LOUIS
FOR MARX
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Translated by Ben Brewster
Originally published in France as Pour Marx
by François Maspero, S.A., Paris.
© 1965 by Librairie François Maspero
These pages are dedicated |
[ - Part 1 - ]
Contents |
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Introduction: Today 21 | ||
1 | ||
2 | ||
3 | ||
4 |
The 'Piccolo Teatro': | |
5 |
The '1844 Manuscripts' of Karl Marx 153 | |
6 |
On the Materialist Dialectic 161 | |
7 |
Marxism and Humanism 219 | |
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Glossary 249 | |
Index 259 [not available] |
I should like briefly to present this translation of Pour Marx to an English audience, and, on the same occasion, to make use of the time that has elapsed since it was written to take some 'bearings' on the philosophical content and the ideological significance of this small book.
Pour Marx appeared in France in 1965. But only its Introduction ('Today') dates from that year. All the other chapters were published earlier, between 1960 and 1964, in the form of articles in French Communist Party journals.[*] They were collected together exactly as originally written, without any corrections or alterations.
To understand these essays and to pass judgement on them, it is essential to realize that they were conceived, written and published by a Communist philosopher in a particular ideological and theoretical conjuncture**. So these texts must be taken for what they are. They are philosophical essays, the first stages of a long-term investigation, preliminary results which obviously demand correction; this investigation concerns the specific nature of the principles of the science and philosophy founded by Marx. However, these philosophical essays do not derive from a merely erudite or speculative investigation. They are, simultaneously, interventions in a definite conjuncture.
As the Introduction shows, this conjuncture is, first, the theoretical and ideological conjuncture in France, more particularly the present conjuncture in the French Communist Party and in
French philosophy. But as well as this peculiarly French conjuncture, it is also the present ideological and theoretical conjuncture in the international Communist movement.
Of course, the essays you are about to read do not bear on the political elements of this conjuncture (the policies of the Communist Parties, the split in the international Communist movement). They deal with the ideological and theoretical problems present in the conjuncture and produced by it. In certain respects these problems are new ones; in others they refer us back to debates which have long characterized the history of the workers' movement.
A consideration of the recent elements of this conjuncture reveals that, since Stalin's death, the International Communist movement has lived in a conjuncture dominated by two great events: the critique of the 'cult of personality' by the Twentieth Congress, and the rupture that has occurred between the Chinese Communist Party and the Soviet Communist Party.
The denunciation of the 'cult of personality', the abrupt conditions and the forms in which it took place, have had profound repercussions, not only in the political domain, but in the ideological domain as well. In what follows I shall deal only with the ideological reactions of Communist intellectuals.
The critique of Stalinist 'dogmatism' was generally 'lived' by Communist intellectuals as a 'liberation'. This 'liberation' gave birth to a profound ideological reaction, 'liberal' and 'ethical' in tendency, which spontaneously rediscovered the old philosophical themes of 'freedom', 'man', the 'human person' and 'alienation'. This ideological tendency looked for theoretical justification to Marx's Early Works, which do indeed contain all the arguments of a philosophy of man, his alienation and liberation. These conditions have paradoxically turned the tables in Marxist philosophy. Since the 1930s Marx's Early Works have been a war-horse for petty bourgeois intellectuals in their struggle against Marxism; but little by little, and then massively, they have been set to work in the interests of a new 'interpretation' of Marxism which is today being openly developed by many Communist intellectuals, 'liberated' from Stalinist dogmatism by the Twentieth Congress. The themes of 'Marxist Humanism' and the 'humanist' interpretation of Marx's work have progressively and irresistibly
imposed themselves on recent Marxist philosophy, even inside Soviet and Western Communist Parties.
If this ideological reaction, characteristic above all of Communist intellectuals, has, despite some resistance, been capable of such a development, it is because it has benefited from the direct or indirect support of certain political slogans laid down by the Communist Parties of the U.S.S.R. and the West. On one side, for example, the Twenty-second Congress of the C.P.S.U. declared that with the disappearance of the class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat had been 'superseded' in the U.S.S.R., that the Soviet State is no longer a class State but the 'State of the Whole People'; and that the U.S.S.R. has embarked on the 'construction of communism', guided by the 'humanist' slogan, 'Everything for Man'. On the other, for example, Western Communist Parties have pursued policies of unity with socialists, democrats and Catholics, guided by certain slogans of related resonance, in which the accent is put on the 'peaceful transition to socialism', on 'Marxist' or 'socialist humanism', on 'dialogue', etc.
The 'humanist' interpretations of Marxist theory which have developed under these definite circumstances represent a new phenomenon as compared with the period just past (the period between 1930 and 1956). However, they have many historical precedents in the history of the workers' movement. Marx, Engels and Lenin, to refer only to them, ceaselessly struggled against ideological interpretations of an idealist, humanist type that threatened Marxist theory. Here it will suffice to recall Marx's rupture with Feuerbach's humanism, Engels's struggle against Dühring, Lenin's long battle with the Russian populists, and so on. This whole past, this whole heritage, is obviously part of the present theoretical and ideological conjuncture of the international Communist movement.
To return to the recent aspects of this conjuncture, I shall add the following remark.
In the text entitled 'Marxism and Humanism', dating from 1963, I have already interpreted the present inflation of the themes of Marxist or socialist ' Humanism' as an ideological phenomenon. In no sense was I condemning ideology as a social reality as Marx says, it is in ideology that men 'become conscious' of their class conflict and 'fight it out'; in its religious, ethical, legal and
political forms, etc., ideology is an objective social reality; the ideological struggle is an organic part of the class struggle. On the other hand, I criticized the theoretical effects of ideology, which are always a threat or a hindrance to scientific knowledge. And I pointed out that the inflation of the themes of 'Marxist humanism' and their encroachment on Marxist theory should be interpreted as a possible historical symptom of a double inability and a double danger. An inability to think the specificity of Marxist theory, and, correlatively, a revisionist danger of confusing it with pre-Marxist ideological interpretations. An inability to resolve the real (basically political and economic ) problems posed by the conjuncture since the Twentieth Congress, and a danger of masking these problems with the false 'solution' of some merely ideological formulae.
It was in this conjuncture that the texts you are about to read were conceived and published. They must be related to this conjuncture to appreciate fully their nature and function: they are philosophical essays, with theoretical investigations as their objects, and as their aim an intervention in the present theoretico-ideological conjuncture in reaction to its dangerous tendencies.
Very schematically, I should say that these theoretical texts contain a double 'intervention', or, if you prefer, they 'intervene' on two fronts, to trace, in Lenin's excellent expression, a 'line of demarcation' between Marxist theory on the one hand, and ideological tendencies foreign to Marxism on the other.
The object of the first intervention is to 'draw a line of demarcation' between Marxist theory and the forms of philosophical (and political) subjectivism which have compromised it or threaten it: above all, empiricism and its variants, classical and modern -- pragmatism, voluntarism, historicism, etc. The essential moments of this first intervention are: a recognition of the importance of Marxist theory in the revolutionary class struggle, a distinction of the different practices, a demonstration of the specificity of 'theoretical practice', a first investigation into the revolutionary specificity of Marxist theory (a total distinction between the idealist dialectic and the materialist dialectic), etc.
This first intervention is situated essentially in the terrain of the confrontation between Marx and Hegel.
The object of the second intervention is to 'draw a line of demarcation' between the true theoretical bases of the Marxist science of history and Marxist philosophy on the one hand, and, on the other, the pre-Marxist idealist notions on which depend contemporary interpretations of Marxism as a 'philosophy of man' or a 'Humanism'. The essential moments of this second intervention are: the demonstration of an 'epistemological break' in the history of Marx's thought, a basic difference between the ideological 'problematic' of the Early Works and the scientific 'problematic' of Capital ; first investigations into the specificity of Marx's theoretical discovery, etc.
This second intervention is situated essentially in the terrain of the confrontation between Marx's Early Works and Capital.
Behind the detail of the arguments, textual analyses and theoretical discussions, these two interventions reveal a major opposition; the opposition that separates science from ideology, or more precisely, that separates a new science in process of self-constitution from the prescientific theoretical ideologies that occupy the 'terrain' in which it is establishing itself. This is an important point; what we are dealing with in the opposition science/ideologies concerns the 'break' relationship between a science and the theoretical ideology in which the object it gave the knowledge of was 'thought' before the foundation of the science. This 'break' leaves intact the objective social domain occupied by ideologies (religion, ethics, legal and political ideologies, etc.). In this domain of non-theoretical ideologies, too, there are 'ruptures' and 'breaks', but they are political (effects of political practice, of great revolutionary events) and not 'epistemological'.
This opposition between science and ideology and the notion of an 'epistemological break' that helps us to think its historical character refer to a thesis that, although always present in the background of these analyses, is never explicitly developed: the thesis that Marx's discovery is a scientific discovery without historical precedent, in its nature and effects.
Indeed, in conformity with the tradition constantly reiterated by the classics of Marxism, we may claim that Marx established a new science : the science of the history of 'social formations'. To
be more precise, I should say that Marx 'opened up' for scientific knowledge a new 'continent', that of history -- just as Thales opened up the 'continent' of mathematics for scientific knowledge, and Galileo opened up the 'continent' of physical nature for scientific knowledge.
I should add that, just as the foundation of mathematics by Thales 'induced' the birth of the Platonic philosophy, just as the foundation of physics by Galileo 'induced' the birth of Cartesian philosophy, etc., so the foundation of the science of history by Marx has 'induced' the birth of a new, theoretically and practically revolutionary philosophy, Marxist philosophy or dialectical materialism. The fact that, from the standpoint of its theoretical elaboration, this unprecedented philosophy still lags behind the Marxist science of history (historical materialism) is explained by historico-political reasons and also simultaneously by theoretical reasons: great philosophical revolutions are always preceded and 'borne along' by the great scientific revolutions 'active' in them, but long theoretical labour and long historical maturing are required before they can acquire an explicit and adequate form. If the accent is laid on Marxist philosophy in the texts you are about to read, it is to assess both its reality and its right to existence, but also its lateness, and to begin to provide it with a theoretical form of existence a little more adequate to its nature.
Naturally, these texts are marked, and sometimes sensibly so, not only by errors and inaccuracies, but also by silences or half silences. Neither the impossibility of saying everything at once nor the urgency of the conjuncture completely explain all these silences and their effects. In fact, I was not equipped for an adequate treatment of certain questions, some difficult points were obscure to me; as a result, in my texts I did not take into account certain important problems and realities, as I should have. As a 'self-criticism', I should like to signal two particularly important points.
If I did lay stress on the vital necessity of theory for revolutionary practice, and therefore denounced all forms of empiricism, I did
not discuss the problem of the 'union of theory and practice' which has played such a major role in the Marxist-Leninist tradition. No doubt I did speak of the union of theory and practice within 'theoretical practice', but I did not enter into the question of the union of theory and practice within political practice. Let us be precise; I did not examine the general form of historical existence of this union: the 'fusion' of Marxist theory and the workers' movement. I did not examine the concrete forms of existence of this 'fusion' (organization of the class struggle -- trade unions, parties -- the means and methods of direction of the class struggle by these organizations, etc.). I did not give precise indications as to the function, place and role of Marxist theory in these concrete forms of existence: where and how Marxist theory intervenes in the development of political practice, where and how political practice intervenes in the development of Marxist theory.
I have learnt from experience that my silence on these questions has not been without its consequences for certain ('theoreticist') 'readings' of my essays.
Similarly, if I did insist on the theoretically revolutionary character of Marx's discovery, and pointed out that Marx had founded a new science and a new philosophy, I left vague the difference distinguishing philosophy from science, a difference which is, however, of great importance. I did not show what it is, as distinct from science, that constitutes philosophy proper : the organic relation between every philosophy, as a theoretical discipline and even within its theoretical forms of existence and exigencies, and politics. I did not point out the nature of this relation, which, in Marxist philosophy, has nothing to do with a pragmatic relation. So I did not show clearly enough what in this respect distinguishes Marxist philosophy from earlier philosophies.
I have learnt from experience that my half-silence on these questions has not been without its consequences for certain ('positivist') 'readings' of my essays.
I intend to return to these two important questions, which are intimately connected from a theoretical and practical point of view, in later studies.
page 17
'On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions' first appeared in La Pensée, March-April 1961.
'Contradiction and Overdetermination' first appeared in La Pensée, December 1962. Its appendix is published here for the first time.
' Notes on a Materialist Theatre' first appeared in Esprit, December 1962.
'The 1844 Manuscripts' first appeared in La Pensée, February 1963.
'On the Materialist Dialectic' first appeared in La Pensée, August 1963.
'Marxism and Humanism' first appeared in the Cahiers de l'I.S.E.A., June 1964.
'A Complementary Note on "Real Humanism"' first appeared in La Nouvelle Critique, March 1965.
I should like to thank all those editors of magazines who were obliging enough to allow me to collect these pieces together into the present volume.
page 19
Introduction Today
page 21
I venture to publish together these jottings, which have appeared in various magazines during the last four years. Some of them are now unobtainable; this is my first, purely practical, excuse. If, hesitant and incomplete as they are, they nevertheless make some sense, this should be brought out by grouping them together; this is my second excuse. Ultimately, I must present them for what they are: the documentation of a particular history.
Nearly all these pieces were born of some conjuncture: a comment on a book, an answer to criticisms or objections, an analysis of a theatrical production, etc. They are marked by their date of birth, even in their inconsistencies, which I have decided not to correct. I have struck out a few passages of unduly personal polemic; I have inserted the small number of words, notes or pages that had then to be cut, either to spare the feelings of those with certain prejudices, or to reduce my expositions to a suitable length; I have also corrected a few references.
Each the result of a special occasion, these pieces are none the less products of the same epoch and the same history. In their own way they are witnesses to the unique experience which all the philosophers of my generation who tried to think with Marx had to live: the investigation of Marx's philosophical thought, indispensable if we were to escape from the theoretical impasse in which history had put us.
History: it had stolen our youth with the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War, and in the War as such it had imprinted in us the terrible education of deeds. It surprised us just as we entered the world, and turned us students of bourgeois or petty bourgeois origin into men advised of the existence of classes, of their struggles and aims. From the evidence it forced on us we drew the only possible conclusion, and rallied to the political organization of the working class, the Communist Party.
The War was just over. We were brutally cast into the Party's
great political and ideological battles: we had to measure up to our choice and take the consequences.
In our political memory this period remains the time of huge strikes and demonstrations, of the Stockholm Appeal and of the Peace Movement -- the time when the great hopes aroused by the Resistance faltered and the long and bitter struggle began in which innumerable human hands would push back the shadow of catastrophe into the Cold War horizon. In our philosophical memory it remains the period of intellectuals in arms, hunting out error from all its hiding-places; of the philosophers we were, without writings of our own, but making politics out of all writing, and slicing up the world with a single blade, arts, literatures, philosophies, sciences with the pitiless demarcation of class -- the period summed up in caricature by a single phrase, a banner flapping in the void: 'bourgeois science, proletarian science'.
To defend Marxism, imperilled as it was by Lysenko's 'biology', from the fury of bourgeois spite, some leaders had relaunched this old 'Left-wing' formula, once the slogan of Bogdanov and the Proletkult. Once proclaimed it dominated everything. Under its imperative line, what then counted as philosophy could only choose between commentary and silence, between conviction, whether inspired or forced, and dumb embarrassment. Paradoxically, it was none other than Stalin, whose contagious and implacable system of government and thought had induced this delirium, who reduced the madness to a little more reason. Reading between the lines of the few simple pages in which he reproached the zeal of those who were making strenuous efforts to prove language a superstructure, we could see that there were limits to the use of the class criterion, and that we had been made to treat science, a status claimed by every page of Marx, as merely the first-comer among ideologies. We had to retreat, and, in semi-disarray, return to first principles.
I write these lines for my own part and as a Communist, inquiring into our past solely for some light on our present which will then illuminate our future.
Neither bitterness nor nostalgia makes me recall this episode -- but the wish to sanction it by a comment that will supersede it. We were at the age of enthusiasm and trust; we lived at a time when the enemy gave no quarter, the language of slander sustaining his
aggression. But this did not save us from remaining long confused by this detour into which certain of our leaders, far from holding us back from the slope of theoretical 'Leftism', had actively led us, without the others showing any sign of restraining them or giving us any warning or advice. So we spent the best part of our time in agitation when we would have been better employed in the defence of our right and duty to know, and in study for production as such. For we did not even take this time. We knew nothing of Bogdanov and the Proletkult, or of Lenin's historic struggle against political and theoretical Leftism; we were not even intimately familiar with Marx's mature works, as we were only too eager and happy to rediscover our own burning passions in the ideological flame of his Early Works. But what of our elders? Those whose responsibility it was to show us the way -- how was it that they too were living in the same ignorance? This long theoretical tradition, worked out in so many trials and struggles, blazoned by the testimony of so many great texts, how could it have become a dead letter for them?
In this way we came to realize that under the protection of the reigning dogmatism a second, negative, tradition, a French one this time, had prevailed over the first, a second tradition, or rather what, echoing Heine's 'German misery', we might call, our 'French misery': the stubborn, profound absence of any real theoretical culture in the history of the French workers' movement. The French Party may have been able to reach its present position by using the general theory of the two sciences in the form of a radical proclamation, it may have been able to make it the test and proof of its indisputable political courage, but this also meant that it was living on meagre theoretical reserves: those it had inherited from the past of the French workers' movement as a whole. In fact, other than the utopians Saint-Simon and Fourier whom Marx loved to invoke, Proudhon who was not a Marxist at all, and Jaurès who was, but only slightly, where were our theoreticians? In Germany there were Marx and Engels and the earlier Kautsky; in Poland, Rosa Luxemburg; in Russia, Plekhanov and Lenin; in Italy, Labriola, who (when we had Sorel!) could correspond with Engels as equal to equal, then Gramsci. Who were our theoreticians? Guesde? Lafargue?
