Conrad

In fact, I thought the Bastions a very convenient place, since the girl did not think it prudent as yet to introduce that young man to her mother. It was here, then, I thought, looking round at that plot of ground of deplorable banality, that their acquaintance will begin and go on in the exchange of generous indignations and of extreme sentiments, too poignant, perhaps, for a non-Russian mind to conceive. I saw these two, escaped out of four score of millions of human beings ground between the upper and nether millstone, walking under these trees, their young heads close together. Yes, an excellent place to stroll and talk in. It even occurred to me, while we turned once more away from the wide iron gates, that when tired they would have plenty of accommodation to rest themselves. There was a quantity of tables and chairs displayed between the restaurant chalet and the bandstand, a whole raft of painted deals spread out under the trees. In the very middle of it I observed a solitary Swiss couple, whose fate was made secure from the cradle to the grave by the perfected mechanism of democratic institutions in a republic that could almost be held in the palm of one’s hand. The man, colourlessly uncouth, was drinking beer out of a glittering glass; the woman, rustic and placid, leaning back in the rough chair, gazed idly around.

There is one particularly wonderful paragraph from Under Western Eyes (p 129 of the OWC edition). I have been told that Edward Said’s first book is an entirely unremarkable study of Conrad. It is hard to imagine such an excellent critic writing an unremarkable book about such an excellent novelist.

Zizek's Violence

Zizek’s short book Violence (2008) begins with a series of distinctions and delimitations in order to bring into view his proper object.  He distinguishes first between subjective and objective violence.  Subjective violence is the immediate physical, physiological, experience of “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (1).  In contradistinction to this is objective violence, which is distinguished into symbolic and systemic varieties.  Symbolic violence includes hate speech, the various hierarchies inscribed into our daily language (of gender, for instance), but also the “more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such” (2).  Systemic violence is the apparently straightforward designation for “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (2).  The whole point of the book, we are told, is to get away from the “inherently mystifying…direct confrontation” (3-4) with specific acts of subjective violence.  The crude political point is that acts of violence, be they bombings on American soil or genocides committed in a far away African country, are mediatized in such a way as to demand an immediate, and therefore partial, subjective, response.   Zizek’s goal, then, is to examine the background against which the ‘subjective’ violence is rendered just that, subjective rather than objective.  The point is not (only or centrally) to show, once again, that capitalism is built on the violence of expropriation, or that certain categories of individuals are systemically excluded from equal access to certain resources.  As Zizek elaborated at length in his Parallax View, it is the inescapable gap between the objective and subjective that is the space of the subject.  So the point here is to examine the mutual positioning of objective and subjective violence in order to understand what kind of a subject is situated there, and how a different one might arise. 

Put differently, Zizek is interested in sites of resistance.  For instance, in his discussion of tolerance, and the critique of it that sometimes emerges from postcolonial studies, his view of cultural difference is ruled by the consideration of political possibility.  He says,

The self-reflexive sensitivity to one’s own limitation can only emerge against the background of the notions of autonomy and rationality promoted by liberalism.  One can, of course, argue that, in a way, the Western situation is even worse because in it oppression itself is obliterated and masked as free choice…Our freedom of choice effectively often functions as a mere formal gesture of consent to our own oppression and exploitation.  However, Hegel’s lesson that form matters is important here; form has an autonomy and efficacy of its own.  So when we compare a Third World woman, forced to undergo clitoridectomy or promised in marriage as a small child, with the First World woman ‘free to choose’ painful cosmetic surgery, the form of freedom matters—it opens up a space for critical reflection (147-8).

The point that Zizek wants to make, it seems to me, goes beyond the notion that a rhetoric can become a reality, that an appearance to be maintained can become a positive force for change.  He remains, I think, attached to the level of the subject.  He means something more like, without formal freedom, there will be no concrete freedom—but entirely in relation to the individual, not the society. 

This allows us to enter into the terrain that is generally upsetting for readers of Zizek.  For Zizek, the subject becomes free only in the moment of terror.  This moment is the juncture between subjective and objective.  The position here is in some sense a Hegelian one, of course, and a Lacanian one.  But it is more interesting to point out that it is Zizek’s way of suturing ethics into politics.

