reasons): it is our duty to strive with all our might for their disappearance,
their withering away. To make agreement an eschatological hope has an
additional advantage: it enables us to avoid teleology – the form of naturalism
which the Marxist tradition has lapsed into, through the medium of the
succession of modes of production. Therein history is progress as well as
progression and advanced communism is the inevitable goal of human history.
In this respect, Habermas is situated in the tradition of continuators of Marx’s
emancipatory project, who reject the teleological vulgate. It runs from Walter
Benjamin, and his critique of the ideology of progress in the ‘Theses on the
Philosophy of History’ and the Arcades Project, to Daniel Bensaïd, who absolves
Marx of the sin of teleology.^7 And, of course, it includes Jacques Derrida, who
in large part bases his reading of Marx and his concept of the messianic
without Messianism on a distinction between eschatology and teleology.^8 We
can appreciate how Habermas, in an important sense, does not simply abandon
the Marxist tradition, but continues and develops Marx’s emancipatory project.
But he does nevertheless abandon it and putting him back on his feet will
consist in returning to the first philosophy of Marx, from which Habermas
separated himself by inverting it, and which makes labour – not language –
the founding social relation. Labour is not reducible to an inter-subjective
relation, but is immediately social, in that it assumes a practice which, even
if it is solitary, assumes meaning only within a collective – that is, neither
within individual subjectivity nor within the dual individuality of dialogue.
Man, like the ape and the ant, and unlike the cat or duck-billed platypus,
belongs to a social species – a sociality imposed by his constitution and way
of life (size, eating habits, means of defence, etc.): man’s humanity is the
result of an evolution in which language has played a role and which has
brought it about that human sociality, fruit of labour, produces individual
subjectivity at the end of the chain, as an effect. On this point we can re-read
the work of the Vietnamese Marxist Tran Duc Thao.^9 Habermas’s myth of
origins inverts this evolution. Hence his stress, so as not to go too far in
denying the facts, on the difference between hominids (who work but who
do not speak) and human beings (who speak). Language can then be treated
58 • Chapter Three
(^7) See Benjamin 1999 and 1973; Bensaïd 1992.
(^8) See Derrida 1994.
(^9) See Thao 1973.