A whole theoretical analysis would be necessary to account for this poverty, so striking when compared with the richness of other traditions. With no pretensions to undertake this analysis, a few reference points can at least be established. Without the efforts of intellectual workers there could be no theoretical tradition (in history or philosophy) in the workers' movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The founders of historical and dialectical materialism were intellectuals (Marx and Engels), their theory was developed by intellectuals (Kautsky, Plekhanov, Labriola, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Gramsci). Neither at the beginning, nor long afterwards, could it have been otherwise -- it cannot be otherwise, neither now nor in the future: what can change and will change is the class origin of intellectual workers but not their characterization as intellectuals.* This is so for those reasons of principle that Lenin, following Kautsky, impressed upon us: on the one hand, the 'spontaneous' ideology of the workers, if left to itself, could only produce utopian socialism, trade-unionism, anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism; on the other hand, Marxist socialism, presupposing as it does the massive theoretical labour of the establishment and development of a science and a philosophy without precedent, could only be the work of men with a thorough historical, scientific and philosophical formation, intellectuals of very high quality. That such intellectuals appeared in Germany, Russia, Poland and Italy, either to found Marxist theory or to become masters of it, is not a matter of isolated accidents; the social, political, religious, ideological and moral conditions prevailing in these countries quite simply denied their intellectuals any activity, the ruling classes (the nobility and the bourgeoisie, allied and united in their class interests and supported by the Churches) could in general only offer them servile and de-
risory employment. Under these conditions, the intellectuals could only seek their freedom and future at the side of the working class, the only revolutionary class. In France, on the contrary, the bourgeoisie had been revolutionary, it had long been able to assimilate intellectuals to its revolution and to keep them as a whole at its side after the seizure and consolidation of power. The French bourgeoisie had successfully carried through a complete, clear revolution, driving the feudal class from the political stage (1789, 1830, 1848), it had set the seal of its own command on the unity of the nation in the process of revolution itself, it had defeated the Church and then adopted it, but only to separate itself at the right moment and cover itself with the slogans of liberty and equality. It had been able to use both its position of strength and its past standing to offer the intellectuals a sufficient space and future, sufficiently honourable functions and a sufficient margin of freedom and illusion to keep them within its authority and under the control of its ideology. With a few important exceptions, who were precisely exceptions, French intellectuals accepted this situation and felt no vital need to seek their salvation at the side of the working class; and when they did rally to the working class, they could not radically cast off the bourgeois ideology in which they were steeped and which survived in their idealism and reformism (Jaurès) or in their positivism. Nor was it accidental that the French Party had to devote a long and courageous struggle to the reduction and destruction of a reflex 'ouvriériste ' distrust of intellectuals, which was in its own way the expression of a long historical experience of continual deception. Thus it was that the forms of bourgeois domination themselves long deprived the French workers' movement of the intellectuals indispensable to the formation of an authentic theoretical tradition.
Need I add another national reason? This is the pitiful history of French philosophy in the 130 years following the Revolution of 1789, its spiritualist persistence in reaction, not just conservatism, from Maine de Biran and Cousin to Bergson, its contempt for history and for the people, its deep but narrow-minded ties with religion, its relentless hostility to the only mind worthy of interest that it produced, Auguste Comte, its incredible ignorance and lack of culture. In the last thirty years things have taken another turn. But the burden of a long century of official philosophical
stupidity has also played a part in crushing theory in the workers' movement itself.
The French Party was born into this theoretical vacuum, and it grew despite this vacuum, filling in as best it could the existing lacunas, nourishing itself from our sole authentic national tradition, the political tradition for which Marx had the most profound respect. Despite itself it has been marked by this primacy of politics and a certain failure to appreciate the role of theory, particularly philosophical theory as opposed to political and economic theory. If it was able to rally itself some famous intellectuals, these were above all great writers, novelists, poets and painters, great natural scientists and also a few first-rate historians and psychologists -- and they came primarily for political reasons; but it very rarely attracted men of sufficient philosophical formation to realize that Marxism should not be simply a political doctrine, a 'method' of analysis and action, but also, over and above the rest, the theoretical domain of a fundamental investigation, indispensable not only to the development of the science of society and of the various 'human sciences', but also to that of the natural sciences and philosophy. It was the fate of the French Party to be born and to grow up in these conditions: without the heritage and assistance of a national theoretical tradition, and as an inevitable consequence, without a theoretical school which could produce masters.
This was the reality we had to learn to spell out, and that all by ourselves. By ourselves because there were no really great philosophical maîtres in Marxist philosophy amongst us to guide our steps. Politzer, who might have become one if he had not sacrificed the great philosophical achievements he had in him to urgent economic tasks, left us only the genius of the errors in his Critique des Fondements de la Psychologie. He was dead, assassinated by the Nazis. We had no maîtres. There was no lack of willing spirits, nor of highly cultivated minds, scholars, literary figures and many more. But I mean masters of Marxist philosophy, emerging from our own history, accessible and close to us. This last condition is not a superfluous detail. For we have inherited from our national past not only a theoretical vacuum, but also a monstrous philosophical and cultural provincialism (our form of chauvinism), we do not read foreign languages, and more or less ignore any
thing that happens to be thought beyond a line of mountains, the course of a river or the width of a sea. Is it an accident that in France the study and commentary of Marx's work has long been the work of a few courageous and tenacious Germanists? If the only name fit for display beyond our frontiers is that of a quiet lone hero, who, unknown to French learning, spent many years in a minutely detailed study of the left neo-Hegelian movement and the Young Marx: Auguste Cornu?
These reflections throw some light on our predicament, but they do not abolish it. We are indebted to Stalin for the first shock, even within the evil for which he bears the prime responsibility. His death set off the second -- his death and the Twentieth Congress. But meanwhile life had done its work among us as well.
Neither a political organization nor a real theoretical culture can be created overnight or by a simple fiat. So many of the young philosophers who had come of age in the War or just after it were worn out by exhausting political tasks but had taken no time off from them for scientific work! It is also characteristic of our social history that the intellectuals of petty bourgeois origin who came to the Party at that time felt that they had to pay in pure activity, if not in political activism, the imaginary Debt they thought they had contracted by not being proletarians. In his own way, Sartre provides us with an honest witness to this baptism of history: we were of his race as well; it is no doubt a gain of recent years that our younger comrades seem free of this Debt, which perhaps they pay in some other way. Philosophically speaking, our generation sacrificed itself and was sacrificed to political and ideological conflict alone, implying that it was sacrificed in its intellectual and scientific work. A number of scientists, occasionally even historians, and even a few rare literary figures came through unscathed or at least only slightly bruised. There was no way out for a philosopher. If he spoke and wrote the philosophy the Party wanted he was restricted to commentary and slight idiosyncrasies in his own way of using the Famous Quotations. We had no audience among our peers. Our enemies flung in our faces the charge that we were merely politicians; our most enlightened colleagues argued that we ought to study our authors before judging them, justify our principles objectively before proclaiming and applying them. To
force their best opponents to pay them some attention, some Marxist philosophers were reduced, and by a natural movement which did not conceal a conscious tactic, to disguising themselves -- disguising Marx as Husserl, Marx as Hegel, Marx as the ethical and humanist Young Marx -- at the risk of some day taking the masks for the reality. This is no exaggeration, simply the facts. We are still living the consequences today. We were politically and philosophically convinced that we had reached the only firm ground in the world, but as we could not demonstrate its existence or firmness philosophically, no one else could see any firm ground beneath our feet -- only conviction. I am not discussing the spread of Marxism, which luckily can radiate from other spheres than the philosophical: I am discussing the paradoxically precarious existence of Marxist philosophy as such. We thought we knew the principles of all possible philosophy, and of the impossibility of all philosophical ideology, but we failed to offer an objective and public proof of the apodicity of our convictions.
Once aware of the vacuity of the dogmatic approach we were left with only one way of accepting the impossible situation we had been reduced to in our efforts towards a real grasp of our philosophy: to treat philosophy itself as impossible. So we were led into that great, subtle temptation, the 'end of philosophy ', encouraged by some enigmatically clear texts in Marx's Early Works (1840-45) and of his epistemological break (1845). Those of us who were the most militant and the most generous tended towards an interpretation of the 'end of philosophy' as its 'realization' and celebrated the death of philosophy in action, in its political realization and proletarian consummation, unreservedly endorsing the famous Thesis on Feuerbach which, in theoretically ambiguous words, counterposes the transformation of the world to its interpretation. It was, and always will be, only a short step from here to theoretical pragmatism. Others, of more scientific bent, proclaimed the 'end of philosophy' in the manner of certain positivistic formulations in The German Ideology, in which it is no longer the proletariat or revolutionary action which take in charge the realization and thereby the death of philosophy, but science pure and simple: does not Marx call on us to stop philosophizing, that is, stop developing ideological reveries so that we can move on to the study of reality itself? Politically speaking, the former of these two
readings was that of the majority of those philosophical militants who gave themselves completely to politics, making philosophy the religion of their action; the latter on the contrary was that of those critics who hoped that a scientific approach would fill out the empty proclamations of dogmatic philosophy. But if both groups made their peace with politics, both paid for it with a bad philosophical conscience: a practico-religious or positivist death of philosophy is not really a philosophical death of philosophy.
So we contorted ourselves to give philosophy a death worthy of it: a philosophical death. Here again we sought support from more texts of Marx and from a third reading of the others. We proceeded on the assumption that the end of philosophy could not but be critical, as the sub-title of Capital proclaims that book to be of Political Economy: it is essential to go to the things themselves, to finish with philosophical ideologies and to turn to the study of the real world -- but, and this we hoped would secure us from positivism, in turning against ideology, we saw that it constantly threatened 'the understanding of positive things', besieged science and obscured real characteristics. So we entrusted philosophy with the continual critical reduction of the thread of ideological illusion, and in doing so we made philosophy the conscience of science pure and simple, reduced it completely to the letter and body of science, but merely turned against its negative surroundings as its vigilant conscience, the consciousness of those surroundings that could reduce them to nothing. Thus philosophy was certainly at an end, but it survived none the less as an evanescent critical consciousness for just long enough to project the positive essence of science on to the threatening ideology, and to destroy the enemy's ideological phantasms, before returning to its place amongst its allies. The critical death of philosophy, identified with its evanescent philosophical existence, gave us at last the status and deserts of a really philosophical death, consummated in the ambiguous act of criticism. Now philosophy had no fate other than the consummation of its critical death in the recognition of the real, and in the return to the real, real history, the progenitor of men, of their acts and their thoughts. Philosophy meant retracing on our own account the Young Marx's critical Odyssey, breaking through the layer of illusion that was hiding the real world from us, and arriving at last in our native land: the land of history, to find there
at last the rest afforded by reality and science in concord under the perpetual vigilance of criticism. According to this reading, there could no longer be any question of a history of philosophy; how could there be a history of dissipated phantasms, of shadows traversed? The only history possible is that of reality, which may dimly arouse in the sleeper incoherent dreams, but these dreams, whose only continuity is derived from their anchorage in these depths, can never make up a continent of history in their own right. Marx said so himself in The German Ideology : 'Philosophy has no history'. When you come to read the essay 'On the Young Marx' you will be able to judge if it is not still partly trapped in the mythical hope for a philosophy which will achieve its philosophical end in the living death of a critical consciousness.
the very act of founding his theory of history, has still largely to be constituted, since, as Lenin said, only the corner-stones have been laid down; that the theoretical difficulties we debated in the dogmatist night were not completely artificial -- rather they were largely the result of a meagrely elaborated Marxist philosophy; or better, that in the rigid caricatural forms we suffered or maintained, including the theoretical monstrosity of the two sciences, something of an unsettled problem was really present in grotesque and blind forms -- the writings of theoretical Leftism (the young Lukács and Korsch) which have recently been re-published are a sufficient witness to this; and finally, that our lot and our duty today is quite simply to pose and confront these problems in the light of day, if Marxist philosophy is to acquire some real existence or achieve a little theoretical consistency.
I should like to give some guidance to the road traversed by the notes you are about to read.
The piece on the Young Marx is still trapped in the myth of an evanescent critical philosophy. Nevertheless, it does contain the essential question, irresistibly drawn from us even by our trials, failures and impotence: What is Marxist philosophy? Has it any theoretical right to existence? And if it does exist in principle, how can its specificity be defined? This essential question was raised practically by another, apparently historical but really theoretical, question: the question of reading and interpreting Marx's Early Works. It was no accident that it seemed indispensable to submit these famous texts to a serious critical examination, these texts which had been inscribed on every banner, in every field, these openly philosophical texts in which we had hoped to read Marx's personal philosophy more or less spontaneously. The question of Marxist philosophy and of its specificity with respect to Marx's Early Works necessarily implied the question of Marx's relation to the philosophies he had espoused or traversed, those of Hegel and Feuerbach, and therefore the question of where he differed with them.
It was the study of the works of Marx's youth that first led me to a reading of Feuerbach, and to the publication of the most
important of his theoretical writings in the period from 1839 to 1845 (cf. my remarks on pp. 43-8). The same reasoning quite naturally led me to begin studying the nature of the relation of Hegel's philosophy to Marx's in the detail of their respective concepts. The question of the specific difference of Marxist philosophy thus assumed the form of the question as to whether or no there was an epistemological break in Marx's intellectual development indicating the emergence of a new conception of philosophy -- and the related question of the precise location of this break. Within the field defined by this question the study of Marx's Early Works acquired a decisive theoretical importance (does this break exist?) as well as a historical importance (where is it located'?).
Of course, the quotation in which Marx himself attests to and locates this break ('we resolved . . . to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience') in 1845 at the level of The German Ideology, can only be treated as a declaration to be examined, and falsified or confirmed, not as a proof of the existence of the break and a definition of its location. The examination of the status of this declaration called for a theory and a method -- the Marxist theoretical concepts in which the reality of theoretical formations in general (philosophical ideologies and science) can be considered must be applied to Marx himself. Without a theory of the history of theoretical formations it would be impossible to grasp and indicate the specific difference that distinguishes two different theoretical formations. I thought it possible to borrow for this purpose the concept of a 'problematic ' from Jacques Martin to designate the particular unity of a theoretical formation and hence the location to be assigned to this specific difference, and the concept of an 'epistemological break ' from Gaston Bachelard to designate the mutation in the theoretical problematic contemporary with the foundation of a scientific discipline. That one of these concepts had to be constructed and the other borrowed does not imply at all that either is arbitrary or foreign to Marx, on the contrary, it can be shown that both are present and active in Marx's scientific thought, even if this presence is most often in the practical state.* These two concepts provided me with the indis-
pensable theoretical minimum authorizing a pertinent analysis of the process of the theoretical transformation of the Young Marx, and leading to some precise conclusions.
Let me summarize here in extremely abbreviated form some of the results of a study which took several years and to which the pieces I am presenting here bear only partial witness.
(1) There is an unequivocal 'epistemological break ' in Marx's work which does in fact occur at the point where Marx himself locates it, in the book, unpublished in his lifetime, which is a critique of his erstwhile philosophical (ideological) conscience: The German Ideology. The Theses on Feuerbach, which are only a few sentences long, mark out the earlier limit of this break, the point at which the new theoretical consciousness is already beginning to show through in the erstwhile consciousness and the erstwhile language, that is, as necessarily ambiguous and unbalanced concepts.
(2) This 'epistemological break' concerns conjointly two distinct theoretical disciplines. By founding the theory of history (historical materialism), Marx simultaneously broke with his erstwhile ideological philosophy and established a new philosophy (dialectical materialism). I am deliberately using the traditionally accepted terminology (historical materialism, dialectical materialism) to designate this double foundation in a single break. And I should point out two important problems implied by this exceptional circumstance. Of course, if the birth of a new philosophy is simultaneous with the foundation of a new science, and this science is the science of history, a crucial theoretical problem arises: by what necessity of principle should the foundation of the scientific theory of history ipso facto imply a theoretical revolution in philosophy? This same circumstance also entails a considerable practical consequence: as the new philosophy was only implicit in the new science it might be tempted to confuse itself with it. The German Ideology sanctions this confusion as it reduces philosophy, as we have noted, to a faint shadow of science, if not to the empty
generality of positivism. This practical consequence is one of the keys to the remarkable history of Marxist philosophy, from its origins to the present day.
I shall examine these two problems later.
(3) This 'epistemological break' divides Marx's thought into two long essential periods: the 'ideological' period before, and the scientific period after, the break in 1845. The second period can itself be divided into two moments, the moment of Marx's theoretical transition and that of his theoretical maturity. To simplify the philosophical and historical labours in front of us, I should like to propose the following provisional terminology which registers the above periodization.
(a ) I propose to designate the works of the earlier period, that is, everything Marx wrote from his Doctoral Dissertation to the 1844 Manuscripts and The Holy Family by the already accepted formula: Marx's Early Works.
(b ) I propose to designate the writings of the break in 1845, that is, the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology which first introduce Marx's new problematic, though usually still in a partially negative and sharply polemical and critical form, by a new formula: the Works of the Break.
(c ) I propose to designate the works of the period 1845-57 by a new formula: the Transitional Works. While it is possible to assign the crucial date of the works of 1845 (the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology ) to the break separating the scientific from the ideological, it must be remembered that this mutation could not produce immediately, in positive and consummated form, the new theoretical problematic which it inaugurated, in the theory of history as well as in that of philosophy. In fact, The German Ideology is a commentary, usually a negative and critical one, on the different forms of the ideological problematic Marx had rejected. Long years of positive study and elaboration were necessary before Marx could produce, fashion and establish a conceptual terminology and systematics that were adequate to his revolutionary theoretical project. That is why I propose to designate the works written between 1845 and the first drafts of Capital (around 1845-57), that is, the Manifesto, the Poverty of Philosophy, Wages, Price and Profit, etc., as the Works of Marx's Theoretical Transition.
(d ) Finally, I propose to designate all the works after 1857 as Marx's Mature Works. This gives us the following classification:
(a ) the liberal-rationalist moment of his articles in Die Rheinische Zeitung (up to 1842).
(b ) the communalist-rationalist moment of the years 1842-5.
As my essay on 'Marxism and Humanism' briefly suggests, the presupposition of the works of the first moment is a problematic of Kantian-Fichtean type. Those of the second moment, on the contrary, rest on Feuerbach's anthropological problematic. The Hegelian problematic inspires one absolutely unique text, which is a rigorous attempt to 'invert' Hegelian idealism, in the strict sense, into Feuerbach's pseudo-materialism: this text is the 1844 Manuscripts. Paradoxically, therefore, if we exclude the Doctoral Dissertation, which is still the work of a student, the Young Marx was never strictly speaking a Hegelian, except in the last text of his ideologico-philosophical period; rather, he was first a Kantian Fichtean, then a Feuerbachian. So the thesis that the Young Marx was a Hegelian, though widely believed today, is in general a myth. On the contrary, it seems that Marx's one and only resort to Hegel in his youth, on the eve of his rupture with his 'erstwhile philosophical conscience', produced the prodigious 'abreaction' indispensable to the liquidation of his 'disordered' consciousness. Until then he had always kept his distance from Hegel, and to grasp the movement whereby he passed from his Hegelian university studies to a Kantian-Fichtean problematic and thence to a Feuerbachian problematic, we must realize that, far from being close to Hegel, Marx moved further and further away from him. With Fichte and Kant he had worked his way back to the end of the eighteenth century, and then, with Feuerbach, he regressed to the heart of the theoretical past of that century, for in his own way Feuerbach may be said to represent the 'ideal' eighteenth-century philosopher,
the synthesis of sensualist materialism and ethico-historical idealism, the real union of Diderot and Rousseau. It would be difficult not to speculate that Marx's sudden and total last return to Hegel in that genial synthesis of Feuerbach and Hegel, the 1844 Manuscripts, might not have been an explosive experiment uniting the substances of the two extremes of the theoretical field which he had until then frequented, that this extraordinarily rigorous and conscientious experiment, the most extreme test of the 'inversion' of Hegel ever attempted might not have been the way Marx lived practically and achieved his own transformation, in a text which he never published. Some idea of the logic of this prodigious mutation is given by the extraordinary theoretical tension of the 1844 Manuscripts, for we know in advance the paradox that the text of the last hours of the night is, theoretically speaking, the text the furthest removed from the day that is about to dawn.
