It is necessary to insist here on the remarkable continuity of Marx's analysis in the works that followed the 1844 Manuscripts, not just up to the Grundrisse but including Capital, beyond the differences of vocabulary and form which are themselves comparable to the different ‘ways’ in which one can try to find the right way to express something. The 1844 Manuscripts present the situation of the worker as that of a being ‘without object’ (gegenstandlos): in other words, if the worker, like every living being, is essentially an objective being, a being that has vital relations to objects that are essential (objects that are the objective conditions of its proper activity), then the situation of the worker as a being without object, and therefore as a non- objective being, an unnatural (or denatured) being, is one a sense of loss which is in fact that of alienation. It is the theme of reversal – from an objective being to a non- objective being – which is mobilised to make sense of this state of alienation. The object of this reversal is work considered as ‘productive life’, as ‘vital activity’. The reversal is thus only comprehensible from the place of the natural form of labour as a vitally productive activity. The natural situation is one in which ‘the worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world’. The natural condition is characterised by a relation of perfect continuity between the worker (as a natural being whose natural activity is productive activity), their work and nature: work is here the vital activity of a natural and objective being existing as part of the objective totality of nature. It is this situation that underlies the idea, expressed by Marx a few pages later, according to which ‘nature is man's inorganic body.

What Marx refers to in this passage as the ‘stage of the economy’ (that is to say, modern civil society, or what he will later refer to as the capitalist mode of production) is marked by the historical accomplishment of the rupture of the continuity between a living and working being, its vital activity (work or production), its vital milieu (where it finds the objective conditions of its activity), and the products of this activity.

Kavan's narrative experiment under her new name began with Asylum Piece (1940). Writing in the first person for the first time and introducing the characteristically sparse style that would continue in much of her later work, her elusive and deeply unreliable narrator in these stories (like many of her characters from this time forward) has no history or name; their identity is defined only by negative experiences of emptiness, hopelessness, guilt and persecution. This anonymous but distinctive narrative voice, in turns despairing and affectless, is interspersed with more realist third-person narratives, a combination that would characterise her later fiction. The asylum experience would continue to be a central feature of Kavan's writing throughout the 1940s in stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945) and in the satirical novel The Horse's Tale (1949). These writings represented and responded to mid-century advances in psychiatric treatment (particularly drug and talking therapies), along with a growing critique of psychiatry and asylum incarceration. But these developments were at the sharp end of broader cultural changes in perceptions of subjectivity and human relations, and Kavan's experimental strategies to disturb the reader's relationship with the text would become a wider feature of mid-century writing. The barriers to communication and understanding between the depressed subject and others, and between patient and psychiatrist, touched the same issues of human relations and literary representations addressed by Virginia Woolf and Nathalie Sarraute, as outlined in the introduction to this book, necessitating new ways of writing character. Kavan's experiment in Asylum Piece suggests that the experience of the psychiatric patient, seemingly so outside of normal life, shows in extremis a disrupted relationship to self, others and objective reality that would increase and intensify across the literature of the mid-century.

Notwithstanding the continuities noted in the previous chapter, the shift from Helen Ferguson's psychological realism to the bleak and haunted narratives of her first publication as Anna Kavan is striking. Freed from the constraints of realist plot and character development, much of the narrative work in Asylum Piece is done by ambiguity and inference. Sketched out in language as spare and unornamented as the stark reality it describes, this more experimental mode of writing formalised the representation of profound depression and psychic division experienced by Helen Ferguson's characters.

