Thesis title: Individuo e soggettivazione in Marx tra Gattung e comunità
The dissertation offers a reconstruction of Marx’s theoretical development that, moving beyond both essentialist humanism and structuralist reductionism, brings the figure of the individual back to the center of analysis – and, with it, the irreducible materiality of the body as the historically mediated site of subjectivity. The transition from “Man” to the “individual” thus does not signal the abandonment of anthropology but its scientific and, at the same time, political re-foundation. Since the individual – understood as the intersection of nature and history – is not an ontological given but the result of social and productive praxis, its very definition becomes an immediate terrain of conflict. Marxian anthropology thereby emerges as a political theory of the body, in which subjectivity appears as the locus of tension between domination and cooperation, abstraction and life, value and materiality. The individual is simultaneously Naturwesen and social form, an immanent and always provisional measure of the relations of production, and in this duality it embodies the potential for a practical transformation of the existing order.
Methodologically, the dissertation is grounded in a long-term philological investigation that interweaves canonical texts with, above all, manuscript materials seldom examined in political and philosophical studies – from the London Notebooks to the late notebooks, with particular attention to previously unpublished excerpts and annotations on physiology. Through these materials, the study shows how the concepts of metabolism and labor-power are anchored in a scientific physiology that conceives the body as an energetic machine, thereby making visible – from within the logic of valorization itself – the friction between the abstraction of value and the historical and biological finitude of living labor.
From this perspective, the fracture between Marx’s early philosophical anthropology and his mature economic critique does not abolish the anthropological dimension but rather overturns and reaffirms it, transforming corporeality into both a critical device and a principle of political resistance. The worker’s body, subsumed as a commodity, becomes the internal limit of capital and the empirical index of its metabolic and ecological crisis. The individual, as the real unity of body, nature, and praxis, thus represents not only the object but also the possible subject of social transformation. Corporeality does not constitute an immediate natural given, but a materiality always already mediated by social relations, whose very historicity entails the possibility of its political reappropriation.
Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the political nature of class and the historicity of social forms both arise from a single techno-poietic dynamic: wherever subjectivity is constituted as associated praxis, the abstract universality of capital is confronted by the historical resistance of bodies, and the critique of political economy rediscovers in the biological dimension its own material – and therefore political – testing ground.