(5) The Works of the Break raise delicate problems of interpretation, precisely as a function of their place in the theoretical formation of Marx's thought. Those brief sparks, the Theses on Feuerbach, light up every philosopher who comes near them, but as is well known, a spark dazzles rather than illuminates: nothing is more difficult to locate in the darkness of the night than the point of light which breaks it. One day we will have to show that these eleven deceptively transparent theses are really riddles. As for The German Ideology, it offers us precisely a thought in a state of rupture with its past, playing a pitiless game of deadly criticism with all its erstwhile theoretical presuppositions: primarily with Feuerbach and Hegel and all the forms of a philosophy of consciousness and an anthropological philosophy. But this new thought so firm and precise in its interrogation of ideological error, cannot define itself without difficulties and ambiguities. It is impossible to break with a theoretical past at one blow: in every case, words and concepts are needed to break with words and concepts, and often the old words are charged with the conduct of the rupture throughout the period of the search for new ones. The German Ideology presents the spectacle of a re-enlisted conceptual reserve standing in for new concepts still in training . . . and as we usually judge these old concepts by their bearing, taking them at their word, it is easy to stray into a positivist conception (the end of all philosophy) or an individualist-humanist conception (the subjects
of history are 'real, concrete men'). Or again, it is possible to be taken in by the ambiguous role of the division of labour, which, in this book, plays the principal part taken by alienation in the writings of his youth, and commands the whole theory of ideology and the whole theory of science. This all arises from its proximity to the break, and that is why The German Ideology alone demands a major critical effort to distinguish the suppletory theoretical function of particular concepts from the concepts themselves. I shall return to this.
(6) Locating the break in 1845 is not without important theoretical consequences as regards not only the relation between Marx and Feuerbach, but also the relation between Marx and Hegel. Indeed, Marx did not first develop a systematic critique of Hegel after 1845; he had been doing so since the beginning of the second moment of his Youthful period, in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843 Manuscript), the Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843), the 1844 Manuscripts and The Holy Family. But the theoretical principles on which this critique of Hegel was based are merely a reprise, a commentary or a development and extension of the admirable critique of Hegel repeatedly formulated by Feuerbach. It is a critique of Hegelian philosophy as speculative and abstract, a critique appealing to the concrete-materialist against the abstract-speculative, i.e. a critique which remains a prisoner of the idealist problematic it hoped to free itself from, and therefore a critique which belongs by right to the theoretical problematic with which Marx broke in 1845.
In the search for Marxist philosophy and in its definition, it is clear that the Marxist critique of Hegel should not be confused with the Feuerbachian critique of Hegel, even if Marx started it in his name. The decision as to whether or no the critique in Marx's writings of 1843 is Marxist (in fact it is Feuerbachian through and through) makes a major difference to our idea of the nature of Marx's later philosophy. I stress this as a crucial point for contemporary interpretations of Marxist philosophy, by which I mean serious, systematic interpretations, based on real philosophical, epistemological and historical knowledge, and on rigorous reading methods -- not mere opinions (books can be written on this basis too). For example, there are the writings of Colletti and Della Volpe in Italy, which I regard as of the greatest
importance, because in our time they are the only scholars who have made an irreconcilable theoretical distinction between Marx and Hegel and a definition of the specificity of Marxist philosophy the conscious centre of their investigations. Their work certainly presupposes the existence of a break between Marx and Hegel, and between Marx and Feuerbach, but they locate it in 1843, at the level of the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right! Such a simple displacement of the break profoundly affects all the theoretical conclusions drawn from it, and not only their conception of Marxist philosophy, but also, as a later work will show, their reading and interpretation of Capital.
That this definition cannot be read directly in Marx's writings, that a complete prior critique is indispensable to an identification of the location of the real concepts of Marx's maturity; that the identification of these concepts is the same thing as the identification of their location; that all this critical effort, the absolute precondition of any interpretation, in itself presupposes activating a minimum of provisional Marxist theoretical concepts bearing on the nature of theoretical formations and their history; that the precondition of a reading of Marx is a Marxist theory of the differential nature of theoretical formations and their history, that is, a theory of epistemological history, which is Marxist philosophy itself; that this operation in itself constitutes an indispensable circle in which the application of Marxist theory to Marx himself appears to be the absolute precondition of an understanding of Marx and at the same time as the precondition even of the constitution and development of Marxist philosophy, so much is clear. But the circle implied by this operation is, like all circles of this kind, simply the dialectical circle of the question asked of an object as to its nature, on the basis of a theoretical problematic which in putting its object to the test puts itself to the test of its object. That Marxism can and must itself be the object of the
epistemological question, that this epistemological question can only be asked as a function of the Marxist theoretical problematic, that is necessity itself for a theory which defines itself dialectically, not merely as a science of history (historical materialism) but also and simultaneously as a philosophy, a philosophy that is capable of accounting for the nature of theoretical formations and their history, and therefore capable of accounting for itself, by taking itself as its own object. Marxism is the only philosophy that theoretically faces up to this test.
All this critical effort is indispensable, not only to a reading of Marx which is not just an immediate reading, deceived either by the false transparency of his youthful ideological conceptions, or by the perhaps still more dangerous false transparency of the apparently familiar concepts of the works of the break. This work which is essential to a reading of Marx is, in the strict sense, simultaneously the work of theoretical elaboration of Marxist philosophy. A theory which enables us to see clearly in Marx, to distinguish science from ideology, to deal with the difference between them within the historical relation between them and to deal with the discontinuity of the epistemological break within the continuity of a historical process, a theory which makes it possible to distinguish a word from a concept, to distinguish the existence or non-existence of a concept behind a word, to discern the existence of a concept by a word's function in the theoretical discourse, to define the nature of a concept by its function in the problematic, and thus by the location it occupies in the system of the 'theory'; this theory which alone makes possible an authentic reading of Marx's writings, a reading which is both epistemological and historical, this theory is in fact simply Marxist philosophy itself.
We set out in search of it. And here it begins to emerge, along with its own first, most elementary demand: the demand for a simple definition of the preconditions of this search.
March, 1965
Part One Feuerbach's 'Philosophical Manifestoes'
page 43
Under the title Philosophical Manifestoes, I have gathered together the most important texts and articles published by Feuerbach between 1839 and 1845: A Contribution fo the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy (1839), the Introduction to The Essence of Christianity (1841), the Provisional Theses for the Reform of Philosophy (1842), the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), the preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity (1843) and an article replying to Stirner's attacks (1845). This selection does not include all of Feuerbach's output between 1839 and 1845, but it does represent the essentials of his thought during these historic years.
Why the title 'Philosophical Manifestoes'?
The expression is not Feuerbach's own. I hazard it for two reasons, one subjective, the other objective.
Anyone who reads the texts on the Reform of Philosophy and the Preface to the Principles will realize that they are true proclamations, a passionate annunciation of the theoretical revelation which is to deliver man from his chains. Feuerbach calls out to Humanity. He tears the veils from universal History, destroys myths and lies, uncovers the truth of man and restores it to him. The fullness of time has come. Humanity is pregnant with the imminent revolution which will give it possession of its own being. Let men at last become conscious of this, and they will be in reality what they are in truth: free, equal and fraternal beings.
Such exhortations are certainly manifestoes as far as their author is concerned.
So were they for their readers. Particularly for the young radical intellectuals of the 1840s, arguing one another through the contradictions of the 'German misery' and neo-Hegelian philosophy. Why the 1840s? Because they were the testing years of this
philosophy. In 1840, the Young Hegelians, who believed there was a goal to history -- the realm of reason and liberty -- looked to the heir to the throne for the realization of their hopes -- the end of the autocratic and feudal Prussian order, the abolition of censorship, the reduction to reason of the Church, in short, the installation of a regime of political, intellectual and religious liberty. But hardly had he reached the throne than this so-called 'liberal' heir, now Frederick William IV, returned to despotism. This confirmation and reaffirmation of tyranny was a terrible blow to the theory which was the basis and sum of all their hopes. In principle, history should be reason and liberty; in fact, it was merely unreason and slavery. The facts had provided a lesson to be learnt: this very contradiction. But how could it be grasped? At this point The Essence of Christianity appeared, and then the pamphlets on the Reform of Philosophy. These texts may not have liberated humanity, but they did release the Young Hegelians from their theoretical impasse. Precisely at the moment of their greatest disarray, Feuerbach gave them an exact answer to the dramatic question they were asking each other about man and history! The echo of this relief and enthusiasm can be seen forty years later in Engels. Feuerbach was precisely the 'New Philosophy ' that made tabula rasa of Hegel and all speculative philosophy, that put the world which philosophy had made to walk on its head back on to its feet again, that denounced every alienation and every illusion but also gave reasons for them, and made the unreason of history thinkable and criticizable in the name of reason itself, that at last reconciled idea and fact, and made the necessity of a world's contradiction and the necessity of its liberation comprehensible. This is why the neo-Hegelians, as the old Engels had to admit, 'all became at once Feuerbachians'. This is why they received his books as Manifestoes announcing the Paths of the Future.
I should add that these Manifestoes are philosophical. For, quite obviously, everything was still taking place in philosophy. But philosophical events had become historical events as well.
What is particularly interesting about these writings?
First of all, they are of historical interest. I did not choose these works of the 1840s simply because they were the most famous and the most lasting (indeed they have lasted until today, when certain
existentialists and theologians look to them for the origins of a modern tendency), but also and primarily because they belong to a historical moment and had a historical role (among a restricted circle, of course, but one with a great future). Feuerbach was both witness to and actor in the crisis in the theoretical development of the Young Hegelian movement. It is essential to read Feuerbach to understand the writings of the Young Hegelians between 1840 and 1845. In particular, this reveals the extent to which Marx's early works are impregnated with Feuerbach's thought. Not only is Marx's terminology from 1842 and 1845 Feuerbachian (alienation, species being, total being, 'inversion' of subject and predicate, etc.) but, what is probably more important, so is the basic philosophical problematic. Articles like On the Jewish Question or the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State cannot be understood outside the context of the Feuerbachian problematic. Naturally, Marx's themes go beyond Feuerbach's immediate preoccupations, but the theoretical schemata and problematic are the same. To use his own expression, Marx did not really 'settle accounts' with this problematic until 1845. The German Ideology is the first work indicating a conscious and definitive rupture with Feuerbach's philosophy and his influence.
A comparative study of Feuerbach's writings and Marx's early works makes possible a historical reading of Marx's writings, and a better understanding of his development.
Does this historical understanding have any theoretical significance?
Certainly. Once Feuerbach's writings in the years from 1839 to 1845 have been read it is impossible to make any mistakes as to the derivation of the majority of the concepts traditionally used to justify 'ethical ' interpretations of Marx. Such famous expressions as 'philosophy's world-to-be', 'the inversion of subject and predicate', 'for man the root is man himself', 'the political State is the species-life of man', the 'suppression and realization of philosophy', 'philosophy is the head of human emancipation and the proletariat is its heart', etc., etc., are expressions directly borrowed from Feuerbach, or directly inspired by him. All the expressions of Marx's idealist 'humanism' are Feuerbachian. Admittedly, Marx did not merely quote or repeat Feuerbach, who, as these Manifestoes show, was always thinking about politics,
but hardly ever talked about it. His whole concern was with the criticism of religion, of theology, and with that secular disguise for theology known as speculative philosophy. The Young Marx, on the contrary, was haunted first by politics and then by that for which politics is merely the 'heaven': the concrete life of alienated men. But in On the Jewish Question, Hegel's Philosophy of the State, etc., and even usually in The Holy Family, he is no more than an avant-garde Feuerbachian applying an ethical problematic to the understanding of human history. In other words, we can say that at this time Marx was merely applying the theory of alienation, that is, Feuerbach's theory of 'human nature', to politics and the concrete activity of man, before extending it (in large part) to political economy in the Manuscripts. It is important that the real origin of these Feuerbachian concepts should be recognized, not so as to assess everything according to a standard of attribution (this is Marx's, that Feuerbach's, etc.), but so as to avoid attributing to Marx the invention of concepts and a problematic he had only borrowed. It is even more important that it be recognized that these borrowed concepts were not borrowed one by one, in isolation, but en bloc, as a set : this set being precisely Feuerbach's problematic. This is the essential point. For borrowing a concept in isolation may only be of accidental and secondary significance. Borrowing a concept in isolation (from its context) does not bind the borrower vis-à-vis the context from which he extracted it (for example, the borrowings from Smith, Ricardo and Hegel in Capital ). But borrowing a systematically interrelated set of concepts, borrowing a real problematic, cannot be accidental, it binds the borrower. I believe that a comparison of the Manifestoes and of Marx's early works shows quite clearly that for two or three years Marx literally espoused Feuerbach's problematic, that he profoundly identified himself with it, and that to understand the meaning of most of his statements during this period, even where these bear on the material of later studies (for example, politics, social life, the proletariat, revolution, etc.) and might therefore seem fully Marxist, it is essential to situate oneself at the very heart of this identification, and to explore all its theoretical consequences and inferences.
I feel that this requirement is a crucial one, for if it is true that Marx espoused a whole problematic, then his rupture with
Feuerbach, his famous 'settling of accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience', implied the adoption of a new problematic which even if it did integrate a certain number of the old concepts, did so into a whole which confers on them a radically new significance. I am pleased to be able to express this in an image from Greek history which Marx himself used: after serious set-backs in the War against the Persians, Themistocles advised the Athenians to leave the land and base the future of their city on another element -- the sea. Marx's theoretical revolution was precisely to base his theory on a new element after liberating it from its old element : the element of Hegelian and Feuerbachian philosophy.
But this new problematic can be looked at in two ways:
Firstly, in Marx's mature writings -- The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, Capital, etc. But these works do not contain any systematic exposition of Marx's theoretical position comparable to the exposition of Hegel's philosophy in The Phenomenology of Mind, the Encyclopaedia, and the Larger Logic, or the exposition of Feuerbach's philosophy in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Marx's writings are either polemics (The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy ) or positive studies (Capital ). Marx's theoretical position, what can be called, ambiguously, his 'philosophy', is certainly active in these works, but it is buried in them, and confused with his own critical or heuristic concerns, and rarely, if ever, explicitly discussed for its own sake in a systematic and extensive form. Naturally, this situation does not simplify the interpreter's task.
At this point a knowledge of Feuerbach's problematic and of why Marx broke with Feuerbach can come to our aid. For through Feuerbach we have an indirect access to Marx's new problematic. We can find out what was the problematic that Marx broke with, and we can discover the theoretical horizons 'opened up' by this rupture. If it is true that we can learn as much about a man by what he rejects as by what he adheres to, then a thinker as exacting as Marx should be illuminated by his break with Feuerbach as much as by his own later statements. As this rupture with Feuerbach occurred at the decisive point in the constitution of Marx's definitive theoretical position, a knowledge of Feuerbach thereby becomes an irreplaceable means of access to Marx's philosophical position, rich in theoretical implications.
In the same way, I feel that it makes possible a better understanding of the relation between Marx and Hegel. If there was this rupture between Marx and Feuerbach, the critique of Hegel to be found in most of the former's early works must, at least as far as its ultimate philosophical presuppositions are concerned, be regarded as inadequate, or even incorrect, to the extent that it was a critique from a Feuerbachian viewpoint, that is, a viewpoint that Marx later rejected. Now, usually for reasons of convenience, there is a constant and innocent tendency to believe that, even though Marx later modified his viewpoint, the critique of Hegel to be found in the early works is none the less justifiable and can therefore be 'retained'. But to do so is to neglect the basic fact that Marx set himself apart from Feuerbach when he realized that the Feuerbachian critique of Hegel was a critique 'from within Hegelian philosophy itself ', that Feuerbach was still a 'philosopher', who had, indeed, 'inverted' the body of the Hegelian edifice, but had retained its ultimate structure and bases, that is, its theoretical presuppositions. In Marx's eyes, Feuerbach had stopped within Hegelian territory, he was as much a prisoner of it as its critic since he had merely turned Hegel's own principles against Hegel himself. He had not changed 'elements '. The truly Marxist critique of Hegel depends precisely on this change of elements, that is, on the abandonment of the philosophical problematic whose recalcitrant prisoner Feuerbach remained.
To summarize the theoretical interest of this privileged confrontation between Marx and Feuerbach's thought in a manner which is not without its bearing on contemporary polemic, I should say that what is at stake in this double rupture, first with Hegel, then with Feuerbach, is the very meaning of the word philosophy. What can Marxist 'philosophy ' be in contrast to the classical models of philosophy? Or, what can be the theoretical position which has broken with the traditional philosophical problematic whose last theoretician was Hegel and from which Feuerbach tried desperately but in vain to free himself? The answer to this question can largely be drawn negatively from Feuerbach himself, from this last witness of Marx's early 'philosophical conscience', the last mirror in which Marx contemplated himself before rejecting the borrowed image to put on his own true features.
October, 1960
Part Two
'On The Young Marx'
To Auguste Cornu, who devoted his 'German criticism has, right up to its latest
page 51
Reading this interesting but uneven[2] collection has given me the opportunity to examine a number of problems, clear up certain confusions and put forward some clarifications on my own account.
Convenience of exposition is my excuse for entering on the question of Marx's Early Works in three basic aspects: political, theoretical and philosophical.
First of all, any discussion of Marx's Early Works is a political discussion. Need we be reminded that Marx's Early Works, whose history and significance were well enough described by Mehring, were exhumed by Social-Democrats and exploited by them to the detriment of Marxism-Leninism? The heroic ancestors of this operation were named Landshut and Mayer (1931). The Preface to their edition may be read in Molitor's translation in the Costès edition of Marx (OEuvres philosophiques de Marx, t. IV, pp. XIII
LI). The position is quite clearly put. Capital is an ethical theory, the silent philosophy of which is openly spoken in Marx's Early Works.[3] Thus, reduced to two propositions, is the thesis which has had such extraordinary success. And not only in France and in Italy, but also, as these articles from abroad show, in contemporary Germany and Poland. Philosophers, ideologiues, theologians have all launched into a gigantic enterprise of criticism and conversion : let Marx be restored to his source, and let him admit at last that in him, the mature man is merely the young man in disguise. Or if he stubbornly insists on his age, let him admit the sins of his maturity, let him recognize that he sacrificed philosophy to economics, ethics to science, man to history. Let him consent to this or refuse it, his truth, everything that will survive him, everything which helps the men that we are to live and think, is contained in these few Early Works.