The key text examined in Violence is Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.”  The notion Zizek wants to explore is that of divine violence.  Although Zizek isn’t quite willing to say it, it seems to me that he identifies divine violence ultimately with the abyss of human freedom, or we might say more in his own terms, with the terror of the radical emptiness of the subject.  This is where he follows Lacan against Kant, “What is truly traumatic for the subject is not the fact that a pure ethical act is (perhaps) impossible, that freedom is (perhaps) an appearance, based on our ignorance of the true motivations of our acts; what is truly traumatic is freedom itself, the fact that freedom IS possible, and we desperately search for some ‘pathological’ determinations in order to avoid this fact” (196).  Divine violence is Zizek’s way of discussing this same fact of freedom and possibility on the objective level.  Zizek cites a long passage from Benjamin’s “Critique,” and then asserts that divine violence is to be understood as the “domain of sovereignty” (198).  Divine violence is not law-making, but beyond law.  It is, one is tempted to say, immanent and therefore outside the realm of law.  Without law, no crime.  Hence, Zizek says, “It is mythical violence that demands sacrifice, and holds power over bare life; whereas divine violence is non-sacrificial and expiatory.  One should therefore not be afraid to assert the formal parallel between the state annihilation of homini sacer, for example the Nazi killing of the Jews, and the revolutionary terror, where one can also kill without committing a crime and without sacrifice” (199).  This passage has alarmed certain people.  Not without reason.  Zizek then goes on, quoting Benjamin, “Less possible and also less urgent [the implication is, than revolutionary/divine/pure violence itself] for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases…”  He concludes from Benjamin’s warnings that the instance of divine violence (now fully transformed into revolutionary violence) is not really of the order of Being—and then, I think oddly, he goes on to say that it is rather of the order of Event.  This is odd because the identification, or rather the assertion, of the Event is absolutely crucial in Badiou’s scheme of things.  Zizek compares the event to the miracle that, although it might have empirically verifiable causes, remains for the believer a miracle.  Fine, but a sort of identification none the less plays a crucial role here. 

In the end, though, divine or revolutionary violence comes to have a fairly banal meaning for Zizek.  We might in Rancièrian language say that it is violence erupting from the part of no part, or in Badiou’s terms, from beside the void.  Of course these are not the same thing, and I think that Zizek does not want to exactly endorse either of them.  Rather, for him, divine violence is that which comes from those who are the constitutive outside of the capitalist system.  And here is where the split within the field of objective violence returns.  Divine violence is that which takes place when a subject has risen from subjective freedom into the simultaneous necessities of the symbolic and the structural.  The agent of divine violence is both existentially free (inside the imperious terror of baseless, necessary action), and objectively free (pinioned to the outside of the inflexible wheel of capital).  He says,

Divine violence should thus be conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: not in the perverse sense of ‘we are doing it as mere instruments of the People’s Will,’ but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision.  It is a decision (to kill, to risk or loose one’s own life) made in absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other.  If it is extra-moral, it is not ‘immoral,’ it does not give the agent license just to kill with some kind of angelic innocence.  When those outside the structured social field strike ‘blindly,’ demanding and enacting immediate justice/vengeance, this is divine violence.  Recall, a decade or so ago, the panic in Rio de Janeiro when crowds descended from the favelas into the rich part of the city and started looting and burning supermarkets.  This was indeed divine violence…They were like biblical locusts, the divine punishment for men’s sinful ways (202).

This last sentence is a bit over the top, forced on Zizek by the example, and not entirely in keeping with the theoretical frame.  Or perhaps it suggests that underneath it all, the content inherited from Marx is in fact just an approach to the moral content of the global economy?

The very last move of Zizek’s book is remarkable, and I think suggests a serious and perhaps significant convergence between him and the authors of Commonwealth.  Zizek goes to Robespierre and Che Guevara, and the notion of revolutionary love.  Commenting on Robespierre, “divine violence belongs to the order of the Event: as such, its status is radically subjective, it is the subject’s work of love” (203), and then further at the end of the chapter, “the notion of love should be given here all its Paulinian weight; the domain of pure violence, the domain outside law (legal power), the domain of the violence which is neither law-founding nor law-sustaining, is the domain of love” (205).  Here is the subjective, I think we must say ethical, side to the more familiar and comprehensive, the more apparently provocative but in fact conventional, claim of Zizek’s that Hitler was not violent enough.  The subject is asked to embrace their own radical brokenness, to assume the gap constitutive of others in an act of terribly violent love.  If this ethical act is accompanied by a genuinely radical politico-economic reconfiguration—if, to emphasize, the twin terrors of both symbolic and systemic objectivity can be assumed in the freedom of the subject—then we will have made revolution.