The relation of Marx to Spinoza is articulated around a central thesis that is repeated several times in the 1844 Manuscripts: ‘Man lives from nature’, ‘man is a part of nature’, states the first manuscript, while the third is more precise: ‘an objective being … creates and establishes only objects because it is established by objects, because it is fundamentally nature’; ‘man is directly a natural being’. If the determination of man as a natural being can be attributed to Feuerbach, then the idea of humanity as part of nature can be considered to come from Spinoza. This thesis, central to Spinozism in that it signifies the insertion of humanity within the general and common order of nature, thereby ruining humanity's immediate conception of itself as a ‘kingdom within a kingdom’, is equally central to Marx, and not just to his early writings but as a thesis that is returned to in his later works. Indeed, he returns to the notion in one of his very last writings, ‘Notes on Adolph Wagner's “Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie”’, ‘the last and most lovely text’ according to Althusser, where he writes: ‘[human beings] begin, like every animal, by eating, drinking, etc., that is not by “finding themselves” in a relationship, but actively behaving, availing themselves of certain things of the outside world by action, and thus satisfying their needs. (They start, then, with production.)’ In this passage, arguing against ‘the natural tendency of a German Professor of Economics’ to imagine that the primary relation of man to nature is a theoretical relationship of knowledge and contemplation, Marx insists that the original relationship of human beings to nature is not an external relationship of knowledge but rather a relationship of implication characteristic of a natural being which, insofar as it has needs, begins by being affected by nature and other natural beings. Affects and passivity are thus primary; they engender human activity and a practical relation with nature which is a reaction and response to this original affection.

1.

In the ‘China brain’ thought experiment, articulated by Lawrence Davis in 1974 and then again by Ned Block in 1978, each citizen of China is imagined playing the role of a single neuron, using telecommunication devices to connect them to one another in the same way that axons and dendrites connect the neurons of the brain together. In such a scenario, would China itself become conscious? In 1980, in turn, John Searle imagined the ‘Chinese room’, which was meant to show the falsehood of ‘strong AI’, that is, of the view that machines can never be made to literally understand anything. A machine that could be shown to convincingly display ‘understanding’ of Chinese would be indistinguishable from a room in which Searle himself, or some other human being, was holed up, receiving sentences in good Chinese written on paper and passed through a slit in the wall, to which he would then respond, in equally good Chinese, by simply consulting various reference works available in the room. But Searle assures us that he does not himself understand Chinese. Therefore, the machine does not either.

It is difficult not to wonder: What is it with China, exactly, in analytic philosophy's thought experiments, which is to say fantasies, about automated thinking? Why choose this nation in particular? It is not enough to say that only China has, or had forty years ago, a population large enough to simulate the human brain: the human brain has around 100 billion neurons, and so the world's most populous nation is only about one percent of the way to being able to furnish one person per neuron. Given this shortage, it would have made just as much sense to let each citizen of Estonia, say, stand in for ten thousand neurons, as have each citizen of China stand in for one hundred. Or the experiment could have been imagined in a cosmopolitan vein, with each human being alive contributing to the ‘earth brain’ – a scenario which would have brought us at least a small step closer to a one-one correspondence between people and neurons. In the case of the Chinese room, Searle seems to have chosen this language in particular because he could attest that he did not know a single word of it.

A half-length male nude, carved in the early sixteenth century from wood and painted to resemble flesh marked with blood, is an arresting presence in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan (Fig. 1.1). The arms of the figure are bound behind its back and drips of red paint on the shoulders evoke the crown of thorns. That crown is absent, however, because the head of Christ has been replaced by a demonic one. Its monstrous fleshy visage, harrowing expression, and gaping orifices are accentuated with calligraphic lines. Its ears are part human, part creature, its eyes are simultaneously penetrating and vacant, and its serrated teeth flash from a gaping jaw. Hinged like a human mandible, the mouth opens to eject a flame-red tongue. Animated by a metal crank at its base, the devil spews smoke, even flames, emitting a yowling cry as its glass eyes roll wildly.