So these good critics leave us with but a single choice: we must admit that Capital (and 'mature Marxism' in general) is either an expression of the Young Marx's philosophy, or its betrayal. In either case, the established interpretation must be totally revised and we must return to the Young Marx, the Marx through whom spoke the Truth.
This is the location of the discussion: the Young Marx. Really at stake in it: Marxism. The terms of the discussion : whether the Young Marx was already and wholly Marx.
The discussion once joined, it seems that Marxists have a choice between two parrying dispositions within the ideal order of the tactical combinatory.[4]
Very schematically, if they want to rescue Marx from the perils of his youth with which his opponents threaten them, they can either agree that the young Marx is not Marx ; or that the young Marx is Marx. These extreme theses may be nuanced ; but their inspiration extends even to their nuances.
Of course, this inventory of possibilities may well seem derisory. Where disputed history is concerned, there is no place for tactics, the verdict must be sought solely in a scientific examination of the facts and documents. However, past experience, and even a reading of the present collection, proves that on occasion it may be difficult to abstract from relatively enlightened tactical considerations or defensive reactions where facing up to a political attack is concerned. Jahn sees this quite clearly:[5] it was not Marxists who opened the debate on Marx's Early Works. And no doubt because they had not grasped the true value of Mehring's classic work or of the scholarly and scrupulous research of Auguste Cornu, young Marxists were caught out, ill-prepared for a struggle they had not foreseen. They reacted as best they could. There is some of this surprise left in the present defence, in its reflex movement, its confusion, its awkwardness. I should also add: in its bad conscience. For this attack surprised Marxists on their own ground: that of Marx. If it had been a question of a simple concept they might have felt themselves to have less of a special responsibility, but the problem raised was one that directly concerned Marx's history and Marx himself. So they fell victim to a second reaction which came to reinforce the first reflex defence: the fear of failing in their duty, of letting the charge entrusted to them come to harm, before themselves and before history. In plain words: if it
is not studied, criticized and dominated, this reaction could lead Marxist philosophy into a 'catastrophic ' parrying movement, a global response which in fact suppresses the problem in its attempt to deal with it.
To discomfit those who set up against Marx his own youth, the opposite position is resolutely taken up: Marx is reconciled with his youth -- Capital is no longer read as On the Jewish Question, On the Jewish Question is read as Capital ; the shadow of the young Marx is no longer projected on to Marx, but that of Marx on to the young Marx; and a pseudo-theory of the history of philosophy in the 'future anterior ' is erected to justify this counter-position, without realizing that this pseudo-theory is quite simply Hegelian.[6] A devout fear of a blow to Marx's integrity inspires as its
reflex a resolute acceptance of the whole of Marx : Marx is declared to be a whole, 'the young Marx is part of Marxism '[7] -- as if we risked losing the whole of Marx if we were to submit his youth to the radical critique of history, not the history he was going to live, but the history he did live, not an immediate history, but the reflected history for which, in his maturity, he gave us, not the 'truth ' in the Hegelian sense, but the principles of its scientific understanding.
Even where parrying is concerned, there can be no good policy without good theory.
This brings us to the second problem posed by a study of Marx's Early Works: the theoretical problem. I must insist on it, as it seems to me that it has not always been resolved, or even correctly posed in the majority of studies inspired by this subject.
Indeed, only too often the form of the reading of Marx's early writings adopted depends more on free association of ideas or on a simple comparison of terms than on a historical critique.[8] This is not to dispute that such a reading can give theoretical results, but these results are merely the precondition of a real understanding of the texts. For example, Marx's Dissertation may be read by comparing its terms with those of Hegel's thought;[9] the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right by comparing its principles with those of Feuerbach or those of Marx's maturity ;[10] the 1844 Manuscripts by comparing their principles with those of Capital.[11] Even then,
the comparison may be either superficial or profound. It may give rise to misunderstandings[12] which are errors for all that. On the other hand, it can open up interesting perspectives.[13] But such comparison is not always its own justification.
Indeed, to stick to spontaneous or even enlightened association of theoretical elements is to run the risk of remaining the prisoner of an implicit conception only too close to the current academic conception of the comparison, opposition and approximation of elements that culminates in a theory of sources -- or, what comes to the same thing, in a theory of anticipation. A sophisticated reading of Hegel 'thinks of Hegel' when it reads the 1841 Dissertation or even the 1844 Manuscripts. A sophisticated reading of Marx 'thinks of Marx' when it reads the Critique of the Philosophy of Right.[14]
Perhaps it is not realized often enough that whether this conception is a theory of sources or a theory of anticipation, it is, in its naïve immediacy, based on three theoretical presuppositions which are always tacitly active in it. The first presupposition is analytic : it holds that any theoretical system and any constituted thought is reducible to its elements : a precondition that enables one to think any element of this system on its own, and to compare it with another similar element from another system.[15] The second presupposition is teleological : it institutes a secret tribunal of history which judges the ideas submitted to it, or rather, which per-
mits the dissolution of (different) systems into their elements, institutes these elements as elements in order to proceed to their measurement according to its own norms as if to their truth.[16] Finally, these two presuppositions depend on a third, which regards the history of ideas as its own element, maintains that nothing happens there which is not a product of the history of ideas itself and that the world of ideology is its own principle of intelligibility.
I believe it is necessary to dig down to these foundations if we are to understand the possibility and meaning of this method's most striking feature: its eclecticism. Where this surface eclecticism is not hiding completely meaningless forms a search beneath it will always reveal this theoretical teleology and this auto-intelligibility of ideology as such. When reading some of the articles in this collection, one cannot help feeling that even in their efforts to free themselves from this conception, they still remain contaminated by its implicit logic. Indeed it seems as if writing the history of Marx's early theoretical development entailed the reduction of his thought into its 'elements ', grouped in general under two rubrics: the materialist elements and the idealist elements; as if a comparison of these elements, a confrontation of the weight of each, could determine the meaning of the text under examination. Thus, in the articles from the Rheinische Zeitung the external form of a thought which is still Hegelian can be shown to conceal the presence of materialist elements such as the political nature of censorship, the social (class) nature of the laws on the theft of wood, etc.; in the 1843 Manuscript (The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right ), the exposition and formulation, though still inspired by Feuerbach or still Hegelian, conceal the presence of materialist elements such as the reality of social classes, of private property and its relation to the State, and even of dialectical materialism itself, etc. It is clear that this discrimination between elements detached from the internal context of the thought expressed and conceived in isolation, is only possible on condition, that the reading of these texts is slanted, that is, teleological. One of the most clear-headed of the authors in this collection, N. Lapine, expressly recognizes this: 'This kind of characterization . . . is,
in fact, very eclectic, as it does not answer the question as to how these different elements are combined together in Marx's world outlook .'[17] He sees clearly that this decomposition of a text into what is already materialist and what is still idealist does not preserve its unity, and that this decomposition is induced precisely by reading the early texts through the content of the mature texts. Fully developed Marxism, the Goal are the members of the tribunal which pronounces and executes this judgement, separating the body of an earlier text into its elements, thereby destroying its unity. 'If we start with the conception Marx then had of his philosophical position, the 1843 Manuscript emerges as a perfectly consistent and complete work,' whereas 'from the viewpoint of developed Marxism the 1843 Manuscript does not emerge as an organically complete whole, in which the methodological value of each element has been rigorously demonstrated. An obvious lack of maturity means that an exaggerated attention is paid to certain problems, whereas others of basic importance are no more than outlined. . . .'[18] We could not ask for a more honest recognition that the decomposition into elements and the constitution of these elements is induced by their insertion into a finalist perspective. I might further add that a sort of 'delegation of reference ' often occurs, which fully developed Marxism confers on an intermediate author, for example, on Feuerbach. As Feuerbach is reckoned to be a 'materialist' (though, strictly speaking, Feuerbach's 'materialism' depends essentially on taking Feuerbach's own declarations of materialism at their face value) he can serve as a second centre of reference, and in his turn make possible the acceptance of certain elements in Marx's Early Works as materialist by-products, by virtue of his own pronouncement and his own 'sincerity'. Thus the subject-predicate inversion, the Feuerbachian critique of speculative philosophy, his critique of religion, the human essence objectified in its productions, etc., are all declared to be 'materialist'. . . . This 'by-production' of elements via Feuerbach combined with the production of elements via the mature Marx occasionally gives rise to strange redundancies and misunderstandings; for example, when it is a matter of deciding just what does distinguish the materialist elements authenticated by Feuerbach from the materialist elements
authenticated by Marx himself.[19] Ultimately, as this procedure enables us to find materialist elements in all Marx's early texts, including even the letter to his father in which he refuses to separate the ideal from the real, it is very difficult to decide when Marx can be regarded as materialist, or rather, when he could not have been! For Jahn, for example, although they 'still ' contain 'a whole series of abstract elements ' the 1844 Manuscripts mark 'the birth of scientific socialism '.[20] For Pajitnov, these manuscripts 'form the crucial pivot around which Marx reoriented the social sciences. The theoretical premises of Marxism had been laid down .'[21] For Lapine, 'unlike the articles in the Rheinische Zeitung in which certain elements of materialism only appear spontaneously, the 1843 Manuscript witnesses to Marx's conscious passage to materialism ', and in fact 'Marx's critique of Hegel starts from materialist positions ' (it is true that this 'conscious passage ' is called 'implicit ' and 'unconscious ' in the same article).[22] As for Schaff, he writes squarely 'We know (from later statements of Engels ) that Marx became a materialist in 1841 '.[23]
I am not trying to make an easy argument out of these contradictions (which might at little cost be set aside as signs of an 'open' investigation). But it is legitimate to ask whether this uncertainty about the moment when Marx passed on to materialism, etc., is not related to the spontaneous and implicit use of an analytico-teleological theory. We cannot but notice that this theory seems to have no valid criterion whereby it could pronounce upon the body of thought it has decomposed into its elements, that is, whose effective unity it has destroyed. And this lack arises precisely because this very decomposition deprives it of such a criterion: in fact, if an idealist element is an idealist element and a materialist element is a materialist element, who can really decide what meaning they constitute once they are assembled together in the effective living unity of a text ? Ultimately, the paradoxical result of this decomposition is that even the question of the global meaning of a text such as On the Jewish Question or the 1843 Manuscript vanishes, it is not asked because the means whereby it might have been
asked have been rejected. But this is a question of the highest importance that neither real life nor a living critique can ever avoid! Suppose by chance that a reader of our own time came to take seriously the philosophy of On the Jewish Question or of the 1844 Manuscripts, and espoused it (it has happened! I was about to say, it has happened to us all! and how many of those to whom it has happened have failed to become Marxists!). Just what, I wonder, could we then say about his thought, considered as what it is, that is, as a whole. Would we regard it as idealist or materialist? Marxist or non-Marxist?[24] Or should we regard its meaning as in abeyance, waiting on a stage it has not yet reached? But this is the way Marx's early texts are only too often treated, as if they belonged to a reserved domain, sheltered from the 'basic question ' solely because they must develop into Marxism. . . . As if their meaning had been held in abeyance until the end, as if it was necessary to wait on the final synthesis before their elements could be at last resorbed into a whole, as if, before this final synthesis, the question of the whole could not be raised, just because all totalities earlier than the final synthesis have been destroyed? But this brings us to the height of the paradox from behind which this analytico-teleological method breaks out: this method which is constantly judging cannot make the slightest judgement of any totality unlike itself. Could there be a franker admission that it merely judges itself, recognizes itself behind the objects if considers, that it never moves outside itself, that the development it hopes to think it cannot definitively think other than as a development of itself within itself ? And to anyone whose response to the ultimate logic that I have drawn from this method is to say 'that is precisely what makes it dialectical ' - my answer is 'Dialectical, yes, but Hegelian! '
In fact, once it is a matter of thinking precisely the development of a thought which has been reduced to its elements in this way, once Lapine's naïve but honest question has been asked: 'how are these different elements combined together in Marx's final world outlook ?', once it is a matter of conceiving the relations between these elements whose destiny we know, the arguments we can see emerging are those of the Hegelian dialectic, in superficial or profound forms. An example of the superficial form is a recourse to the contradiction between form and content, or more precisely, between content and its conceptual expression. The 'materialist content' comes into contradiction with its 'idealist form', and the idealist form itself tends to be reduced to a mere matter of terminology (it had to dissolve in the end; it was nothing but words ). Marx was already a materialist, but he was still using Feuerbachian concepts, he was borrowing Feuerbachian terminology although he was no longer and had never been a pure Feuerbachian: between the 1844 Manuscripts and the Mature Works Marx discovered his definitive terminology;[25] it is merely a question of language. The whole development occurred in the words. I know this is to schematize, but it makes it easier to see the hidden meaning of the procedure. It can on occasion be considerably elaborated, for example, in Lapine's theory which, not content with opposing form (terminology) and content, opposes consciousness and tendency. Lapine does not reduce the differences between Marx's thought at different times to a mere difference of terminology. He admits that the language had a meaning : this meaning was that of Marx's consciousness (of himself) at a particular moment in his development. Thus, in the 1843 Manuscript (Critique of Hegel's State Philosophy ) Marx's self-consciousness was Feuerbachian. Marx spoke the language of Feuerbach because he believed himself to be a Feuerbachian. But this language-consciousness was objectively in contradiction with his 'materialist tendency '. It is this contradiction which constitutes the motor of his development. This conception may well be Marxist in appearance (cf. the 'delay of consciousness'), but only in appearance, for if it is possible within it to define the consciousness of a text (its global meaning,
its language-meaning), it is hard to see how concretely to define its 'tendency '. Or, rather, it is perfectly clear how it has been defined once we realize that, for Lapine, the distinction between materialist tendency and consciousness (of self) coincides exactly with 'the difference between the appearance of the objective content of the 1843 Manuscript from the viewpoint of developed Marxism and what Marx himself regarded as the content at the time '.[26] Rigorously understood, this sentence suggests that the 'tendency ' is nothing but a retrospective abstraction of the result, which was precisely what had to be explained, that is, it is the Hegelian in-itself conceived on the basis of its end as its real origin. The contradiction between consciousness and tendency can thus be reduced to the contradiction between the in-itself and the for-itself. Lapine immediately goes on to say that this tendency is 'implicit' and 'unconscious'. We are given an abstraction from the problem itself as if it were the solution. Naturally, I am not denying that in Lapine's essay there are not indications of a way to a different conception (now I shall be accused of lapsing into the theory of elements! The very concept of 'tendency' must be renounced if it is to be really possible to think these elements), but it must be admitted that his systematics is Hegelian.
It is not possible to commit oneself to a Marxist study of Marx's Early Works (and of the problems they pose) without rejecting the spontaneous or reflected temptations of an analytico-teleological method which is always more or less haunted by Hegelian principles. It is essential to break with the presuppositions of this method, and to apply the Marxist principles of a theory of ideological development to our object.
These principles are quite different from those hitherto considered. They imply:
(1) Every ideology must be regarded as a real whole, internally unified by its own problematic, so that it is impossible to extract one element without altering its meaning.
(2) The meaning of this whole, of a particular ideology (in this case an individual's thought), depends not on its relation to a truth other than itself but on its relation to the existing ideological field and on the social problems and social structure which sustain the ideology and are reflected in it; the sense of the development
of a particular ideology depends not on the relation of this development to its origins or its end, considered as its truth, but to the relation found within this development between the mutations of the particular ideology and the mutations in the ideological field and the social problems and relations that sustain it.
(3) Therefore, the developmental motor principle of a particular ideology cannot be found within ideology itself but outside it, in what underlies (l'en-deça de) the particular ideology: its author as a concrete individual and the actual history reflected in this individual development according to the complex ties between the individual and this history.
I should add that these principles, unlike the previous ones, are not in the strict sense ideological principles, but scientific ones : in other words, they are not the truth of the process to be studied (as are all the principles of a history in the 'future anterior'). They are not the truth of, they are the truth for, they are true as a precondition to legitimately posing a problem, and thus through this problem, to the production of a true solution. So these principles too presuppose 'fully developed Marxism', but not as the truth of its own genesis, rather, as the theory which makes possible an understanding of its own genesis as of any other historical process. Anyway, this is the absolute precondition if Marxism is to explain other things than itself : not only its own genesis as something different from itself, but also all the other transformations produced in history including those marked by the practical consequences of the intervention of Marxism in history. If it is not the truth of in the Hegelian and Feuerbachian sense, but a discipline of scientific investigation, Marxism need be no more embarrassed by its own genesis than by the historical movement it has marked by its intervention: where Marx came from, as well as what comes from Marx must, if they are to be understood, both suffer the application of Marxist principles of investigation.[27]
If the problem of Marx's Early Works is really to be posed, the first condition to fulfil is to admit that even philosophers are young
men for a time. They must be born somewhere, some time, and begin to think and write. The scholar who insisted that his early works should never be published, or even written (for there is bound to be at least some doctoral candidate to publish them!) was certainly no Hegelian . . . for from the Hegelian viewpoint, Early Works are as inevitable and as impossible as the singular object displayed by Jarry: 'the skull of the child Voltaire '. They are as inevitable as all beginnings. They are impossible because it is impossible to choose one's beginnings. Marx did not choose to be born to the thought German history had concentrated in its university education, nor to think its ideological world. He grew up in this world, in it he learned to live and move, with it he 'settled accounts', from it he liberated himself. I shall return to the necessity and contingency of this beginning later. The fact is that there was a beginning, and that to work out the history of Marx's particular thoughts their movement must be grasped at the precise instant when that concrete individual the Young Marx emerged into the thought world of his own time, to think in it in his turn, and to enter into the exchange and debate with the thoughts of his time which was to be his whole life as an ideologue. At this level of the exchanges and conflicts that are the very substance of the texts in which his living thoughts have come down to us, it is as if the authors of these thoughts were themselves absent. The concrete individual who expresses himself in his thoughts and his writings is absent, so is the actual history expressed in the existing ideological field. As the author effaces himself in the presence of his published thoughts, reducing himself to their rigour, so concrete history effaces itself in the presence of its ideological themes, reducing itself to their system. This double absence will also have to be put to the test. But for the moment, everything is in play between the rigour of a single thought and the thematic system of an ideological field. Their relation is this beginning and this beginning has no end. This is the relationship that has to be thought: the relation between the (internal) unity of a single thought (at each moment of its development) and the existing ideological field (at each moment of its development). But if this relationship is to be thought, so, in the same movement, must its terms.