The second, 2009, edition of In Defense of Lost Causes contains an afterword entitled “What is Divine about Divine Violence?”  It is essentially a clarification and restatement of the ideas presented in Violence—indeed certain sections are simply word-for-word copies (it is also, incidentally, a venue for the continuation of Zizek’s polemic with Simon Critchley).  Although a few examples are operative here, a central one is Haiti.  Zizek follows Susan Buck-Morss in her Hegelian reading of the Revolution a certain distance, but stops at what he calls her “liberal limit” (471).  Her liberalism—and this is not a wrong definition of liberalism—amounts to a rejection of (most) revolutionary activity on the grounds that it will simply make things worse than they already are.  Revolution is thus to be avoided, to be treated as a fearful last resort.  Zizek firmly rejects this.  He suggests that we must, “distinguish as clearly as possible between two types of violence; radical emancipatory violence against the ex-oppressors and the violence which serves the continuation and/or establishment of hierarchical relations of exploitation and domination” (471).  A familiar move.  From this perspective, “we should thus condemn the elimination of all whites in Haiti not out of humanitarian compassion for the innocent among them, but based on the insight that the true strategic goal of this process was to establish a new hierarchical order among the remaining blacks, justified by the ethnic ideology of blackness” (472). Zizek has here the great virtue of stating his position in a clear and unambiguous manner. 

He is simply drawing necessary conclusions from his premises when he says that it is entirely possible and necessary to distinguish between the acts of violence committed by the Tonton Macoutes (Duvalier) and the chimères (Lavalas).  Precisely the same acts, the same mode of inflicting painful death on a human being, has objectively different meanings.  When a murder is committed by the chimères, for Zizek, “these desperate acts of violent popular self-defense are again examples of divine violence: they are to be located ‘beyond good and evil,’ in a kind of politico-religious suspension of the ethical.  Although we are dealing with what, to an ordinary moral consciousness, cannot but appear as ‘immoral’ acts of killing, one has no right to condemn them, since they are the reply to years, centuries even, of systematic state violence and economic exploitation” (478).  He thus arrives at a “minimal definition of divine violence,” that is, “the counter-violence to the excess of violence that pertains to state power” (483).  Then, framing a distinction that is significantly different from the earlier one between emancipator/repressive violence, he says, “if mythic violence serves the state, divine violence doesn’t serve another, better, purpose (such as life) – it doesn’t serve anything, which is why it is divine” (484-5).  It is not too clear how this divine, purposeless violence, lines up with a revolutionary violence that is anti-repressive.  Perhaps the relationship is one of inclusion.  A struggle for freedom is not positive, but rather anti-repressive.  It is therefore not really to any positive purpose.  In this sense it is divine, even though Zizek also sees Nazi genocidal violence as basically divine, but not therefore revolutionary.  So some objective element must enter into the evaluation of purposeless, pure, violence, to distinguish that which is revolutionary from that which is not.  And here again, Zizek is at least very clear.  I think we can assume that the objective element that intervenes to assign violence into the mythic or the divine is the same as that which distinguishes divine-revolutionary from simply divine-sovereign violence.  This is the ethical commitment.  He says, returning to the Haitian example, “chimères and Tonton Macoutes may perform exactly the same act—lynching an enemy—but where the first act is divine, the second is only the ‘mythic’ obscene and illegal support of power.  The risk involved in reading or assuming an act as divine is fully the subject’s own” (485). 

That, I believe, is a fair presentation of what Zizek says about violence in these two recent texts.  My summary has of course had an element of evaluation and criticism, but an adequate contextualization of the arguments in the history of such arguments and in the contemporary political and theoretical contexts would be required to mount a proper critique of the corner into which Zizek has painted himself.  The major issue, it seems to me, is how to reconcile the above justification—or story about how to distinguish justifiable and non-justifiable acts of violence from one another—with what I take to be Zizek’s ‘positive’ political project of subtraction.  Is the analytic here worked out simply a way to think about that violence which is acceptable in pursuing and defending specific instances of subtraction?  Violence ceases to be revolutionary, divine, the moment that it becomes something the revolutionary government wields ‘so that the people do not do it themselves’?  This certainly is the case, but as a criterion it doesn’t go very far.  A fuller account of what Zizek means by subtractive, Bartleby-inspired, politics is required before one could move forward here.  And that’s for another day.   

Memory and Intellect

     perché appressando sé al suo disire,

nostro intelletto si profonda tanto,

che dietro la memoria non può ire.

Dante, Paradiso, I.7-9

Geuss' realism

Raymond Geuss’ Philosophy and Real Politics [2008] is a highly polemical book. Its position is basically anti-Rawlsian, against bringing the ‘is/ought’ distinction into political philosophy, and articulates itself as beginning with “assumptions that are opposite of the ‘ethics-first’ view.” The position is identified with a Hobbesian tradition. Geuss’ vision of political philosophy is sketched out in the first half of the book, and clarified in fierce opposition of Rawls in particular, but also Nozik, in the second half. Here, I’m going to give the first, programmatic, part of the book in summary form.

