Napoleoni between Marx and Heidegger: A Sympathetic Critique of the Late Napoleoni in Discorso sull’economia politica

The 1985 Discorso sull’economia politica marks a turning point in Claudio Napoleoni’s theoretical path. Having abandoned any attempt to rethink Marx through his own categories, Napoleoni finds a new theoretical horizon in a Heideggerian-oriented philosophy centered on the question of technique. This shift led Napoleoni to reinterpret the Marxian “material subsumption of labour under capital” as the “disappearance of the subject” and to see this disappearance of the subject as the ultimate result of the “essence of technique”, which in turn was ultimately interpreted as the “essence of the subject”. At this point, the necessary liberation became, for Napoleoni, the liberation of human beings from their subjective approach to the world. Through a comparison with the Lezioni sul capitolo sesto inedito of 1971 and a critique based on an interpretation of Marx that maintains a subjective perspective but avoids a subjectivist and productivist approach, the article aims to show: (1) that the thesis of the disappearance of the subject is the ultimate outcome of abandoning the link between value and labor in the field of economic theory; (2) that this evolution in Napoleoni’s thinking, while on the one hand providing him with the opportunity to raise extremely important and topical issues about the relationship between human beings and the world, on the other hand forces him into a dead end from both a theoretical and a practical point of view; (3) that a revival of the project to redefine and reinterpret Marx’s labor theory of value, begun by Napoleoni in the early 1970s, is potentially capable not only of refuting the criticisms of the Marxian perspective advanced by Napoleoni himself in the 1980s, but also of providing more convincing and practicable answers to the very questions he raised in the context of the Heideggerian turn.