This methodological demand immediately implies an effective knowledge of the substance and structure of this basic ideological
field, and not just an allusive knowledge. It implies that as neutral a representation of the ideological world as that of a stage, on which characters as famous as they are non-existent make chance encounters, will not do. Marx's fate in the years from 1840 to 1845 was not decided by an ideal debate between characters called Hegel, Feuerbach, Stirner, Hess, etc. Nor was it decided by the same Hegel, Feuerbach, Stirner and Hess as they appeared in Marx's own works at the time. Even less by later evocations of great generality by Engels and Lenin. It was decided by concrete ideological characters on whom the ideological context imposed determinate features which do not necessarily coincide with their literal historical identities (e.g. Hegel), which are much more extensive than the explicit representations Marx gave them of in these same writings, quoting, invoking and criticizing them (e.g. Feuerbach), and, of course, the general characteristics outlined by Engels forty years later. As a concrete illustration of these remarks, the Hegel who was the opponent of the Young Marx from the time of his doctoral dissertation was not the library Hegel we can meditate on in the solitude of 1960; it was the Hegel of the neo-Hegelian movement, a Hegel already summoned to provide German intellectuals of the 1840s with the means to think their own history and their own hopes; a Hegel already made to contradict himself, invoked against himself, in despite of himself. The idea of a philosophy transforming itself into a will, emerging from the world of reflection to transform the political world, in which we can see Marx's first rebellion against his master, is perfectly in accord with the interpretation dominant among the neo-Hegelians.[28] I do not dispute the claim that in his thesis Marx already showed that acute sense of concepts, that implacably rigorous grasp and that genius of conception which were the admiration of his friends. But this idea was not his invention. In the same way, it would be very rash to reduce Feuerbach's presence in Marx's writings between 1841 and 1844 to explicit references alone. For many passages directly
reproduce or paraphrase Feuerbachian arguments without his name ever being mentioned. The passage Togliatti extracted from the 1844 Manuscripts comes straight from Feuerbach; many others could be invoked which have been too hastily attributed to Marx. Why should Marx have referred to Feuerbach when everyone knew his work, and above all, when he had appreciated Feuerbach's thought and was thinking in his thoughts as if they were his own? But as we shall see in a moment, we must go further than the unmentioned presence of the thoughts of a living author to the presence of his potential thoughts, to his problematic, that is, to the constitutive unity of the effective thoughts that make up the domain of the existing ideological field with which a particular author must settle accounts in his own thought. It is immediately obvious that if it is impossible to think the unity of an individual's thought while ignoring its ideological field, if this field is itself to be thought it requires the thought of this unity.
So what is this unity? Let us return to Feuerbach for an illustration whereby we can answer this question, but this time to pose the problem of the internal unity of Marx's thought when the two were related. Most of the commentators in our collection are manifestly troubled by the nature of this relation, and it gives rise to many conflicting interpretations. This embarrassment is not merely the result of a lack of familiarity with Feuerbach's writings (they can be read). It arises because they do not succeed in conceiving what it is that constitutes the basic unity of a text, the internal essence of an ideological thought, that is, its problematic. I put this term forward -- Marx never directly used it, but it constantly animates the ideological analyses of his maturity (particularly The German Ideology )[29] -- because it is the concept that gives the best grasp on the facts without falling into the Hegelian ambiguities of 'to-
tality '. Indeed, to say that an ideology constitutes an (organic) totality is only valid descriptively -- not theoretically, for this description converted into a theory exposes us to the danger of thinking nothing but the empty unity of the described whole, not a determinate unitary structure. On the contrary, to think the unity of a determinate ideological unity (which presents itself explicitly as a whole, and which is explicitly or implicitly 'lived' as a whole or as an intention of 'totalization') by means of the concept of its problematic is to allow the typical systematic structure unifying all the elements of the thought to be brought to light, and therefore to discover in this unity a determinate content which makes it possible both to conceive the meaning of the 'elements' of the ideology concerned -- and to relate this ideology to the problems left or posed to every thinker by the historical period in which he lives.[30]
Take a specific example: Marx's 1843 Manuscript (The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right ). According to the commentators this contains a series of Feuerbachian themes (the subject-predicate inversion, the critique of speculative philosophy, the theory of the species-man, etc.), but also some analyses which are not to be found in Feuerbach (the interrelation of politics, the State and private property, the reality of social classes, etc.). To remain at the level of elements would be to fall into the impasse of the analytico-teleological critique we discussed above, and into its pseudo-solution: terminology and meaning, tendency and consciousness,
etc. We must go further and ask whether the presence in Marx of analyses and objects about which Feuerbach says little or nothing is a sufficient justification for this division into Feuerbachian and non-Feuerbachian (that is, already Marxist) elements. But no answer can be hoped for from the elements themselves. For the object discussed does not directly qualify the thought. The many authors who talked of social classes or even of the class struggle before Marx have never to my knowledge been taken for Marxists simply because they dealt with objects which were eventually destined to attract Marx's attention. It is not the material reflected on that characterizes and qualifies a reflection, but, at this level the modality of the reflection,[31] the actual relation the reflection has with its objects, that is, the basic problematic that is the starting point for the reflection of the objects of the thought. This is not to say that the material reflected may not under certain conditions modify the modality of the reflection, but that is another question (to which we shall return), and in any case, this modification in the modality of a reflection, this restructuration of the problematic of an ideology can proceed by many other routes than that of the simple immediate relation of object and reflection! So anyone who still wants to pose the problem of elements in this perspective must recognize that everything depends on a question which must have priority over them: the question of the nature of the problematic which is the starting-point for actually thinking them, in a given text. In our example, the question takes the following form: in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, has Marx's reflection on his new objects, social class, the private property/State relation, etc., swept aside Feuerbach's theoretical presuppositions, has it reduced them to the level of mere phrases? Or are these new objects thought from the starting-point of the same presuppositions ? This question is possible precisely because the problematic of a thought is not limited to the domain of the objects considered by its author, because it is not an abstraction for the thought as a totality, but the concrete determinate structure of a thought and of all the thoughts possible within this thought. Thus Feuerbach's anthropology can become the problematic not only of religion (The Essence of Christianity ), but also of politics (On the Jewish
Question, the 1843 Manuscript), or even of history and economics (the 1844 Manuscripts ) without ceasing to be in essentials an anthropological problematic, even if the 'letter' of Feuerbach is itself abandoned or superseded.[32] It is, of course, possible to regard it as politically important to have moved from a religious anthropology to a political anthropology, and finally to an economic anthropology, and I would agree completely that in Germany in 1843 anthropology represented an advanced ideological form. But to make this judgement presupposes that the nature of the ideology under consideration is already familiar, that is, that its effective problematic has been defined.
I should add that if it is not so much the immediate content of the objects reflected as the way the problems are posed which constitutes the ultimate ideological essence of an ideology, this problematic is not of itself immediately present to the historian's reflection, for good reason: in general a philosopher thinks in it rather than thinking of it, and his 'order of reasons' does not coincide with the 'order of reasons' of his philosophy. An ideology (in the strict Marxist sense of the term -- the sense in which Marxism is not itself an ideology) can be regarded as characterized in this particular respect by the fact that its own problematic is not conscious of itself. When Marx tells us (and he continually repeats it) not to take an ideology's consciousness of itself for its essence, he also means that before it is unconscious of the real problems it is a response (or non-response) to, an ideology is already unconscious of its 'theoretical presuppositions', that is, the active but unavowed problematic which fixes for it the meaning and movement of its problems and thereby of their solutions. So a problematic cannot generally be read like an open book, it must be dragged up from the depths of the ideology in which it is buried but active, and usually despite the ideology itself, its own statements and proclamations. Anyone who is prepared to go this far will, I imagine, feel obliged to stop confusing the materialist proclamations of certain 'materialists' (above all Feuerbach) with materialism itself. There is much to suggest that this would clarify some problems and dissipate some other, false, problems. Marxism would thereby gain an ever more exact consciousness of its own problematic, that is,
of itself, and even in its historical works -- which, after all, is its due, and, if I may say so, its duty.
Let me summarize these reflections. Understanding an ideological argument implies, at the level of the ideology itself, simultaneous, conjoint knowledge of the ideological field in which a thought emerges and grows; and the exposure of the internal unity of this thought: its problematic. Knowledge of the ideological field itself presupposes knowledge of the problematics compounded or opposed in it. This interrelation of the particular problematic of the thought of the individual under consideration with the particular problematics of the thoughts belonging to the ideological field allows of a decision as to its author's specific difference, i.e, whether a new meaning has emerged. Of course, this complex process is all haunted by real history. But everything cannot be said
at once.
It is now clear that this method, breaking directly with the first theoretical presupposition of eclectic criticism, has already[33] detached itself from the illusions of the second presupposition, the silent tribunal over ideological history whose values and verdicts are decided even before investigation starts. The truth of ideological history is neither in its principle (its source) nor in its end (its goal). It is in the facts themselves, in that nodal constitution of ideological meanings, themes and objects, against the deceptive backcloth of their problematic, itself evolving against the backcloth of an 'anchylose' and unstable ideological world, itself in the sway of real history. Of course, we now know that the Young Marx did become Marx, but we should not want to live faster than he did, we should not want to live in his place, reject for him or discover for him. We shall not be waiting for him at the end of the course to throw round him as round a runner the mantle of repose, for at last it is over, he has arrived. Rousseau remarked that with children and adolescents the whole art of education consists of knowing how to lose time. The art of historical criticism also consists of knowing how to lose time so that young authors can grow up. This lost time is simply the time we give them to live. We scan the necessity of their lives in our understanding of its nodal points, its reversals and mutations. In this area there is perhaps no greater
joy than to be able to witness in an emerging life, once the Gods of Origins and Goals have been dethroned, the birth of necessity.
But all this seems to leave the third presupposition of the eclectic method in the air; the presupposition that the whole of ideological history occurs within ideology. Let us take up this point.
I am afraid that, with the exception of the articles by Togliatti and Lapine and above all Hoeppner's very remarkable piece,[35] the majority of the studies offered here ignore this problem or devote only a few paragraphs to it.
But ultimately, no Marxist can avoid posing what used a few years ago to be called the problem of 'Marx's path', that is, the problem of the relation between the events of his thought and the one but double real history which was its true subject. We must fill in this double absence and reveal the real authors of these as yet subjectless thoughts: the concrete man and the real history that produced them. For without these real subjects how can we account for the emergence of a thought and its mutations?
I shall not pose the problem of Marx's own personality here, the problem of the origin and structure of that extraordinary theoretical temperament, animated by an insatiable critical passion, an intransigent insistence on reality, and a prodigious feeling for the concrete. A study of the psychological structure of Marx's personality and of its origins and history would certainly cast light on the style of intervention, conception and investigation which are so striking in these Early Writings themselves. From it we would obtain, if not the root origin of his undertaking in Sartre's sense (the author's 'basic project'), at least the origins of the profound and far-reaching insistence on a grasp on reality, which would give a first sense to the actual continuity of Marx's development, to what Lapine has, in part, tried to think in the term 'tendency'. Without such a study we risk a failure to grasp what precisely it was that saved Marx from the fate of most of his contemporaries, who issued from the same environment and confronted the same ideological themes as he did, that is, the Young
Hegelians. Mehring and Cornu have carried out the substance of this study and it is worth completing so that we may be able to understand how it was that the son of a Rhenish bourgeois became the theoretician and leader of the workers' movement in the Europe of the railway epoch.
But as well as giving us Marx's psychology this study would lead us to real history, and the direct apprehension of it by Marx himself. I must stop here for a moment to pose the problem of the meaning of Marx's evolution and of its 'motor'.
When eclectic criticism is faced with the question, 'how were Marx's growth to maturity and change possible', it is apt to give an answer which remains within ideological history itself. For example, it is said that Marx knew how to distinguish Hegel's method from his content, and that he proceeded to apply the former to history. Or else, that he set the Hegelian system back on to its feet (a statement not without a certain humour if we recall that the Hegelian system was 'a sphere of spheres'). Or, that Marx extended Feuerbach's materialism to history, as if a localized materialism was not rather suspect as a materialism; that Marx applied the (Hegelian or Feuerbachian) theory of alienation to the world of social relations, as if this 'application' could change the theory's basic meaning. Or finally, and this is the crucial point, that the old materialists were 'inconsistent ' whereas Marx, on the contrary, was consistent. This inconsistency-consistency theory which haunts many a Marxist in ideological history is a little wonder of ideology, constructed for their personal use by the Philosophers of the Enlightenment. Feuerbach inherited and, alas, made good use of it! It deserves a short treatise all to itself, for it is the quintessence of historical idealism: it is indeed obvious that if ideas were self-reproducing, then any historical (or theoretical) aberration could only be a logical error.
Even when they do contain a certain degree of truth,[36] taken
literally these formulations remain prisoner to the illusion that the Young Marx's evolution was fought out and decided in the sphere of ideas, and that it was achieved by virtue of a reflection on ideas put forward by Hegel, Feuerbach, etc. It is as if there was agreement that the ideas inherited from Hegel by the young German intellectuals of 1840 contained in themselves, contrary to appearances, a certain tacit, veiled, masked, refracted truth which Marx's critical abilities finally succeeded in tearing from them, and forcing them to admit and recognize, after years of intellectual effort. This is the basic logic implied by the famous theme of the 'inversion', the 'setting back on to its feet' of the Hegelian philosophy (dialectic), for if it were really a matter merely of an inversion, a restoration of what had been upside down, it is clear that to turn an object right round changes neither its nature nor its content by virtue merely of a rotation! A man on his head is the same man when he is finally walking on his feet. And a philosophy inverted in this way cannot be regarded as anything more than the philosophy reversed except in theoretical metaphor: in fact, its structure, its problems and the meaning of these problems are still haunted by the same problematic.[37] This is the logic that most often seems to be at work in the Young Marx's writings and which is most apt to be attributed to him.
Whatever the status of this view, I do not believe that it corresponds to reality. Naturally, no reader of Marx's Early Works could remain insensible to the gigantic effort of theoretical criticism which Marx made on all the ideas he came across. Rare are the authors who have possessed so many virtues (acuity, perseverance, rigour) in the treatment of ideas. For Marx, the latter were concrete objects which he interrogated as the physicist does the objects of his experiments, to draw from them a little of the truth, of their truth. See his treatment of the idea of censorship in his article on the Prussian Censorship, or the apparently insignificant
difference between green and dead wood in his article on the Theft of Wood, or the ideas of the freedom of the press, of private property, of alienation, etc. The reader cannot resist the transparency of this reflective rigour and logical strength in Marx's early writings. And this transparency quite naturally inclines him to believe that the logic of Marx's intelligence coincides with the logic of his reflection, and that he did draw from the ideological world he was working on a truth it really contained. And this conviction is further reinforced by Marx's own conviction, the conviction that shines through all his efforts and even through his enthusiasms, in short, by his consciousness.
So I will go so far as to say that it is not only essential to avoid the spontaneous illusions of the idealist conception of ideological history, but also, and perhaps even more, it is essential to avoid any concession to the impression made on us by the Young Marx's writings and any acceptance of his own consciousness of himself. But to understand this it is necessary to go on to speak of real history, that is, to question 'Marx's path ' itself.
With this I have returned to the beginning. Yes, we all have to be born some day, somewhere, and begin thinking and writing in a given world. For a thinker, this world is immediately the world of the living thoughts of his time, the ideological world where he is born into thought. For Marx, this world was the world of the German ideology of the 1830s and 1840s, dominated by the problems of German idealism, and by what has been given the abstract name of the 'decomposition of Hegel'. It was not any world, of course, but this general truth is not enough. For the world of the German ideology was then without any possible comparison the world that was worst crushed beneath its ideology (in the strict sense), that is, the world farthest from the actual realities of history, the most mystified, the most alienated world that then existed in a Europe of ideologies. This was the world into which Marx was born and took up thought. The contingency of Marx's beginnings was this enormous layer of ideology beneath which he was born, this crushing layer which he succeeded in breaking through. Precisely because he did deliver himself, we tend too easily to believe that the freedom he achieved at the cost of such prodigious efforts and decisive encounters was already inscribed in this
world, and that the only problem was to reflect. We tend too easily to project Marx's later consciousness on to this epoch and, as has been said, to write this history in the 'future anterior', when it is not a matter of projecting a consciousness of self on to another consciousness of self, but of applying to the content of an enslaved consciousness the scientific principles of historical intelligibility (not the content of another consciousness of self) later acquired by a liberated consciousness.
In his later works, Marx showed why this prodigious layer of ideology was characteristic of Germany rather than of France or England: for the two reasons of the historical backwardness of Germany (in economics and politics) and the state of the social classes corresponding to this backwardness. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Germany emerged from the gigantic upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars deeply marked by its historical inability either to realize national unity or bourgeois revolution. And this 'fatality' was to dominate the history of Germany throughout the nineteenth century and even to be felt distantly much later. This situation whose origins can be traced back to the period of the Peasants' War, made Germany both object and spectator of the real history which was going on around it. It was this German inability that constituted and deeply marked the German ideology which was formed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was this inability which obliged German intellectuals to 'think what the others had done ' and to think it in precisely the conditions implied by their inability: in the hopeful, nostalgic, idealized forms characteristic of the aspirations of their social circle: the petty bourgeoisie of functionaries, teachers, writers, etc. -- and with the immediate objects of their own servitude as starting-point: in particular, religion. The result of this set of historical conditions and demands was precisely a prodigious development of the 'German idealist philosophy ' whereby German intellectuals thought their conditions, their hopes and even their 'activity '.
It was not the attraction of a witty turn of phrase that led Marx to declare that the French have political minds, the English economic minds, while the Germans have theoretical minds. The counterpart to Germany's historical underdevelopment was an ideological and theoretical 'over-development ' incomparable with
anything offered by other European nations. But the crucial point is that this theoretical development was an alienated ideological development, without concrete relation to the real problems and the real objects which were reflected in it. From the viewpoint we have adopted, that is Hegel's tragedy. His philosophy was truly the encyclopedia of the eighteenth century, the sum of all knowledge then acquired, and even of history. But all the objects of its reflection have been 'assimilated' in their reflection, that is, by the particular form of ideological reflection which was the tyrant of all Germany's intelligence. So it is easy to imagine what could be and what had to be the basic precondition for the liberation of a German youth who started to think between 1830 and 1840 in Germany itself. This precondition was the rediscovery of real history, of real objects, beyond the enormous layer of ideology which had hemmed them in and deformed them, not being content with reducing them to their shades. Hence the paradoxical conclusion: to free himself from this ideology, Marx was inevitably obliged to realize that Germany's ideological overdevelopment was at the same time in fact an expression of her historical underdevelopment, and that therefore it was necessary to retreat from this ideological flight forwards in order to reach the things themselves, to touch real history and at last come face to face with the beings that haunted the mists of German consciousness.[38] Without this retreat, the story of the Young Marx's liberation is incomprehensible; without this retreat, Marx's relation to the German ideology, and in particular to Hegel, is incomprehensible; without this return to real history (which was also to a certain extent a retreat) the Young Marx's relation to the labour movement remains a mystery.