Geuss’s four “interrelated theses that…ought to structure a more fruitful approach to politics” (9) are, as slogans, realism, the study of contextualized action, emphasis on the historical location of politics, and finally, the “assumption that…politics is more like the exercise of a craft or art,” than the application of a theory to reality (15). It seems to me that it is the first and last of these four that are potentially problematic. There is nothing remarkable in history and context—the rub always comes in arguing about what constitutes correct or sufficient history and context. Even the emphasis on action, it seems to me, is not unreasonable or immediately problematic.

For Geuss, it seems that realism really means a non-normative opposition to the analysis of ideal reconstructions or models. This is not simply a materialism of interests, although this is important to Geuss, but also, “tautologically,” that “ideals and aspirations influence…behavior and hence are politically relevant, only to the extent to which they do actually influence behavior in some way” (9). Further on, Geuss says that his Hobbesian, realist approach “is centered on the study of historically instantiated forms of collective human action with special attention to the variety of ways in which people can structure and organise their action so as to limit and control forms of disorder that they might find excessive or intolerable for other reasons” (22). I am suspicious of the rhetoric of ‘hard’ realism as opposed to flabby idealism. Yet I am tempted to read all this, especially given the last half of the book, as a polemical move that can safely be treated as more or less internal to political theory as an academic discipline. This is against Rawls; or put differently, it is Skinner against the rarified history of ideas. Now, the notion of politics, or political action, as basically a skill or craft, seems to me to be close to mystification. Geuss says,

a skill is an ability to act in a flexible way that is responsive to features of the given environment with the result that action or interaction is enhanced…One of the signs that I have acquired a skill, rather than that I have been simply mechanically repeating things I have seen others do…is that I can attain interesting and positively valued results in a variety of different and unexpected circumstances. (15-16)

To say that such and such a political actor is successful because they are politically skilled seems to me to have advanced matters no further than the famous old saw about how it is the dormative quality of opium that makes you sleepy. Maybe Geuss wants us to understand that establishing criteria for success, even local ones, is simply not the task of political philosophy? Whose task is it? Is it a pointless, hopeless task? If so, it seems no more pointless than asking why one person is good at playing the piano and another is not, which is after all a question with answers.

Geuss does give us a clear picture of what he thinks the tasks of political philosophy ought to be, but before that, he presents us with a somewhat oddly mixed together set of questions under three basic headings, with which he thinks political philosophical investigation should start and that “map out the realm of politics” (30). He groups these questions under three proper names: Lenin, Nietzsche, and Max Weber (23). Lenin is made to stand for the contextually complex ‘who [does what to] whom [to whose benefit]?’ Further, and tangentially related to this, is the question of the partisanship of political philosophy itself. Essentially Geuss’ position here seems to be that all theory is somehow political, but that this does not require every ‘theorization’ to commence with a political declaration of faith, or even that isometry must exist between a given clutch of interdependent theoretical positions and the political positions to which they correspond (29). The second set of questions, grouped quite loosely under ‘Nietzsche,’ are basically those thrown up around “priorities, preference, timing,” by the assertion (observation?) that “politics as we know it is a matter of differential choice: opting for A rather than B. Thus politics is not about doing what is good or rational or beneficial simpliciter…but about the pursuit of what is good in a particular concrete case by agents with limited powers and resources, where choice of one thing to pursue means failure to choose and pursue another” (30-31). Finally, ‘Weber’ indicates all that is implied by a notion of ‘legitimacy.’ It seems that Geuss wants to step back from Weber’s interest in the ‘legitimate monopoly on violence’ and take legitimacy more generally. Without a sense of how, in a given society at a given moment, legitimation takes place, one cannot “attain a moderately realistic understanding of why a society behaves politically in a certain way” (36).