The automaton manifests transformative effects ascribed by early moderns to a fallen, or evil, soul. Startling viewers, it conjures bodily reactions from onlookers similar to those performed by the sculpture – externalising expressions of interior movements of the mind and the passions. These effects are emphasised in the description, in Chapter 7 of the guidebook to the museum, that was published in 1666: ‘De i moti quasi perpetui’ (On the motions, as if perpetual):

It is in this spirit that one can understand something of the theory of alienation that Marx develops in the 1844 Manuscripts. Taking the word alienation from Hegel, Marx nevertheless radically changes its sense, because for him it no longer makes sense to say that, for a being conceived as a subject, the relation to objectivity is itself alienating and that this relation can only be overcome through the abolition of the alienating exteriority of objectivity, that is to say, through the ‘return of the object into the self’. In order to think in these terms it is necessary to posit, as Hegel does, that ‘human nature, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness’, that is, to the consciousness of the self or the consciousness of self as a singular subject. But if one begins instead to consider human beings as finite modes – that is, as objective and natural beings whose actual essence consists in the effort they make to persevere in their being – then one perceives that it is not the fact of being in a necessary relation to the exteriority of objective nature that is alienating, but on the contrary the fact of being separated from the vital and necessary relation that such a natural being depends on necessarily and essentially. According to Marx, this necessary relation to an exterior nature is far from being an alienating one; it is on the contrary the relation through which human beings prove themselves to be what they are in truth, that is to say, living beings. ‘A being that does not have nature outside of itself’, Marx writes, ‘is not a natural being and plays no part in the system of nature’. In other words, it simply does not exist. A being which does not know relations of necessary composition with essential objects exterior to it is not itself an objective being: or, ‘a non-objective being is a non-being’. Briefly, for a natural and living being, it is not the fact that it has a relation with nature that is alienating, but the fact that it is a separate being: for an objective being it is alienating not to be in an essential relation to objects, to be removed from or restricted from accessing its essential objects.

When the vital activity unique to humans is considered in terms of natural beings existing objectively in nature it is perhaps only unique in that it is an activity that produces objects. Such an activity can perhaps be judged inessential only from the point of view of a philosophy that starts from the place of the subject and that examines only the act by which the subject poses and affirms itself as subject. Importantly, ‘in the act of establishing [objects]’, Marx writes, humanity ‘does not descend from its “pure activity” to the creation of objects; on the contrary, its objective product simply confirms its objective activity, its activity as the activity of an objective, natural being’. Nothing is more natural and nothing is more necessary, for a being itself produced by nature and therefore engendered by natural objects, than engendering and producing in its turn naturally existing objects: ‘It creates and establishes only objects because it is established by objects, because it is fundamentally nature.’ It is the essential break between passivity and activity that is overcome by Marx, as he demonstrates in the decisive and often remarked upon passage from the 1844 Manuscripts: ‘The domination of the objective essence within me, the sensuous outburst of my essential activity, is passion, which here becomes the activity of my being.’ For Marx, as for Hume, the ‘mother of passions’ is a passion for activity, a drive for activity; it would not be false to call it a compulsory activity. The opposition of activity and passivity no longer makes sense for Spinoza, for whom the conception of human beings as part of nature certainly implies the affirmation of their natural passionate servitude, but also the thesis according to which, for the exact same reasons, the infinite power of nature is expressed in human beings as in every natural being under the form of a conatus, as that activity of persevering which, positively and for itself, produces a certain number of effects. In the same way, Marx could perhaps say that the human being considered as Naturwesen, that is, as a ‘natural active being’ endowed with ‘natural’ or ‘vital’ powers, is also ‘a suffering, conditioned and limited being’.