I have deliberately stressed this 'retreat '. The too frequent use of formulae such as the 'supersession' of Hegel, Feuerbach, etc., tends to suggest some continuous pattern of development, or at
least a development whose discontinuities themselves should be thought (precisely along the lines of a Hegelian dialectic of 'Aufhebung ') within the same element of continuity sustained by the temporality of history itself (the story of Marx and his time); whereas the critique of this ideological element implies largely a return to the authentic objects which are (logically and historically) prior to the ideology which has reflected them and hemmed them in.
Let me illustrate this formula of the retreat by two examples.
The first concerns those authors whose substance Hegel 'assimilated', among them the English economists and the French philosophers and politicians, and the historical events whose meaning they interpreted: above all, the French Revolution. When, in 1843, Marx sat down and read the English economists, when he took up the study of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, etc., when he studied concretely the history of the French Revolution,[39] it was not just a return to Hegel's sources to verify Hegel by his sources: on the contrary, it was to discover the reality of the objects Hegel had stolen by imposing on them the meaning of his own ideology. To a very great extent, Marx's return to the theoretical products of the English and French eighteenth century was a real return to the pre-Hegelian, to the objects themselves in their reality. The 'supersession' of Hegel was not at all an 'Aufhebung ' in the Hegelian sense, that is, an exposition of the truth of what is contained in Hegel; it was not a supersession of error towards its truth, on the contrary, it was a supersession of illusion towards its truth, or better, rather than a 'supersession' of illusion towards truth it was a dissipation of illusion and a retreat from the dissipated illusion back towards reality : the term 'supersession'
is thus robbed of all meaning.[40] Marx never disavowed this his decisive experience of the direct discovery of reality via those who had lived it directly and thought it with the least possible deformation : the English economists (they had economic heads because there was an economy in England!) and the French philosophers and politicians (they had political heads because there was politics in France!) of the eighteenth century. And, as his critique of French utilitarianism, precisely for its lack of the advantage of direct experience,[41] shows, he was extremely sensitive to the ideological 'distanciation' produced by this absence: the French utilitarians made a 'philosophical' theory out of the economic relation of utilization and exploitation whose actual mechanism was described by the English economists as they saw it in action in English reality. I feel that the problem of the relation between Marx and Hegel will remain insoluble until we take this readjustment (décalage ) of viewpoint seriously, and realize that this retreat established Marx in a domain and a terrain which were no longer Hegel's domain and terrain.
What were the meanings of Marx's loans from Hegel, of his Hegelian heritage and in particular of the dialectic, are questions that can only be asked from the vantage point of this 'change of elements '.[42]
My second example: In their arguments within the Hegel they had constructed to answer to their needs, the Young Hegelians constantly asked the questions which were in fact posed them by the backwardness of the German history of the day when they compared it with that of France and England. The Napoleonic defeat had not indeed greatly altered the historical dislocation (décalage ) between Germany and the great nations of Western Europe. The German intellectuals of the 1830s and 1840s looked to France and England as the lands of freedom and reason, particularly after the July Revolution and the English Reform Act of 1832. Once again, unable to live it, they thought what others had done. But as they thought it in the element of philosophy, the French constitution and the English Reform became for them the reign of Reason, and they therefore awaited the German liberal revolution primarily from Reason.[43] When the failure of 1840 revealed the impotence of (German) Reason alone, they looked for aid from outside; and they came up with the incredibly naïve yet moving theme, the theme which was simply an admission of their backwardness and their illusions, but an admission still within those illusions, that the future belonged to the mystical union of France and Germany, the
union of French political sense and German theory.[44] Thus they were haunted by realities which they could only perceive through their own ideological schema, their own problematic, in the deformations produced by this medium.[45]
And when, in 1843, Marx was disillusioned by his failure to teach the Germans Reason and Freedom and he decided at last to leave for France, he still went largely in search of a myth, just as a few years ago it was still possible for the majority of the students of colonial subject nations to leave home in search of their Myth in France.[46] But when he got there, he made the fundamental discovery that France and England did not correspond to their myth, the discovery of the class struggle, of flesh and blood capitalism, and of the organized proletariat. Thus an extraordinary division of labour led to Marx discovering the reality of France while Engels did the same for England. Once again we must use the term retreat (not 'supersession'), that is, the retreat from myth to reality, when we are dealing with the actual experience which tore off the veils of illusion behind which Marx and Engels had been living as a result of their beginnings.
But this retreat from ideology towards reality came to coincide with the discovery of a radically new reality of which Marx and Engels could find no echo in the writings of 'German philosophy '. In France, Marx discovered the organized working class, in England, Engels discovered developed capitalism and a class struggle obeying its own laws and ignoring philosophy and philosophers.[47]
This double discovery played a decisive part in the Young Marx's intellectual evolution: the discovery beneath (en-deça ) the ideology which had deformed it of the reality it referred to -- and the discovery beyond contemporary ideology, which knew it not, of a new reality. Marx became himself by thinking this double reality in a rigorous theory, by changing elements -- and by thinking the unity and reality of this new element. Of course, it should be understood that these discoveries are inseparable from Marx's total personal experience, which was itself inseparable from the German history which he directly lived. For something was happening in Germany none the less. Events there were not just feeble echoes of events abroad. The idea that everything happened outside and nothing inside was itself an illusion of despair and impotence: for a history that fails, makes no headway and repeats itself is, as we
know only too well, still a history. The whole theoretical and practical experience I have been discussing was in fact bound up with the progressive experimental discovery of German reality itself. The disappointment of 1840 which broke down the whole theoretical system behind the neo-Hegelians' hopes, when Frederick William IV, the pseudo-'liberal', changed into a despot -- the failure of the Revolution of Reason attempted by the Rheinische Zeitung, persecution, Marx's exile, abandoned by the German bourgeois elements who had supported him at first, taught him with facts what was concealed by the famous 'German misery', the 'philistinism' denounced with such moral indignation, and this moral indignation itself : a concrete historical situation which was no misunderstanding, rigid and brutal class relations, reflex exploitation and fear, stronger in the German bourgeoisie than any proof by Reason. This swept everything aside, and Marx at last discovered the reality of the ideological opacity which had blinded him; he realized that he could no longer project German myths on to foreign realities and had to recognize that these myths were meaningless not only abroad but even in Germany itself which was cradling in them its own bondage to dreams: and that on the contrary, he had to project on to Germany the light of experience acquired abroad to see it in the light of day.
I hope it is now clear that if we are truly to be able to think this dramatic genesis of Marx's thought, it is essential to reject the term 'supersede ' and turn to that of discoveries, to renounce the spirit of Hegelian logic implied in the innocent but sly concept of 'supersession' (Aufhebung ) which is merely the empty anticipation of its end in the illusion of an immanence of truth, and to adopt instead a logic of actual experience and real emergence, one that would put an end to the illusions of ideological immanence ; in short, to adopt a logic of the irruption of real history in ideology itself, and thereby -- as is absolutely indispensable to the Marxist perspective, and, moreover, demanded by it -- give at last some real meaning to the personal style of Marx's experience, to the extraordinary sensitivity to the concrete which gave such force of conviction and revelation to each of his encounters with reality.[48]
I do not propose to give a chronology or a dialectic of the actual experience of history which united in that remarkable individual the Young Marx one man's particular psychology and world history so as to produce in him the discoveries which are still our nourishment today. The details should be sought in 'Père ' Cornu's works, for, with the exception of Mehring who did not have the same erudition or source material, he is the only man to have made this indispensable effort. I confidently predict that he will be read for a long time, for there is no access to the Young Marx except by way of his real history.
I merely hope that I have been able to give some idea of the extraordinary relation between the enslaved thought of the Young Marx and the free thought of Marx by pointing out some thing which is generally neglected, that is, the contingent beginnings (in respect to his birth) that he had to start from and the gigantic layer of illusions he had to break through before he could even see it. We should realize that in a certain sense, if these beginnings are kept in mind, we cannot say absolutely that 'Marx's youth is part of Marxism ' unless we mean by this that, like all historical phenomena, the evolution of this young bourgeois intellectual
can be illuminated by the application of the principles of historical materialism. Of course Marx's youth did lead to Marxism, but only at the price of a prodigious break with his origins, a heroic struggle against the illusions he had inherited from the Germany in which he was born, and an acute attention to the realities concealed by these illusions. If 'Marx's path' is an example to us, it is not because of his origins and circumstances but because of his ferocious insistence on freeing himself from the myths which presented themselves to him as the truth, and because of the role of the experience of real history which elbowed these myths aside.
Allow me to touch on one last point. If this interpretation does make possible a better reading of the Early Works, if the deeper unity of the thought (its problematic) casts light on their theoretical elements, and the acquisitions of Marx's actual experience (his history; his discoveries) illuminate the development of this problematic, and this makes it possible to settle those endlessly discussed problems of whether Marx was already Marx, whether he was still Feuerbachian or had gone beyond Feuerbach, that is, of the establishment at each moment of his youthful development of the internal and external meaning of the immediate elements of his thought, there is still another question that it leaves unanswered, or rather introduces: the question of the necessity of Marx's beginnings, from the vantage point of his destination.
It is as if Marx's necessity to escape from his beginnings, that is to traverse and dissipate the extraordinarily dense ideological world beneath which he was buried, had, as well as a negative significance (escape from illusions), a significance in some sense formative, despite these very illusions. We might even feel that the discovery of historical materialism was 'in the air' and that in many respects Marx expended a prodigious theoretical effort to arrive at a reality and attain certain truths which had already in part been recognized and accepted. So there ought to have been a 'short-cut' to the discovery (e.g., Engels's route via his 1844 article, or the one Marx admired in Dietzgen) as well as the 'roundabout' route that Marx took himself. What did he gain by this theoretical 'Long March ' that his beginnings had forced on him? What profit was there in starting so far from the end, in sojourning so long in philosophical abstraction and in crossing such spaces on his way to reality? Probably the sharpening it gave to his critical intelli-
gence as an individual, the acquisition of that historically incomparable 'clinical sense', ever vigilant for the struggles between classes and ideologies; but also, and in his contact with Hegel par excellence, the feeling for and practice in abstraction that is indispensable to the constitution of any scientific theory, the feeling for and practice in theoretical synthesis and the logic of a process for which the Hegelian dialectic gave him a 'pure', abstract model. I have not provided these reference points because I think I can answer this question; but because they may perhaps make possible, subject to certain scientific studies in progress, a definition of what might have been the role of the German Ideology and even of German 'speculative philosophy' in Marx's formation. I am inclined to see this role less as a theoretical formation than as a formation for theory, a sort of education of the theoretical intelligence via the theoretical formations of ideology itself. As if for once, in a form foreign to its pretensions, the ideological over-development of the German intellect had served as a propaedeutic for the Young Marx, in two ways: both through the necessity it imposed on him to criticize his whole ideology in order to reach that point beneath (en-deça ) his myths; and through the training it gave him in the manipulation of the abstract structure of its systems, independently of their validity. And if we are prepared to stand back a little from Marx's discovery so that we can see that he founded a new scientific discipline and that this emergence itself was analogous to all the great scientific discoveries of history, we must also agree that no great discovery has ever been made with out bringing to light a new object or a new domain, without a new horizon of meaning appearing, a new land in which the old images and myths have been abolished -- but at the same time the inventor of this new world must of absolute necessity have prepared his intelligence in the old forms themselves, he must have learnt and practised them, and by criticizing them formed a taste for and learnt the art of manipulating abstract forms in general, without which familiarity he could never have conceived new ones with which to think the new object. In the general context of the human development which may be said to make urgent, if not inevitable, all great historical discoveries, the individual who makes himself the author of one of them is of necessity in the paradoxical situation of having to learn the way of saying what he is going to
discover in the very way he must forget. Perhaps, too, it is this situation which gives Marx's Early Works that tragic imminence and permanence, that extreme tension between a beginning and an end, between a language and a meaning, out of which no philosophy could come without forgetting that the destiny they are committed to is irreversible.
December, 1960
Part Three
Contradiction and Overdetermination For Margritte and Gui 'With (Hegel) it is standing on its head. It page 88 [blank]
page 89
I could go further, and suggest that in the well-known passage: 'With (Hegel, the dialectic ) is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell '[2], this 'turning right side up again' is
merely gestural, even metaphorical, and it raises as many questions as it answers.
How should we really understand its use in this quotation? It is no longer a matter of a general 'inversion ' of Hegel, that is, the inversion of speculative philosophy as such. From The German Ideology onwards we know that such an undertaking would be meaningless. Anyone who claims purely and simply to have inverted speculative philosophy (to derive, for example, materialism) can never be more than philosophy's Proudhon, its unconscious prisoner, just as Proudhon was the prisoner of bourgeois economics. We are now concerned with the dialectic and the dialectic alone. It might be thought that when Marx writes that we must 'discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell ' he means that the 'rational kernel ' is the dialectic itself, while the 'mystical shell ' is speculative philosophy, Engels's time-honoured distinction between method and system implies precisely this.[3] The shell, the mystical wrapping (speculative philosophy), should be tossed aside and the precious kernel, the dialectic, retained. But in the same sentence Marx claims that this shelling of the kernel and the inversion of the dialectic are one and the same thing. How can an extraction be an inversion? or in other words, what is 'inverted' during this extraction?
Let us look a little closer. As soon as the dialectic is removed from its idealistic shell, it becomes 'the direct opposite of the Hegelian dialectic '. Does this mean that for Marx far from dealing
with Hegel's sublimated, inverted world, it is applied to the real world? This is certainly the sense in which Hegel was 'the first consciously to expose its general forms of movement in depth '. We could therefore take over the dialectic from him and apply it to life rather than to the Idea. The 'inversion' would then be 'inversion' of the 'sense' of the dialectic. But such an inversion in sense would in fact leave the dialectic untouched.
Taking Young Marx as an example, in the article referred to above, I suggested that to take over the dialectic in rigorous Hegelian form could only expose us to dangerous ambiguities, for it is impossible given the principles of a Marxist interpretation of any ideological phenomenon, it is unthinkable that the place of the dialectic in Hegel's system could be conceived as that of a kernel in a nut.[4] By which I meant that it is inconceivable that the essence of the dialectic in Hegel's work should not be contaminated by Hegelian ideology, or, since such a 'contamination' presupposes the fiction of a pure pre-'contamination' dialectic, that the Hegelian dialectic could cease to be Hegelian and become Marxist by a simple, miraculous 'extraction '.
Even in the rapidly written lines of the afterword to the second edition of Das Kapital Marx saw this difficulty clearly. By the accumulation of metaphors, and, in particular, in the remarkable encounter of the extraction and the inversion, he not only hints at something more than he says, but in other passages he puts it clearly enough, though Roy has half spirited them away.
A close reading of the German text shows clearly enough that
the mystical shell is by no means (as some of Engels's later commentaries would lead one to think)[5] speculative philosophy, or its 'world outlook' or its 'system', that is, an element we can regard as external to its method, but refers directly to the dialectic itself. Marx goes so far as to talk of the 'mystification the dialectic suff-
ered at Hegel's hands ', of its 'mystificatory side ', its 'mystified form ', and he opposes precisely to this mystified form (mystifizierten Form ) of the Hegelian dialectic the rational figure (rationelle Gestalt ) of his own dialectic. It would be difficult to indicate more clearly that the mystical shell is nothing but the mystified form of the dialectic itself: that is, not a relatively external element of the dialectic (e.g. the 'system') but an internal element, consubstantial with the Hegelian dialectic. It is not enough, therefore, to disengage it from its first wrapping (the system) to free it. It must also be freed from a second, almost inseparable skin, which is itself Hegelian in principle (Grundlage ). We must admit that this extraction cannot be painless; in appearance an unpeeling, it is really a demystification, an operation which transforms what it extracts.
So I think that, in its approximation, this metaphorical expression -- the 'inversion' of the dialectic -- does not pose the problem of the nature of the objects to which a single method should be applied (the world of the Idea for Hegel -- the real world for Marx), but rather the problem of the nature of the dialectic considered itself; that is, the problem of its specific structures ; not the problem of the inversion of the 'sense' of the dialectic, but that of the transformation of its structures. It is hardly worth pointing out that, in the first case, the application of a method, the exteriority of the dialectic to its possible objects poses a pre-dialectical question, a question without any strict meaning for Marx. The second problem on the other hand, raises a real question to which it is hardly likely that Marx and his disciples should not have given a concrete answer in theory and practice, in theory or in practice.
Let us say, to end this over-extended textual exposition, that if the Marxist dialectic is 'in principle' the opposite of the Hegelian dialectic, if it is rational and not mystical-mystified-mystificatory, this radical distinction must be manifest in its essence, that is, in its characteristic determinations and structures. To be clear, this means that basic structures of the Hegelian dialectic such as negation, the negation of the negation, the identity of opposites, 'supersession', the transformation of quantity into quality, contradiction, etc., have for Marx (in so far as he takes them over, and he takes over by no means all of them ) a structure different from the structure they
have for Hegel. It also means that these structural differences can be demonstrated, described, determined and thought. And if this is possible, it is therefore necessary, I would go so far as to say vital, for Marxism. We cannot go on reiterating indefinitely approximations such as the difference between system and method, the inversion of philosophy or dialectic, the extraction of the 'rational kernel', and so on, without letting these formulae think for us, that is, stop thinking ourselves and trust ourselves to the magic of a number of completely devalued words for our completion of Marx's work. I say vital, for I am convinced that the philosophical development of Marxism currently depends on this task.[6]
As this is also a personal responsibility, whatever risks I shall run, I should like to attempt a moment's reflection on the Marxist concept of contradiction, in respect to a particular example: the Leninist theme of the 'weakest link '.
Lenin gave this metaphor above all a practical meaning. A chain is as strong as its weakest link. In general, anyone who wants to control a given situation will look out for a weak point, in case it should render the whole system vulnerable. On the other hand, anyone who wants to attack it, even if the odds are apparently against him, need only discover this one weakness to make all its power precarious. So far there is no revelation here for readers of Machiavelli and Vauban, who were as expert in the arts of the defence as of the destruction of a position, and judged all armour by its faults.
