The Question of “Human Essence” and Processes of Subjectivation.

Cesare Luporini and the Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach: Notes on Critical Pedagogy.

Abstract

The contribution, within a framework of Critical Pedagogy, investigates Cesare Luporini’s role in
problematizing the notion of “human essence” within historical materialism, through the analysis of
Marx’s Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach. This thesis, by decentering the subject from an abstract human
nature to the totality of social relations, allows for a rearticulation of the theme of humanism and an
exploration of teleology, intersubjectivity, and historicism within pedagogical discourse. Three key
conceptual nodes are examined: the confrontation between Luporini and Althusser, who emphasizes
the practical rather than epistemic nature of the relationship between “human essence” and social relations;
a transindividual rereading that situates subjects within a complex relational process; and,
finally, the pedagogical implications of this perspective, framed as a critique of humanism and historicism
and as a deconstruction of the ideological deadlocks embedded in the notion of the ‘subject’.