This catalogue of dreams in Asylum Piece anticipates the scope of Anna Kavan's fictional writing; the ‘machines in the head’ from her first collection of stories, the ‘hot, heavy’ tropical visions of Let Me Alone and Who Are You? and the ‘ice-age dream’ of her last and best-known work. Kavan's oblique, often oneiric prose consistently resists simplified interpretations that relegate its fantastic elements to dream; her characters never wake up to reality and if her narrator can ‘scarcely tell true from false’, the reader is left in the same quandary. But dream and its relation to conscious life, and to fiction, is a recurring theme in her writing. Her representations of blacked-out and night-time worlds in her 1940s stories, including those induced through narcosis and narco-analysis, developed into a sustained engagement with sleep and the unconscious in Sleep Has His House (published in the USA as The House of Sleep). This surrealist novel continues the gothic trope of Kavan's earlier writing and draws on existentialist and psychoanalytic theory, shaped by her close association with Karl Bluth and Ludwig Binswanger. Continuing and expanding her exploration of fractured and uncertain identity into a postwar context, Kavan pushed her linguistic and narrative experiment in new directions, but always with an eye to representations of subjective reality, inflected by her treatment with psychotropic drugs and her long-term heroin use. Time, which had begun to behave strangely in her wartime writing, also continues to take an odd turn in her postwar fiction.

In her final review for Horizon in early 1946, Kavan decried a cultural impulse to look backwards, which she identified as beginning during the war and continuing beyond it.

Having once marked the centre of the courtyard or patio at the Exconvento de San Francisco, the stone cross at Tepeapulco, northeast of Mexico City in present-day Hidalgo, now sits plastered to the modern church's façade (Fig. 4.1). Even in its new, peripheral home, the former patio cross still stands out against the Exconvento's architectural fabric. At roughly 1.2 metres in height, the cross amasses various symbols carved in low and high relief, pigments that ooze from drilled, vacant holes, and sculpted textures that prompt viewers to explore and touch its body. Upon closer inspection, the cross's symbols reveal themes related to Christ's death: a crown of thorns marks the centre, a red-tipped spear extends across the diagonal, a skull near the base foretells his bodily end at Golgotha, and the slanting letters INRI at the top identify the Messiah from Nazareth. Patio crosses produced in New Spain, such as this example from Tepeapulco, display the arma Christi to recount Christ's Passion. These crosses, made by and for Nahua converts in central New Spain, were key components of conversion spaces built throughout the Valley of Mexico in the sixteenth century.

Following their arrival in New Spain in 1524, mendicant friars needed to construct religious spaces that could serve large groups of Indigenous converts. In a copper engraving by Franciscan friar Diego Valadés, we see their architectural response (Fig. 4.2). As his idealised print reveals, outdoor patios and evenly spaced chapels functioned as spaces to teach Christian doctrine, administer sacraments, study language, and convert Indigenous souls.

Each patio's design in New Spain was unique, but most had four walls and a central cross. At the centre of Valadés's print, the twelve Franciscan friars who first arrived in the Valley of Mexico hold up the Church to usher in a new era of Christianity. At the centre of actual patios, however, the carved patio crosses stood tall, sometimes on a rising pedestal. During Christian feast days and special masses, friars led converts counterclockwise around the patio's perimeter and recited Christian teachings or reviewed the stations of the cross. The patio cross anchored these spatial narratives in the patio landscape, and its symbols further unveiled Christ's final days on Earth. Given their central role in the visual and didactic programmes of the patio, crosses and their arma were useful devices in a spatial pedagogy that centred around the life and death of Christ.

Conversion is a strange thing. It is something confected from natural, material and corporeal kinds of transformations that in turn transforms the multiform becomings of all kinds of matter and living creatures. Stone becomes sand by the movement of water, and sand becomes glass in the heat of fire. And animal and human bodies metamorphose in a host of ways. Early modern Europeans seem to have believed that bear cubs, shapeless at birth, were literally licked into shape by their mothers.

But conversion is also a particular case of transformation: it is both a force and a response to a force; it describes being pulled or directed toward a new kind of being. Bodies and matter change in themselves; conversion reaches out from the phenomenon of transformation to radiate change across the temporal and spatial character of the world itself.