There are, says Geuss, five basic tasks of political philosophy. The first three are discussed together, and the last two are given a more extended treatment. Political philosophy is to strive for understanding, evaluation, and orientation. It may also play a role in conceptual innovation, and in grappling with ideology. Although Geuss has various interesting things to say about the first three, their interrelation is summed up nicely in a description of the modern condition, “Humans in modern societies are driven by a perhaps desperate hope that they might find some way of mobilising their theoretical and empirical knowledge and their evaluative systems so as both to locate themselves and their projects in some larger imaginative structure that makes sense to them, and to guide their actions to bring about what they would find to be satisfactory…outcomes or to improve in some other way the life they live” (42). Political philosophy may also have a real effect in the world by changing how we think about it. Geuss’ example is the rise of the modern concept of the state, which, he says, had the power it did because it smuggled in alongside its conceptual clarity and explanatory power, certain normative assumptions. We can see historically how, in the aftermath of Hobbes’ invention of the concept of the state, “the ‘tool’ develops a life of its own, and can become an inextricable part of the fabric of life itself” (49). In a nice Hegelian ending, “often you can’t see the original problem clearly until you have the conceptual instrument, but having the instrument can then change the ‘real’ situation with which one is confronted so that other, unforeseen problems emerge” (50). There is, finally, the question of ideology. This is controversial, but Geuss proceeds with clarity, giving us the following definition of ideology, “An ideology…is a set of beliefs, attitudes, preferences, that are distorted as a result of the operation of specific relations of power; the distortion will characteristically take the form of presenting these beliefs, desires, etc., as inherently connected with some universal interest, when in fact they are subservient to particular interests” (52). For Geuss, political philosophy can have different orientations toward a given ideology. Ideology might well enlist in various ways the support of political philosophy—but the latter may also take up the “reputable” task of “analyzing and criticizing” it (55).

Although Geuss makes several interesting moves in the next part of the text, I do not want to enter into it. He essentially sweeps to the side the entire project of a normative, ‘kantian,’ political theory. I will only pull out the following, itself a rather ‘normative’ statement.

Historical arguments…are not in the first instance intended to support or refute a thesis; rather, they aim to change the structure of argument by directing attention to a new set of relevant questions that need to be asked. They are contributions not to finding out whether this or that argument is invalid or poorly supported, but to trying to change the questions people ask about concepts and arguments (68).

Jean-Paul Sartre, antisemite

The argument of Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive is straightforward. Antisemitism is a specific and recognizable psychological posture in the world. It is a reaction against the fundamental human condition of freedom and contingency, and it takes the shape of a synthesizing manichean antirationalism. Antisemitism is, it goes without saying, an inauthentic way of being. Not, for all that, powerless. The most famous phase of Sartre’s argument is that it is ultimately the antisemite who makes the Jew (first clearly state p 83, but see also 112, 123-4, 167, 170, 176). The word and the condition are fixed onto certain human beings, who are thus forced to confront Jewishness as their situation. Many respond inauthentically to their condition, and Sartre, in what is probably the part of the book to which people most object, describes in great detail the various well-known traits of ‘the Jew’ (relation to money, social climbing, and so on) as attempts to disavow and escape their situation. For instance, money is important to (inauthentic) Jews because it is related to abstraction (pp 156-60) and thus to an escape from the particularity thrust upon them. Although there is some typically daring and penetrating psychological analysis here (particularly, I think, around the notion of flesh), this is all very close to the edge of having simply accepted that ‘Jews are that way,’ that is, to have given up a great deal too much already. Although Sartre claims to pass no moral judgment on those unable to live authentically, of course the goal, and the only real way to escape psychological distortion, is to authentically assume both one’s freedom and one’s situation. This is the task of Jews themselves—but, and here Sartre quotes Richard Wright—there isn’t a Jewish problem, there’s an antisemitic problem. Ultimately Sartre feels that only the revolution will genuinely put an end to this—and here is yet another of the series of comparisons between the worker-bourgeois and the jew-antisemite dyads. This was also although I’m not sure Sartre would have known this, Marx’s answer. Until the revolution comes, though, there are many ways to act against antisemitism, but essentially through collective propaganda. Form leagues against antisemitism, make it illegal to say antisemitic things, use the school systems. Make everyone understand that, in a word, antisemitism hurts us all.

In the end, this is a remarkably French-republican response. Of course Sartre is clear that he is speaking specifically about France, the situation of French Jews and French antisemites. Although it would be useful to place this book in Sartre’s broader development, I think it would also be interesting to be precise about the tensions in it between republican-coded universalism (the famous last lines: “Pas de Français ne sera libre tant que les Juifs ne jouiront pas de la plénitude de leurs droits. Pas un Français ne sera en sécurité tant qu’un Juif, en France et dans le monde entier, pourra craindre pour sa vie” p 189) and the drive to the concrete implicit in Sartre’s whole philosophy (here represented by his peculiar notion of “libéralisme concret” p 181). I wonder if this book, written in the immediate aftermath of the war, isn’t really best regarded as a document of Popular Front era non-communist left republicanism.

Since it would be so easy to show in a facile way how Sartre reproduces the antisemitism he sets out to criticize (it would be less easy, but still possible, to do so seriously), I want finally to give a chunk of text from the end of Sartre’s psychological sketch of the inauthentic Jew.