But here we should pay careful attention: if it is obvious that the theory of the weakest link guided Lenin in his theory of the revolutionary party (it was to be faultlessly united in consciousness and organization to avoid adverse exposure and to destroy the enemy), it was also the inspiration for his reflections on the revolution itself. How was this revolution possible in Russia, why was it victorious there? It was possible in Russia for a reason that went beyond Russia: because with the unleashing of imperialist war humanity entered into an objectively revolutionary situation.[7] Imperialism tore off the 'peaceful' mask of the old capitalism. The concentration of industrial monopolies, their subordination to financial monopolies, had increased the exploitation of the workers and of the colonies. Competition between the monopolies made war inevitable. But this same war, which dragged vast masses, even colonial peoples from whom troops were drawn, into limitless suffering, drove its cannon-fodder not only into massacres, but also into history. Everywhere the experience, the horrors of war, were a revelation and confirmation of a whole century's protest against capitalist exploitation; a focusing-point, too, for hand in hand with this shattering exposure went the effective means of action. But though this effect was felt throughout the greater part of the popular masses of Europe (revolution in Germany and Hungary, mutinies and mass strikes in France and Italy, the Turin soviets), only in Russia, precisely the 'most backward ' country in Europe, did it produce a triumphant revolution. Why this paradoxical exception? For this basic reason: in the 'system of imperialist states'[8] Russia represented the weakest point. The Great War had, of course, precipitated and aggravated this weakness, but it had not by itself created it. Already, even in defeat, the 1905 Revolution had demonstrated and measured the weakness of Tsarist Russia. This weakness was the product of this special feature: the accumulation and exacerbation of all the historical contradictions
then possible in a single State. Contradictions of a regime of feudal exploitation at the dawn of the twentieth-century, attempting ever more ferociously amidst mounting threats to rule, with the aid of a deceitful priesthood, over an enormous mass of 'ignorant'[9] peasants (circumstances which dictated a singular association of the peasants' revolt with the workers' revolution).[10] Contradictions of large-scale capitalist and imperialist exploitation in the major cities and their suburbs, in the mining regions, oil-fields, etc. Contradictions of colonial exploitation and wars imposed on whole peoples. A gigantic contradiction between the stage of development of capitalist methods of production (particularly in respect to proletarian concentration: the largest factory in the world at the time was the Putilov works at Petrograd, with 40,000 workers and auxiliaries) and the medieval state of the countryside. The exacerbation of class struggles throughout the country, not only between exploiter and exploited, but even within the ruling classes themselves (the great feudal proprietors supporting autocratic, militarist police Tsarism; the lesser nobility involved in constant conspiracy; the big bourgeoisie and the liberal bourgeoisie opposed to the Tsar; the petty bourgeoisie oscillating between conformism and anarchistic 'leftism'). The detailed course of events added other 'exceptional'[11] circumstances, incomprehensible outside the 'tangle' of Russia's internal and external contradictions. For example, the 'advanced ' character of the Russian revolutionary elite, exiled by Tsarist repression; in exile it became 'cultivated', it absorbed the whole heritage of the political experience of the Western European working classes (above all, Marxism); this was particularly true of the formation of the Bolshevik Party, far ahead of any Western 'socialist' party in consciousness and organization ;[12] the 'dress rehearsal ' for the Revolution in 1905, which, in common with most serious crises, set class relations sharply into relief, crystallized them and made possible the 'discovery' of a new form of mass political organiza-
tion: the soviets.[13] Last, but not the least remarkable, the unexpected 'respite' the exhausted imperialist nations allowed the Bolsheviks for them to make their 'opening' in history, the involuntary but effective support of the Anglo-French bourgeoisie, who, at the decisive moment, wishing to be rid of the Tsar, did everything to help the Revolution.[14] In short, as precisely these details show, the privileged situation of Russia with respect to the possible revolution was a matter of an accumulation and exacerbation of historical contradictions that would have been incomprehensible in any country which was not, as Russia was, simultaneously at least a century behind the imperialist world, and at the peak of its development.
Lenin said this time and time again,[15] and Stalin summarized it in particularly clear terms in his April 1924 speeches.[16] The unevenness of capitalist development led, via the 1914-18 War, to the Russian Revolution because in the revolutionary situation facing the whole of humanity Russia was the weakest link in the chain of imperialist states. It had accumulated the largest sum of historical contradictions then possible; for it was at the same time the most backward and the most advanced nation, a gigantic contradiction which its divided ruling classes could neither avoid nor solve. In other words Russia was overdue with its bourgeois revolution on the eve of its proletarian revolution; pregnant with two revolutions, it could not withhold the second even by delaying the first. This exceptional situation was 'insoluble' (for the ruling classes)[17] and Lenin was correct to see in it the objective conditions of a Russian
revolution, and to forge its subjective conditions, the means of a decisive assault on this weak link in the imperialist chain, in a Communist Party that was a chain without weak links.
What else did Marx and Engels mean when they declared that history always progresses by its bad side ?[18] This obviously means the worse side for the rulers, but without stretching the sense unduly we can interpret the bad side as the bad side for those who expect history from another side ! For example, the German Social-Democrats at the end of the nineteenth century imagined that they would shortly be promoted to socialist triumph by virtue of belonging to the most powerful capitalist State, then undergoing rapid economic growth, just as they were experiencing rapid electoral growth (such coincidences do occur. . .). They obviously saw History as progressing by the other side, the 'good' side, the side with the greatest economic development, the greatest growth, with its contradiction reduced to the purest form (the contradiction between Capital and Labour), so they forgot that all this was taking place in a Germany armed with a powerful State machine, endowed with a bourgeoisie which had long ago given up 'its' political revolution in exchange for Bismarck's (and later Wilhelm's) military, bureaucratic and police protection, in exchange for the super-profits of capitalist and colonialist exploitation, endowed, too, with a chauvinist and reactionary petty bourgeoisie. They forgot that, in fact, this simple quintessence of contradiction was quite simply abstract : the real contradiction was so much one with its 'circumstances' that it was only discernible, identifiable and manipulable through them and in them.
What is the essence of this practical experience and the reflections it inspired in Lenin? It should be pointed out immediately that this was not Lenin's sole illuminating experience. Before 1917 there was 1905, before 1905 the great historical deceptions of England and Germany, before that the Commune, even earlier the German failure of 1848-9. These experiences had been reflected en route (Engels, Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany ; Marx, The Class Struggles in France, The Civil War in France , The Eighteenth Brumaire , The Critique of the Gotha Programme ; Engels, The Critique of the Erfurt Programme, and so on), directly or indirectly, and had been related to even earlier revolutionary
experience: to the bourgeois revolutions of England and France.
How else should we summarize these practical experiences and their theoretical commentaries other than by saying that the whole Marxist revolutionary experience shows that, if the general contradiction (it has already been specified: the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, essentially embodied in the contradiction between two antagonistic classes) is sufficient to define the situation when revolution is the 'task of the day', it cannot of its own simple, direct power induce a 'revolutionary situation', nor a fortiori a situation of revolutionary rupture and the triumph of the revolution. If this contradiction is to become 'active ' in the strongest sense to become a ruptural principle, there must be an accumulation of 'circumstances' and 'currents' so that whatever their origin and sense (and many of them will necessarily be paradoxically foreign to the revolution in origin and sense, or even its 'direct opponents'), they 'fuse ' into a ruptural unity : when they produce the result of the immense majority of the popular masses grouped in an assault on a regime which its ruling classes are unable to defend.[19] Such a situation presupposes not only the 'fusion' of the two basic conditions into a 'single national crisis', but each condition considered (abstractly) by itself presupposes the 'fusion' of an 'accumulation' of contradictions. How else could the class-divided popular masses (proletarians, peasants, petty bourgeois) throw themselves together, consciously or unconsciously, into a general assault on the existing regime? And how else could the ruling classes (aristocrats big bourgeois, industrial bourgeois, finance bourgeois, etc.), who have learnt by long experience and sure instinct to
themselves, despite their class differences, a holy alliance against the exploited, find themselves reduced to impotence, divided at the decisive moment, with neither new political solutions nor new political leaders, deprived of foreign class support, disarmed in the very citadel of their State machine, and suddenly overwhelmed by the people they had so long kept in leash and respectful by exploitation, violence and deceit? If, as in this situation, a vast accumulation of 'contradictions' comes into play in the same court, some of which are radically heterogeneous -- of different origins, different sense, different levels and points of application -- but which nevertheless 'merge' into a ruptural unity, we can no longer talk of the sole, unique power of the general 'contradiction'. Of course, the basic contradiction dominating the period (when the revolution is 'the task of the day') is active in all these 'contradictions' and even in their 'fusion'. But, strictly speaking, it cannot be claimed that these contradictions and their fusion are merely the pure phenomena of the general contradiction. The 'circumstances' and 'currents' which achieve it are more than its phenomena pure and simple. They derive from the relations of production, which are, of course, one of the terms of the contradiction, but at the same time its conditions of existence ; from the superstructures, instances which derive from it, but have their own consistency and effectivity, from the international conjuncture itself, which intervenes as a determination with a specific role to play.[20] This means that if the 'differences' that constitute each of the instances in play (manifested in the 'accumulation' discussed by Lenin) 'merge ' into a real unity, they are not 'dissipated ' as pure phenomena in the internal unity of a simple contradiction. The unity they constitute in this 'fusion' into a revolutionary rupture,[21] is constituted by their own essence and effectivity, by what they are, and according to the specific modalities of their action. In constituting this unity, they reconstitute and complete their basic animating
unity, but at the same time they also bring out its nature : the 'contradiction' is inseparable from the total structure of the social body in which it is found, inseparable from its formal conditions of existence, and even from the instances it governs; it is radically affected by them, determining, but also determined in one and the same movement, and determined by the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates; it might be called overdetermined in its principle.[22]
I am not particularly taken by this term overdetermination (borrowed from other disciplines), but I shall use it in the absence of anything better, both as an index and as a problem, and also because it enables us to see clearly why we are dealing with something quite different from the Hegelian contradiction.
Indeed, a Hegelian contradiction is never really overdetermined, even though it frequently has all the appearances of being so. For example, in the Phenomenology of Mind, which describes the 'experiences' of consciousness and their dialectic, culminating in Absolute Knowledge, contradiction does not appear to be simple, but on the contrary very complex. Strictly speaking, only the first contradiction -- between sensuous consciousness and its knowledge -- can be called simple. The further we progress in the dialectic of its production, the richer consciousness becomes, the more complex is its contradiction. However, it can be shown that this complexity is not the complexity of an effective overdetermination, but the complexity of a cumulative internalization which is only apparently an overdetermination. In fact at each moment of its development consciousness lives and experiences its own essence (the essence corresponding to the stage it has attained) through all the echoes of the essence it has previously been, and through the allusive presence of the corresponding historical forms. Hegel, therefore, argues that every consciousness has a suppressed-conserved (aufgehoben ) past even in its present, and a world (the world whose consciousness it could be, but which is marginal in the Phenomenology, its presence virtual and latent), and that therefore it also has as its past the worlds of its superseded essences. But these past images of conscious-
ness and these latent worlds (corresponding to the images) never affect present consciousness as effective determinations different from itself : these images and worlds concern it only as echoes (memories, phantoms of its historicity) of what it has become, that is, as anticipations of or allusions to itself. Because the past is never more than the internal essence (in-itself) of the future it encloses, this presence of the past is the presence to consciousness of consciousness itself, and no true external determination. A circle of circles, consciousness has only one centre, which solely determines it; it would need, circles with another centre than itself -- decentred circles -- for it to be affected at its centre by their effectivity, in short for its essence to be over-determined by them. But this is not the case.
This truth emerges even more clearly from the Philosophy of History. Here again we encounter an apparent overdetermination: are not all historical societies constituted of an infinity of concrete determinations, from political laws to religion via customs, habits, financial, commercial and economic regimes, the educational system, the arts, philosophy, and so on? However, none of these determinations is essentially outside the others, not only because together they constitute an original, organic totality, but also and above all because this totality is reflected in a unique internal principle, which is the truth of all those concrete determinations. Thus Rome: its mighty history, its institutions, its crises and ventures, are nothing but the temporal manifestation of the internal principle of the abstract legal personality, and then its destruction. Of course, this internal principle contains as echoes the principle of each of the historical formations it has superseded, but as echoes of itself -- that is why, too, it only has one centre, the centre of all the past worlds conserved in its memory; that is why it is simple. And its own contradiction appears in this very simplicity: in Rome, the Stoic consciousness, as consciousness of the contradiction inherent in the concept of the abstract legal personality, which aims for the concrete world of subjectivity, but misses it. This is the contradiction which will bring down Rome and produce its future: the image of subjectivity in medieval Christianity. So all Rome's complexity fails to overdetermine the contradiction in the simple Roman principle, which is merely the internal essence of this infinite historical wealth.
We have only to ask why Hegel thought the phenomena of his-
torical mutation in terms of this simple concept of contradiction, to pose what is precisely the essential question. The simplicity of the Hegelian contradiction is made possible only by the simplicity of the internal principle that constitutes the essence of any historical period. If it is possible, in principle, to reduce the totality, the infinite diversity, of a historically given society (Greece, Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, England, and so on) to a simple internal principle, this very simplicity can be reflected in the contradiction to which it thereby acquires a right. Must we be even plainer? This reduction itself (Hegel derived the idea from Montesquieu), the reduction of all the elements that make up the concrete life of a historical epoch (economic, social, political and legal institutions, customs, ethics, art, religion, philosophy, and even historical events : wars, battles, defeats, and so on) to one principle of internal unity, is itself only possible on the absolute condition of taking the whole concrete life of a people for the externalization-alienation (Entäusserung-Entfremdung ) of an internal spiritual principle, which can never definitely be anything but the most abstract form of that epoch's consciousness of itself : its religious or philosophical consciousness, that is, its own ideology. I think we can now see how the 'mystical shell' affects and contaminates the 'kernel' -- for the simplicity of Hegelian contradiction is never more than a reflection of the simplicity of this internal principle of a people, that is, not its material reality but its most abstract ideology. It is also why Hegel could represent Universal History from the Ancient Orient to the present day as 'dialectical', that is, moved by the simple play of a principle of simple contradiction. It is why there is never for him any basic rupture, no actual end to any real history -- nor any radical beginning. It is why his philosophy of history is garnished with uniformly 'dialectical' mutations. This stupefying conception is only defensible from the Spirit's topmost peak. From that vantage point what does it matter if a people die once it has embodied the determinate principle of a moment of the Idea (which has plenty more to come), once, having embodied it, it has cast it off to add it to that Self-Memory which is History, thereby delivering it to such and such another people (even if their historical relation is very tenuous!), who, reflecting it in their substance, will find in it the promise of their own internal principle, that is, as if by chance the logically consecutive moment of the Idea, etc. etc.? It must be
clear that all these arbitrary decisions (shot through though they are with insights of genius) are not just miraculously confined to Hegel's 'world outlook', to his 'system', but are reflected in the structure, in the very structures of his dialectic, particularly in the 'contradiction ' whose task is the magical movement of the concrete contents of a historical epoch towards their ideological Goal.
Thus the Marxist 'inversion' of the Hegelian dialectic is something quite different from an extraction pure and simple. If we clearly perceive the intimate and close relation that the Hegelian structure of the dialectic has with Hegel's 'world outlook', that is, with his speculative philosophy, this 'world outlook' cannot really be cast aside without our being obliged to transform profoundly the structures of that dialectic. If not, whether we will or no, we shall drag along with us, one hundred and fifty years after Hegel's death and one hundred years after Marx, the shreds of the famous 'mystical wrapping'.
Let us return to Lenin and thence to Marx. If it is true, as Leninist practice and reflection prove, that the revolutionary situation in Russia was precisely a result of the intense overdetermination of the basic class contradiction, we should perhaps ask what is exceptional about this 'exceptional situation ', and whether, like all exceptions, this one does not clarify its rule -- is not, unbeknown to the rule, the rule itself. For, after all, are we not always in exceptional situations ? The failure of the 1849 Revolution in Germany was an exception, the failure in Paris in 1871 was an exception, the German Social-Democratic failure at the beginning of the twentieth century pending the chauvinist betrayal of 1914 was an exception . . . exceptions, but with respect to what ? To nothing but the abstract, but comfortable and reassuring idea of a pure, simple 'dialectical' schema, which in its very simplicity seems to have retained a memory (or rediscovered the style) of the Hegelian model and its faith in the resolving 'power' of the abstract contradiction as such: in particular, the 'beautiful' contradiction between Capital and Labour. I do not deny that the 'simplicity ' of this purified schema has answered to certain subjective necessities of the mobilization of the masses; after all, we know perfectly well that the utopian forms of socialism also played a historical part, and played it well because they took the masses at the word of their
consciousness, because if they are to be led forward, even (and above all) this is how they must be taken. One day it will be necessary to do what Marx and Engels did for utopian socialism, but this time for those still schematic utopian forms of mass consciousness influenced by Marxism (even the consciousness of certain of its theoreticians) in the first stage of its history: a true historical study of the conditions and forms of that consciousness.[23] In fact we
find that all the important historical and political articles written by Marx and Engels during this period give us precisely the material for a preliminary reflection on these so-called 'exceptions'. They draw from them the basic notion that the Capital-Labour contradiction is never simple, but always specified by the historically concrete forms and circumstances in which it is exercised. It is specified by the forms of the superstructure (the State, the dominant ideology, religion, politically organized movements, and so on); specified by the internal and external historical situation which determines it on the one hand as a function of the national past (completed or 'relapsed' bourgeois revolution, feudal exploitation eliminated wholly, partially or not at all, local 'customs' specific national traditions, even the 'etiquette' of political struggles and behaviour, etc.), and on the other as functions of the existing world context (what dominates it -- competition of capitalist nations, or 'imperialist internationalism', or competition within imperialism, etc.), many of these phenomena deriving from the 'law of uneven development' in the Leninist sense.
What can this mean but that the apparently simple contradiction is always overdetermined ? The exception thus discovers in itself the rule, the rule of the rule, and the old 'exceptions' must be regarded as methodologically simple examples of the new rule. To extend the analysis to all phenomena using this rule, I should like to suggest that an 'overdetermined contradiction ' may either be overdetermined in the direction of a historical inhibition, a real 'block' for the contradiction (for example, Wilhelmine Germany), or in the direction of revolutionary rupture [24] (Russia in 1917), but in neither condition is it ever found in the 'pure' state. 'Purity' itself would be the exception, I agree, but I know of no example to refer to.
But if every contradiction appears in Marxist historical practice and experience as an overdetermined contradiction ; if this overdetermination constitutes the specificity of Marxist contradiction; if the 'simplicity' of the Hegelian dialectic is inseparable from Hegel's 'world outlook', particularly the conception of history it reflects, we must ask what is the content, the raison d'être of the overdetermination of the Marxist contradiction, and how can the Marxist conception of society be reflected in this overdetermination. This is a crucial question, for it is obvious that if we cannot demonstrate the necessary link that unites the characteristic structure of contradiction for Marx to his conception of society and history, if this overdetermination is not based on the very concepts of the Marxist theory of history, the category will remain 'up in the air'. For however accurate and verified it may be in political practice, we have only so far used it descriptively, that is, contingently, and like an descriptions it is still at the mercy of any philosophical theory that happens to come along.