Neither the route nor the momentum of conversion follows a straight path. For conversion is enabled, hindered, orchestrated and resisted by elemental, environmental, material, institutional, social and bodily demands and desires, which render the process open and subject to reversals and reorientations. Its itineraries cannot easily be traced, nor its effects measured. Its temporal and spatial dimensions are inevitably intertwined – its pasts, presents and futures arrested and accelerated. To confront conversion in its historical and phenomenal permutations therefore entails exploring how these experiences, sensations and transmutations are materialised in cultural forms and in human bodies – through imagination, narration, performance, violence, experimentation, social structures and institutional apparatuses.

Augustine's account of his conversion is a critical instance of narrative's potential to convey the temporal and spatial dynamics of conversion, together with its anticipatory and ineluctable character. He tells the story of his life differently because of the revelatory experience in the garden. All his wanderings, fallings, sufferings become necessary parts of a narrative leading up to the time-shaping child's cry of ‘tolle lege [pick it up and read]’ and his reading of the passage from Romans. ‘For instantly,’ Augustine reports, ‘as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.’ The moment of conversion changes him by transforming his past into wanderings away from and then back to his true home.

The question of how a return to Marx and Spinoza can make it possible to construct a concept of alienation that would still be relevant for us today is the central question both of this book and also of a major work by Frédéric Lordon, Capitalisme, désir et Servitude: Marx and Spinoza, which appeared in 2010 (translated in 2014 as Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire). If there is a terrain common to Lordon's Spinoza and Marx and our own Marx with Spinoza, it can only be a Spinozist one, and therefore in accord with the idea that alienation must be thought in relation to a regime of activity or acting more than to a certain form of being: that alienation is experienced first in terms of what we do (or what we cannot do), as primarily a restriction on what we can or are able to do, and subsequently as a restriction on what we are or can be.

With its title and subtitle, Lordon's book is placed in relation to a philosophical tradition that has its roots in France, going back at least to Althusser, and that consists in reading Marx and Spinoza together: a tradition which posits that it is Spinoza (not Hegel) who makes it possible to understand Marx, and that it is Marx (more than Descartes) who makes it possible to understand Spinoza. The first approach effectively makes possible a reading of Spinoza by Marx, focused on the traces that remain in the text of Marx, mostly the young Marx, of his reading of Spinoza, notably in his anthropological (human beings as Teil der Natur or pars naturae) and ontological conceptions (nature as productive totality, human history as a continuation of natural history). The second approach (using Marx to read Spinoza) appears more adventurous and risky, but it can justify itself in terms of multiple points of intersection. For example, with Spinoza and Marx, it is a matter of two philosophers who, in the context of the entire western tradition, are rare in terms of their specific claim to be partisans of democracy.

The examination of the relation of Marx with Spinoza has often been driven – most notably with respect to Althusser and the Althusserian tradition – by the project of ‘giving Marxism the metaphysics that it needs’, according to an expression used by Pierre Macherey specifically with respect to Althusser. The intention was laudable, but, times having changed, our project can no longer be exactly that. We begin from the idea that the philosophy specific to Marx, or the specifically Marxist philosophy, is still largely unknown, that Marx as a philosopher is still largely and for the most part unknown. For a long time this was due to factors largely external to the thought of Marx: initially, the urgency of militant practice; later, the theme of the rupture with philosophy expressed by the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach and in The German Ideology, which meant that any reading of Marx that was resolutely philosophical was suspected of being ideological. Then, at the margins of orthodoxy, several authors – and not insignificant ones – both at the heart of the history of Marxism and outside of it, maintained that while there is a critique of philosophy in Marx, this critique would still be a determinant practice of philosophy. The ignorance of ‘Marx's philosophy’, however, is equally due to factors internal to his work: the critical relation that Marx enters into with philosophy implies in effect that when it appears it does so in unfamiliar and novel ways, which are not those of a doctrine expressed as such – Marx, who never completed any of his grand works, always refused any dogmatic or systematic presentation of his thoughts – but are also not a matter of mere fragments. Neither systematic nor fragmentary, philosophy in Marx appears diluted, omnipresent but always mixed, and everywhere combined with elements of the discourses of history and political economy, but also the natural sciences and literature.