Tel est donc cet homme traqué, condamné à se choisir sur la base de faux problèmes et dans une situation fausse, privé du sens métaphysique par l’hostilité menaçante de la société qui l’entour, acculé à un rationalisme de désespoir. Sa vie n’est qu’une longue fute decant les autres et devant lui-même. On lui a aliéné jusqu’à son propre corps, on a coupé en deux sa vie affective, on l’a réduit à poursuivre dans un monde qui le rejette, le rêve impossible d’une fraternité universelle. A qui la faute ? Ce sont nos yeux qui lui renvoient l’image inacceptable qu’il veut se dissimuler. Ce sont nos paroles et nos gestes – toutes nos paroles et nos gestes, notre antisémitisme mais aussi bien notre libéralisme condescendant – qui l’ont empoisonné jusqu’aux moelles ; c’est nous qui le contraignons à se choisir juif, soit qu’il se fuie, soit qu’il se revendique, c’est nous qui l’avons acculé au dilemme de l’inauthenticité ou de l’authenticité juive. Nous avons créé cette espèce d’hommes qui n’a de sens que comme produit artificiel d’une société capitaliste (ou féodale), qui n’a pour raison d’être que de servir de bouc émissaire à une collectivité encore prélogique. Cette espèce d’hommes qui témoigne de l’homme plus que toutes les autres parce qu’elle est née de réactions secondaires à l’intérieur de l’humanité, cette quintessence d’homme, disgrâciée, déracinée, originellement vouée à l’inauthenticité ou au martyre. Il n’est pas un de nous qui ne soit, en cette circonstance, totalement coupable et même criminel ; le sang juif que les nazis ont versé retombe sur toutes nos têtes. (pp 167-8)

Strong words. This is a species of radical responsibility that, I think, today is entirely without moral force. Certainly the left has been unable to use it to their advantage. ‘Collective responsibility’ has, in general, been kept out of political discourse. It would be good to think about why and how this took place.

Perhaps it is simply so radical and so obviously true that it becomes meaningless. The sharpest formulation: we are all responsible for the system of global exploitation and misery for which the word ‘capitalism’ usually stands. This easily comes to seem like a morally impossible situation. It sounds a great deal like the anarchist justifications for random violence of the 1890s. This would be the beginning of a long discussion of the various life-style leftisms that exist today, and how the very massiveness of the situation makes an essentially aesthetic (not even ethical) response the most apparently sensible one. Although, if I am interested in the difficulty of fusing an ethic of personal freedom and responsibility with a Marxist historical and economic perspective, then I am in danger of sitting down to read The Critique of Dialectical Reason.

Magic table

From Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958]:

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible. (pp 52-3)

Cognition, on the other hand, belongs to all, and not only to intellectual or artistic work processes; like fabrication itself, it is a process with a beginning and end, whose usefulness can be tested, and which, if it produces no results, has failed, like a carpenter’s workmanship has failed when he fabricates a two-legged table. (p 171)

At first I thought that these two examples, both employing a table, as she often does, were in contradiction with one another. Now it seems to me rather that while action is not work, work is none the less required to erect the space of action (the disappearing table). It would be worth going back to On Revolution to see if she discusses the actual practical activity of ‘making revolution’ as work. Work, then, could found new politics in a way that labor never could. Makes sense.

Karl Marx, Antisemite

Around the turn of 1843 and 1844, Marx wrote two essays, which it seems to me articulate in contrasting ways themes, or attack problems, to which he would return throughout his life. I have in mind “On the Jewish Question” and “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction.” In both ‘critique’ is mobilized in the service of ‘emancipation,’ although especially the latter is very much up for definition. Obviously, generations of very smart and well read people have looked at these texts and thought about what they mean for Marxism in general. After I’ve had my look, I’m going to be very interested in what other people have to say. But for the moment, here is my own naïve reading.

“On the Jewish Question” is a disagreement with Bruno Bauer. Bauer, says Marx, argues that Jewish emancipation will come only when the Jews have ceased to be Jewish, so that they can participate in the universal project of political emancipation. Marx begins by criticizing Bauer’s notion of political emancipation. He does some very interesting things here, ultimately arguing that what is really at stake is human emancipation, which is quite a different project. In the colorful second part of the essay, we get his full answer: since the essence of Jewishness is the essence of modern egotistical material relations, that is the economy, and the economy is that against which human emancipation must struggle, what must really happen is that society must be liberated from the Jews (or at least Jewishness).

