Decentering the human. Subjectivity, reproduction, and critical pedagogy between Althusser and Luporini

Abstract

The article advances a materialist account of decentring the human by situating pedagogical analysis within Marx’s dual circuits of economic valorisation and ideological reproduction. The D–M–D’ dynamic and the logic of surplus value frame subjectivity as an effect of social relations that define usefulness, excess and subalternity, while the S–F–S’ circuit highlights how educational apparatuses transform dominant knowledges and norms into forms of subjectivity aligned with valorisation. Drawing on Althusser, education is examined as a site of gaps, non-contemporaneity and ideological interpellation; through Luporini, the critique of speculative humanism and historicism reveals the normative production of the human as an effect of material relations. On this basis, the article proposes a tripartite reading of reproduction – economic, ideological, and critical – outlining a form of critical pedagogy capable of identifying, within structural contradictions, the conditions for non-conformative modes of subjectivation.