Human deformation is a social product, not a damage to an underlying essence

Evidence

While human beings may bear a number of deformities, they have ‘no substratum beneath such “deformations”, no ontic interior on which social mechanisms merely act externally: the deformation is not a sickness in men but in the society which begets its children with the “hereditary taint” that biologism projects on to nature’. If society has become its own ideology, then human beings are the way they are under capital precisely because this benefits capital. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 939

Categorization

• XREF: Deformation-as-social-product resonates with the reader’s existing knowledge of Adorno’s critique of biologism (against Lorenz and Chamberlain-era race thought), a key thread in critical theory. — connects to: Human subjectivity itself is constituted by the social process of production. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 254; Phallic privilege is contingent on situation, not anatomically destined — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 128; Humans are constituted by their social relations rather than an intrinsic essence — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2517 (+11 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies Adorno’s anti-essentialist anthropology: subjects have no ontic interior that social mechanisms merely overlay.

Broader Connections

• Humans are constituted by their social relations rather than an intrinsic essence #corroborates (0.95) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2517
• Human nature is the totality of historically determined social relations, not a fixed essence. #corroborates (0.95) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 617
• Human nature is the ever-changing complex of social relations, not a fixed essence #corroborates (0.95)
• Human essence is the ensemble of social relations, not an individual abstraction #expands (0.90)
• Human beings create their own essence through action rather than inheriting a fixed nature #corroborates (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 27
• The subject’s unity is an effect of social configuration, not a premise #expands (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 333
• Social and cultural structures overdetermine our natural human constitution. #expands (0.80)
• Human beings are processes of their own actions, not fixed essences #complicates (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1256
• Modern subjectivity is a constructed architectural effect, not a natural condition #expands (0.75) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 202
• Reified social wholes are objective forces that decide individual existence #expands (0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 735
• The body-as-metaphor legitimated social hierarchy as naturally given #expands (0.70)