a fundamental inspiration for the core concepts of Canguilhem’s major works – from his conception of technology as organs of life, to the biological activity in the milieu, the ambivalent relation between machine and organism, and, not least, his notions of the normal and pathological.

As we have seen, Arendt and Canguilhem share numerous Marx-related references. However, their respective conclusions diverge in rather striking ways. While acknowledging the ‘depth of experience’ reached by Marx’s biologically grounded theory, Arendt (1958: 106, 322) also criticizes Marx as the preeminent philosopher of an economistic modernity that glorifies labor to the extent of ‘a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species’ (Arendt, 1958: 322). Canguilhem shares with Arendt an aversion when it comes to the economism and the ‘deliberating hostility against [. . .] all individualism’ (Canguilhem and Planet, 2011: 849) inherent in contemporary Marxism. He goes so far as to accuse rationalist versions of Marxism of perpetuating ‘a way of life bound to the economic rise of the capitalist class, a class of which the principles of self-justification consist in considering the totality of experience, living beings and humans included, as objects whose technical use presupposes their prior reduction to mechanisms’ (Canguilhem, 2015c: 318–19).

For Canguilhem, though, it is precisely the vitalist foundation in Marx’s original philosophy that distinguishes it from the economistic misreading in certain strands of reception. Only by viewing the living being as an individual willing and working to create a milieu according to its own norms can we escape the mechanist conception of the subject, which is complicit in exploitative forms of power, and perform what is key to Canguilhem’s organology: ‘a dialectical reversal of the relation mechanism-organism’ (Canguilhem, 2015c: 318).

What this reversal brings to bear is no less than the resistance of life to the formation of capitalist societies. Unlike Arendt, who only goes so far as to observe that modern technology unleashed ‘an enormously intensified life process’ (Arendt, 1958: 132), Canguilhem repeatedly refers to the double-edged potentials that certain ways of life produce in modern societies. As in Marx’s analyses of the pathological changes to the muscles and nerves of the human body on account of the production process, life thus becomes recognizable as the agent of a resistance that is deeply inscribed in the bodies of every individual involved in and affected by the production process. Life marks, as it were, the limit for submission to the production process of capitalism.

Conversely, vitalism becomes a position that experiences, recognizes, and highlights precisely this resistance – not at all in the sense of an uncritical profession of faith in the metaphysical quality of life, but as historically and sociologically grounded proof of the ‘chronologically irrevocable anticipation of life vis-à-vis mechanical theory and technology as well as vis-à-vis intelligence and the simulation of life’ (Canguilhem, 2021: 737).

In this view, vitalist Marxism can also serve as a philosophical backbone to conclusions feminist scholars have derived more recently from their respective readings of Marx. Consistent with Canguilhem, Butler (2019b: 15) concludes from the early Marx that ‘there are conditions under which the desire to live becomes more possible, conditions of labour that sustain or fail to sustain, forms of labouring that sustain or fail to sustain, and that the desire to live is always a desire to live in this world, and in a specific way’. Similarly, when Haraway (2008: 46, 65) points to Marx’s blind spot of human exceptionalism and calls for ‘making companions’ among various species rather than commodifying them, this arguably implies a much more profound revolution in terms of ways of life than any form of energy transition advocated today.

In a nutshell, it is the vitalist reversal of the relationship between machine and organism that we believe is crucial to current debates concerning societal life on an increasingly exploited and exhausted planet – not in order to unify the political and social movements that invoke and claim life in quite different ways, but in order to provide these various approaches with an overarching orientation. Vitalist Marxism, in our reading of Canguilhem, means not remaining satisfied with clinical descriptions of bio-capitalist devastation, but reclaiming a normative foothold on behalf of living beings, a defined position from which to speak and act in resistance, rather than perpetuate the ever more fashionable guises assumed by toxic ways of life. This critical approach to ways of life translates into engaged investigations concerning the theory and history of the very real tensions among life, technology, and society – in order to conceive of these tensions in ways that are at once active and reflective.