“A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” on the other hand, is about Germany. It contains the famous assertions of Germany’s backwardness, of how the German contribution to politics is in its philosophy. At issue here is German emancipation. Whereas in France, every group feels that it is universal, in Germany, no class is able to do so properly. What is needed, then, is a class the suffering of which is universal, so that when it comes to power, even if it acts only for itself, it acts for all. This is the proletariat.

Much about these essays is surprising. What surprises me most is the specificities that they suggest lie at the origin of Marx’s categories. Could it really be that it was only after encountering the French utopians themselves later in the 1840s that Marx came to think of a genuinely total system? The distance between the German need for the proletariat in 1844 and its world historical role in the Manifesto of 1847—this is striking. Perhaps although Marx is dealing with Germany, really he means the whole world, although it seems as though France is for him a very different situation—or perhaps the point is just that France will approach the proletarian revolution in decorous and beautifully balanced stages, while Germany must have only it or nothing at all? And then, of course, there is the Jew. Now, on one level, I recognize that Marx is standing here with a long tradition in European historiography and social thought that saw (and for some, still sees) ‘the Jews’ as a modernizing force. Jewish ideals, or Jewish economic practices, Jewish social reality—somehow, Jews were a force for political and economic development, the development of individual freedoms and rights. Especially toward the end of the 19^th century, this was a major philosemitic argument. Yet, it is not hard to see how ‘force for political liberalism and modernization’ could be goose-stepped into ‘rootless cosmopolitan agitator.’ So there is Marx (and there is also Nietzsche, you might say). Marx does not yet use the word ‘capital,’ he does not yet seem to have the concept. How seriously are we to take his identification of the acquisitive haggling egoism of the marketplace—and therefore economic modernity—with, as he says, the everyday reality of Jewish life?

In another context, it would be worth walking with some care through Marx’s arguments in “On the Jewish Question,” but for the moment, I only want to cite the last sentences of the first part, what comes just after Marx cites Rousseau on how the founding of a new ‘people’s institution’ is really to change human nature,

All emancipation is reduction of the human world and of relationships to man himself.

Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other to the citizen, the moral person.

On when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed.

These passages are from the Penguin Early Writings (p 234). I’m not sure that the translation is perfect (compare). For instance, the word ‘reduction’ is used to render both, in the first sentence, the German ‘Zurückführung’ and in the second sentence the German ‘Reduktion.’ One might also question rendering ‘Kraft’ as ‘force.’ Then, although I don’t want to make too much of this, in the third sentence the English ‘recognized’—a word sure to make one’s ears prick up in these contexts—is used for ‘erkannt.’ The Hegelian word, I think, is ‘anerkennen.’ Enough with the pedantic stuff. The main point is that for Marx, at this moment, emancipation is the end of the political. Or, what is not perhaps the same thing, emancipation is complete when man no longer apprehends social forces in ‘der Gestalt der politischen Kraft.’ Politics is a form of alienation just like religion, and emancipation is its destruction.

Back to the Jews. Marx finally poses the question thus: “what specific social element must be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the capacity of the present-day Jew for emancipation is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the present-day world. This relation flows inevitably from the special position of Judaism in the enslaved world of today.” The question should not be taken theologically, but practically, “the secular basis of Judaism” is “Practical need, self-interest.” Thus the “secular cult of the Jew” becomes “Haggling. What is his secular God? Money” (236). Giving the best possible reading to this, and perhaps being overgenerous, one might read this as saying that ‘the Jew’ is a collective identity forced on a group of people who have been historically made dependent upon exclusively economic capacities—that is, in the feudal world, they were excluded from the politico-social relations that gave structure to society, relations which, incidentally, Marx analyzes in criticist terms in “Contribution…” The point here is that Marx

Recognize[ses] in Judaism the presence of a universal and contemporary anti-social element whose historical evolution – eagerly nurtured by the Jews in its harmful aspects – has arrived at its present peak, a peak at which it will inevitably disintegrate.

The emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism. (237)

…

The contradiction between the practical political power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and financial power in general. Ideally speaking the former is superior to the latter, but in actual fact it is in thrall to it. (238)

Which is to say that although the Jews are nominally at a disadvantage, discriminated against by political power in various ways, in possession of fewer rights—in fact, their power through money is enormous. Reading all of this just after Nietzsche is enlightening. I do not believe that, for instance, historically, the idea of France or ‘frenchness’ has anything like this kind of relation to the idea of ‘the Jew.’ I will look later at Sartre’s essay. One can almost give a good reading (although, to bring in an important rhetorical device of Marx’s, the stench is too great to be mistaken) to the following, “Civil society ceaselessly begets the Jew from its own entrails” (238). And then,

Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may stand. Money debases all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore deprived the entire world – both the world of man and of nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and existence; this alien essence dominates him and he worships it.

