In the good old days of the Christian-Marxist dialogue, it was comforting to think that, whatever the divergences between the two camps, they were at least united by their profoundly humanistic dimension. It is a wry historical irony that the humanistic plank which once bridged the Christian-Marxist gap has now become the blunt instrument with which Marxism belabours Christianity about the head. For the most important developments in European Marxism centre on a decisive rejection of the ‘Marxist-humanist’ interpretation of historical materialism. ‘Marxism’, announces Louis Althusser in a polemical, programmatic chapter-heading, ‘is not a Humanism’; and Michel Foucault takes comfort in the thought that ‘man is but a recent invention, a figure not two centuries old, a simple fold in our knowledge, and will disappear when the latter has found a new form’. Man-centred Marxism—that heretical deviation from historical materialism which pivots all on the ‘collective subject’ and its ‘praxis’—is merely a displacement of the inherently bourgeois ideology of ‘humanism’. History as the expression of the generic subject Man, en route to reappropriating his alienated being: we cannot escape this Hegelian form of Marxism merely by substituting ‘men’ for Man. For the subjects of history are not ‘men’, not even ‘social classes’, but, as Althusser comments, social formations; Marxism is the science of the laws of these social formations, of these structures of which individual men are merely the bearers. It is ‘humanism’, with its corrosive insistence on rooting all in the ‘living concrete individuals’ of history, which forestalls us from thinking through society as structure—a structure which, like the unconscious, has its reasons of which ‘living individuals’ know nothing.

The ‘de-centring’ of the human subject: this is the scandalous, pervasive theme of European Marxism and structuralism. ‘Man’ or ‘men’, installed by bourgeois ideology at the heart of history and the universe, the source of all discourse and creation, is impudently dethroned.