The god of the Jews has been secularized and become the god of the world. Exchange is the true god of the Jew. His god is nothing more than illusory exchange (239).

Marx reads the history of theological Judaism as the Jesuitical (!) justification of self-interest. So we get what, in another context, might be an interesting idea, “the religion of practical need could not by its very nature find its completion in theory but only in practice, precisely because its truth is practice” (240). And so it follows that the Judaism would never really fall out of practice, “since the real essence of the Jew is universally realized and secularized in civil society, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious essence, which is nothing more than the ideal expression of practical need” (241). All of which is why, in the end, in what I take to be a radicalization of Bauer’s thesis, the social (as opposed to political) emancipation of the Jews is equal to “the emancipation of society from Judaism” (241).

Germany, in its actually existing state, is beneath criticism. Marx’s language is very powerful here. In trying to think about what ‘critique’ might mean in general, and specifically now, it seems to me reasonable to compare the situation today to the relation in which Marx claimed that it stood to the actual political reality of Germany in 1844, “But war on conditions in Germany! By all means! They are below the level of history, they are beneath all criticism, but they remain an object of criticism, in the same way as the criminal who is beneath the level of humanity remains an object for the executioner…Criticism is no longer an end in itself, but simply a means. The essential force that moves it is indignation and its essential task is denunciation” (246). Critique, it seems to me, finding that denunciation and indignation got boring, has moved back to suggesting that it can generate change by being its own end. That is, critique wants to make revolution and posits itself as the empty destroying revolutionary force—that which, when it takes power, is fully universal because purely negative. If there are those who feel that this is basically a capitulation to capital…The reversal, or stopping-up, of the practice of enlightenment is also of interest: “the important thing is not to permit the German a single moment of self-deception or resignation. The actual burden must be made even more burdensome by creating an awareness of it. The humiliation must be increased by making it public” (247).

At this point, Marx’s discussion of revolution is remarkably voluntaristic. He says, “if one class is to be the class of liberation per excellence, then another class must be the class of overt oppression” (254). In France, it was and to some extent remains the nobility and the clergy who stood as oppressors. No class in Germany has the moral energy to fill this role; also lacking is a class with the “breadth of spirit… [the] genius which can raise material force to the level of political power, that revolutionary boldness,” that would allow it to claim the universal for itself. Rather, in a striking phrase that must excite literary critics to no end, and perhaps made Lukacs feel that his preparations had all been worth it, “the relationship of the different spheres of German society is therefore epic rather than dramatic” (255).

The comparison is to France. There, “it is enough to be something for one to want to be everything.” Here, Marx sees France going through, modeling, a series of political revolutions and partial emancipations, whereas, for Germany, there can be only one. He says,

In France partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germany universal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation [what about the Jews?]. In France it is the reality, in Germany the impossibility, of emancipation in stages that must give birth to complete freedom. In France each class of the people is a political idealist and experiences itself first and foremost not as a particular class but as the representative of social needs in general. The role of emancipator therefore passes in a dramatic movement from one class of the French people to the next, until it finally reaches that class which no longer realizes social freedom by assuming certain conditions external to man and yet created by human society, but rather by organizing all the [pgbrk] conditions of human existence on the basis of social freedom. In Germany, however, where practical life is as devoid of intellect as intellectual life is of practical activity, no class of civil society has the need and the capacity for universal emancipation unless under the compulsion of its immediate situation, of material necessity and of its chains themselves.

So where is the positive possibility of German emancipation?

This is our answer. In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general; a sphere of society which can no longer lay claim to a historical title, but merely to a human one, which does not stand in one-sided opposition to the consequences but in all-sided opposition to the premises of the German political system; and finally a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from – and therefore emancipating – all the other spheres of society, which is, in a word, the total loss of humanity and which can therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat. (255-6)

To sum up what it seems to me has so far happened. The vision of Marxist revolution as we have come to recognize it—inevitable, catastrophic, redemptive, carried by a universal class forced into action by their own radical dispossession—as it would be articulated in the Manifesto and elsewhere, originally applied to Germany in contrast to France. The revolution was to take place in Germany. The universal condition that, ultimately, strips the proletariat of its humanity and therefore renders it capable of redeeming humanity in general through revolution—is the spirit of Jewishness. Is it not the case, then, that the entire movement of Marx’s thought begins with the drama of German and Jew? And further, that for him the drama concludes when the German eliminates the Jew?