But this raises the ghost of the Hegelian model again -- not of its abstract model of contradiction, but of the concrete model of the conception of history reflected in it. If we are to prove that the specific structure of Marxist contradiction is based on Marx's conception of history, we must first ensure that this conception is not itself a mere 'inversion' of the Hegelian conception pure and simple. It is true that we could argue as a first approximation that Marx 'inverted' the Hegelian conception of History. This can be quickly illustrated. The whole Hegelian conception is regulated by the dialectic of the internal principles of each society, that is, the dialectic of the moments of the idea; as Marx said twenty times, Hegel explains the material life, the concrete history of all peoples by a dialectic of consciousness (the people's consciousness of itself: its ideology). For Marx, on the other hand, the material life of men explains their history; their consciousness, their ideologies are then merely the phenomena of their material life. This opposition certainly unites all the appearances of an 'inversion'. To push this to extremes, almost to caricature: what do we find in Hegel? A conception of society which takes over the achievements of eighteenth-century political theory and political economy, and regards every society (every modern society of course; but the present reveals what was once only a germ) as
constituted by two societies : the society of needs, or civil society, and the political society or State and everything embodied in the State: religion, philosophy, in short, the epoch's consciousness of itself. In other words, schematically, by material life on the one hand and spiritual life on the other. For Hegel, material life (civil society, that is, the economy) is merely a Ruse of Reason. Apparently autonomous, it is subject to a law outside itself: its own Goal, which is simultaneously its condition of possibility, the State, that is, spiritual life. So here again we have a way of inverting Hegel which would apparently give us Marx. It is simply to invert the relation of the terms (and thus to retain them ): civil society and State, economy and politics-ideology -- but to transform the essence into the phenomena and the phenomena into an essence, or if you prefer, to make the Ruse of Reason work backwards. While for Hegel, the politico-ideological was the essence of the economic, for Marx, the economic will be the essence of the politico-ideological. The political and the ideological will therefore be merely pure phenomena of the economic which will be their 'truth'. For Hegel's 'pure' principle of consciousness (of the epoch's consciousness of itself), for the simple internal principle which he conceived as the principle of the intelligibility of all the determinations of a historical people, we have substituted another simple principle, its opposite: material life, the economy -- a simple principle which in turn becomes the sole principle of the universal intelligibility of all the determinations of a historical people.[25] Is this a caricature ? If we take Marx's famous comments on the hand-mill, the water mill and the steam-mill literally or out of context, this is their meaning. The logical destination of this temptation is the exact mirror image of the Hegelian dialectic -- the only difference being that it is no longer a question of deriving the successive moments from the Idea, but from the Economy, by virtue of the same internal contradiction. This temptation results in the radical reduction of the dialectic of history to the dialectic generating the successive modes of production, that is, in the last analysis, the different production techniques. There are names for these temptations in the history of Marxism: economism and even technologism.
But these terms have only to be mentioned to evoke the memory of the theoretical and practical struggles of Marx and his disciples against these 'deviations'. And how many peremptory attacks on economism there are to counterbalance that well-thumbed piece on the steam engine! Let us abandon this caricature, not so as to oppose the official condemnations to economism, but to examine what authentic principles are active in these condemnations and in Marx's actual thought.
For all its apparent rigour, the fiction of the 'inversion ' is now clearly untenable. We know that Marx did not retain the terms of the Hegelian model of society and 'invert ' them. He substituted other, only distantly related terms for them. Furthermore, he overhauled the connexion which had previously ruled over the terms. For Marx, both terms and relation changed in nature and sense.
Firstly, the terms are no longer the same.
Of course, Marx still talks of 'civil society ' (especially in The German Ideology : the term is often mistranslated as 'bourgeois society') but as an allusion to the past, to denote the site of his discoveries, not to re-utilize the concept. The formation of this concept requires closer examination. Beneath the abstract forms of the political philosophy of the eighteenth century and the more concrete forms of its political economy, we discover, not a true theory of economic history, nor even a true economic theory, but a description and foundation of economic behaviour, in short, a sort of philosophico-economic Phenomenology. What is remarkable in this undertaking, as much in its philosophers (Locke, Helvetius, etc.) as in its economists (Turgot, Smith, etc.), is that this description of civil society acts as if it were the description (and foundation) of what Hegel, aptly summarizing its spirit, called 'the world of needs '; a world related immediately, as if to its internal essence, to the relations of individuals defined by their particular wishes, personal interests, in short, their 'needs'. We know that Marx's whole conception of political economy is based on a critique of this presupposition (the homo economicus and its ethical and legal abstraction, the 'Man ' of philosophy); how then could he take over a concept which is its direct product ? Neither this (abstract) description of economic behaviour nor its supposed foundation in the mythical homo economicus interested Marx -- his
concern was rather the 'anatomy ' of this world, and the dialectic of the mutations of this 'anatomy'. Therefore the concept of 'civil society ' -- the world of individual economic behaviour and its ideological origin -- disappears from Marx's work. He understands abstract economic reality (which Smith, for example, rediscovers in the laws of the market as a result of his work of foundation) as the effect of a deeper, more concrete reality: the mode of production of a determinate social formation. Thus for the first time individual economic behaviour (which was the pretext for this economico-philosophical Phenomenology) is measured according to its conditions of existence. The degree of development of the forces of production, the state of the relations of production : these are from now on the basic Marxist concepts. 'Civil society' may well have gestured towards the site of the new concepts ('dig here'), but we must admit that it did not even contribute to their material. But where in Hegel would you find all that?
As for the State, it is only too easy to show that it no longer has the same content for Marx as it had for Hegel. Not just because the State can no longer be the 'reality of the Idea', but also and primarily because it is systematically thought as an instrument of coercion in the service of the ruling, exploiting class. Beneath the 'description' and sublimation of the attributes of the State, Marx finds here also a new concept, foreshadowed in the eighteenth century (Linguet, Rousseau, etc.), taken up even by Hegel in his Philosophy of Right (making it into a 'phenomenon' of the Ruse of Reason which triumphs in the State: the opposition of wealth and poverty), and abundantly used by the historians of the 1830s: the concept of social class, in direct relation with the relations of production. The intervention of this new concept and its interconnexion with one of the basic concepts of the economic structure transforms the essence of the State from top to toe, for the latter is no longer above human groups, but at the service of the ruling class; it is no longer its mission to consummate itself in art, religion and philosophy, but to set them to serve the interests of the ruling class, or rather to force them to base themselves on ideas and themes which it renders ruling ; it therefore ceases to be the 'truth of' civil society, to become, not the 'truth of' something else, not even of the economy, but the means of action and domination of a social class, etc.
But it is not just the terms which change, it is also their relations themselves.
We should not think that this means a new technical distribution of roles imposed by the multiplication of new terms. How are these new terms arranged? On the one hand, the structure (the economic base: the forces of production and the relations of production); on the other, the superstructure (the State and all the legal, political and ideological forms). We have seen that one could nevertheless attempt to maintain a Hegelian relation (the relation Hegel imposed between civil society and the State) between these two groups of categories: the relation between an essence and its phenomena, sublimated in the concept of the 'truth of. . . . '. For Hegel, the State is the 'truth of ' civil society, which, thanks to the action of the Ruse of Reason, is merely its own phenomenon consummated in it. For a Marx thus relegated to the rank of a Hobbes or a Locke, civil society would be nothing but the 'truth of ' its phenomenon, the State, nothing but a Ruse which Economic Reason would then put at the service of a class: the ruling class. Unfortunately for this neat schema, this is not Marx. For him, this tacit identity (phenomenon-essence-truth-of . . .) of the economic and the political disappears in favour of a new conception of the relation between determinant instances in the structure-superstructure complex which constitutes the essence of any social formation. Of course, these specific relations between structure and superstructure still deserve theoretical elaboration and investigation. However, Marx has at least given us the 'two ends of the chain', and has told us to find out what goes on between them: on the one hand, determination in the last instance by the (economic ) mode of production ; on the other, the relative autonomy of the superstructures and their specific effectivity. This clearly breaks with the Hegelian principle of explanation by consciousness of self (ideology), but also with the Hegelian theme of phenomenon-essence-truth-of. We really are dealing with a new relationship between new terms.
Listen to the old Engels in 1890, taking the young 'economists' to task for not having understood that this was a new relationship.[26] Production is the determinant factor, but only 'in the last instance ':
'More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted .' Anyone who 'twists this ' so that it says that the economic factor is the only determinant factor, 'transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, empty phrase '. And as explanation: 'The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure the political forms of the class struggle and its results: to wit constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas -- also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles, and in many cases preponderate in determining their form . . .' The word 'form ' should be understood in its strongest sense, designating something quite different from the formal. As Engels also says: 'The Prussian State also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenberg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by the entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power )'.[27]
Here, then, are the two ends of the chain: the economy is determinant, but in the last instance, Engels is prepared to say, in the long run, the run of History. But History 'asserts itself' through the multiform world of the superstructures, from local tradition[28] to international circumstance. Leaving aside the theoretical solution Engels proposes for the problem of the relation between determination in the last instance -- the economic -- and those determinations imposed by the superstructures -- national traditions
and international events -- it is sufficient to retain from him what should be called the accumulation of effective determinations (deriving from the superstructures and from special national and international circumstances) on the determination in the last instance by the economic. It seems to me that this clarifies the expression overdetermined contradiction, which I have put forward, this specifically because the existence of overdetermination is no longer a fact pure and simple, for in its essentials we have related it to its bases, even if our exposition has so far been merely gestural. This overdetermination is inevitable and thinkable as soon as the real existence of the forms of the superstructure and of the national and international conjuncture has been recognized -- an existence largely specific and autonomous, and therefore irreducible to a pure phenomenon. We must carry this through to its conclusion and say that this overdetermination does not just refer to apparently unique and aberrant historical situations (Germany, for example), but is universal ; the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state ; in History, these instances, the superstructures, etc. -- are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never comes.
In short, the idea of a 'pure and simple' non-overdetermined contradiction is, as Engels said of the economist turn of phrase 'meaningless, abstract, senseless'. That it can serve as a pedagogical model, or rather that it did serve as a polemical and pedagogical instrument at a certain point in history does not fix its destiny for all time. After all, pedagogic systems do change in history. It is time to make the effort to raise pedagogy to the level of circumstances, that is, of historical needs. But we must all be able to see that this pedagogical effort presupposes another purely theoretical effort. For if Marx has given us the general principles and some concrete examples (The Eighteenth Brumaire, The Civil War in France, etc.), if all political practice in the history of Socialist and Communist movements constitutes an inexhaustible reservoir of concrete 'experiential protocol', it has to be said that the theory of the specific effectivity of the superstructures and other 'circumstances ' largely remains to be elaborated ; and before the theory of their
effectivity or simultaneously (for it is by formulating their effectivity that their essence can be attained) there must be elaboration of the theory of the particular essence of the specific elements of the superstructure. Like the map of Africa before the great explorations, this theory remains a realm sketched in outline, with its great mountain chains and rivers, but often unknown in detail beyond a few well-known regions. Who has really attempted to follow up the explorations of Marx and Engels? I can only think of Gramsci.[29] But this task is indispensable if we are to be able to express even propositions more precise than these approximations on the character of the overdetermination of Marxist contradiction, based primarily on the existence and nature of the superstructures.
Allow me one last example. Marxist political practice is constantly coming up against that reality known as 'survivals '. There can be no doubt that these survivals exist -- they cling tenaciously to life. Lenin struggled with them inside the Russian Party even before the Revolution. We do not need to be reminded that after the Revolution and from then till now they have been the source of constant difficulties, battles and commentaries. What is a 'survival '? What is its theoretical status? Is it essentially social or 'psychological' ? Can it be reduced to the survival of certain economic structures which the Revolution was unable to destroy with its first decrees: for example, the small-scale production (primarily peasant production in Russia) which so preoccupied Lenin? Or does it refer as much to other structures, political, ideological structures, etc.: customs, habits, even 'traditions ' such as the 'national tradition ' with its specific traits? The term 'survival ' is constantly invoked, but it is still virtually uninvestigated, not in
its name (it has one!), but in its concept. The concept it deserves (and has fairly won) must be more than a vague Hegelianism such as 'supersession ' -- the maintenance-of-what-has-been-negated-in-its-very-negation (that is, the negation of the negation). If we return to Hegel for a second we see that the survival of the past as the 'superseded ' (aufgehoben ) is simply reduced to the modality of a memory, which, furthermore, is merely the inverse of (that is, the same thing as) an anticipation. Just as at the dawn of Human History the first stammerings of the Oriental Spirit -- joyous captive of the giants of the sky, the sea and the desert, and then of its own stone bestiary -- already betrayed the unconscious presage of the future achievements of the Absolute Spirit, so in each instant of Time the past survives in the form of a memory of what it has been; that is, as the whispered promise of its present. That is why the past is never opaque on an obstacle. It must always be digestible as it has been pre-digested. Rome lived happily in a world impregnated by Greece: Greece 'superseded' survived as objective memories: its reproduced temples, its assimilated religion, its rethought philosophy. Without knowing it, as at last it died to bring forth its Roman future, it was already Rome, so it never shackled Rome in Rome. That is why the present can feed on the shades of its past, or even project them before it, just as the great effigies of Roman Virtue opened up the road to Revolution and Terror for the Jacobins. Its past is never anything more than itself and only recalls to it that law of interiority which is the destiny of the whole Future of Humanity.
I think this is enough to show that, though the word is still meaningful (in fact, not rigorously meaningful), Marx's conception of 'supersession' has nothing to do with this dialectic of historical comfort; his past was no shade, not even an 'objective' shade -- it is a terribly positive and active structured reality, just as cold, hunger and the night are for his poor worker. How, then, are we to think these survivals ? Surely, with a number of realities, which are precisely realities for Marx, whether superstructures, ideologies 'national traditions' or the customs and 'spirit' of a people, etc? Surely, with the overdetermination of any contradiction and of any constitutive element of a society, which means : (1) that a revolution in the structure does not ipso facto modify the existing superstructures and particularly the ideologies at one blow (as it would if the
economic was the sole determinant factor ), for they have sufficient of their own consistency to survive beyond their immediate life context, even to recreate, to 'secrete' substitute conditions of existence temporarily; (2) that the new society produced by the Revolution may itself ensure the survival, that is, the reactivation, of older elements through both the forms of its new superstructures and specific (national and international) 'circumstances'. Such a reactivition would be totally inconceivable for a dialectic deprived of overdetermination. I shall not evade the most burning issue: it seems to me that either the whole logic of 'supersession' must be rejected, or we must give up any attempt to explain how the proud and generous Russian people bore Stalin's crimes and repression with such resignation; how the Bolshevik Party could tolerate them; not to speak of the final question -- how a Communist leader could have ordered them. But there is obviously much theoretical work needed here as well. By this I mean more than the historical work which has priority -- precisely because of this priority, priority is given to one essential of any Marxist historical study: rigour ; a rigorous conception of Marxist concepts, their implications and their development ; a rigorous conception and investigation of what appertains to them in particular, that is, what distinguishes them once and for all from their phantoms.
One phantom is more especially crucial than any other today: the shade of Hegel. To drive this phantom back into the night we need a little more light on Marx, or what is the same thing, a little more Marxist light on Hegel himself. We can then escape from the ambiguities and confusions of the 'inversion'.
June-July, 1962
Appendix*
I should like to stop here for a moment to examine a passage from Engels's letter to Bloch that I deliberately ignored in the preceding article. For this passage, containing Engels's theoretical solution to the problem of the basis for the determination 'in the last instance' by the economy, is, in fact, independent of the Marxist theses that Engels was counter-posing to 'economist' dogmatism.
No doubt this is only a letter. But as it constitutes a decisive theoretical document for the refutation of schematism and economism, and as it has already played a historical role as such and may well do so again, we should not conceal the fact that his argument for this basis will no longer answer to our critical needs.
In his solution, Engels resorts to a single model at two different levels of analysis:
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To My English Readers
I
* With the exception of the article on Bertolazzi and Brecht, which was published in the Catholic review Esprit.
** For explanation of terms used see Glossary, page 249.
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II
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III
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October, 1967
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Acknowledgements
'Feuerbach's Philosophical Manifestoes' first appeared in La Nouvelle Critique, December 1960.
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I
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* Naturally this term 'intellectuals' denotes a very specific type of militant intellectual, a type unprecedented in many respects. These are real initiates, armed with the most authentic scientific and theoretical culture forewarned of the crushing reality and manifold mechanisms of all forms of the ruling ideology and constantly on the watch for them, and able in their theoretical practice to borrow -- against the stream of all 'accepted truths' the fertile paths opened up by Marx but bolted and barred by all the reigning prejudices. An undertaking of this nature and this rigour is unthinkable without an unshakeable and lucid confidence in the working class and direct participation in its struggles.
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I have recalled these investigations and these choices because in their own way they carry the traces of our history. And also because the end of Stalinist dogmatism has not completely dissipated them as mere circumstantial reflexes; they are still our problems. Those who impute all our disappointments, all our mistakes and all our disarray in whatever domain, to Stalin, along with his crimes and errors, are likely to be disconcerted by having to admit that the end of Stalinist dogmatism has not restored Marxist philosophy to us in its integrity. After all, it is never possible to liberate, even from dogmatism, more than already exists. The end of dogmatism produced a real freedom of investigation, and also in some a feverish haste to make philosophy an ideological commentary on their feeling of liberation and their taste for freedom. Fevers sink as surely as stones. What the end of dogmatism has restored to us is the right to assess exactly what we have, to give both our wealth and our poverty their true names, to think and pose our problems in the open, and to undertake in rigour a true investigation. It makes it possible for us to emerge partly from our theoretical provincialism, to recognize and acquaint ourselves with those who did exist and do exist outside us, and as we see this outside, we can begin to see ourselves from the outside and discover the place we occupy in the knowledge and ignorance of Marxism, and thereby begin to know ourselves. The end of dogmatism puts us face to face with this reality: that Marxist philosophy, founded by Marx in
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II
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* On this dual theme of the problematic and of the epistemological break (the break indicating the mutation of a pre-scientific problematic into a [cont. onto p. 33. -- DJR] scientific problematic), see the pages of extraordinary theoretical profundity in Engels's Preface to the Second Volume of Capital (English translation, Moscow 1961, pp. 14-18). I shall give a brief commentary on them in Lire le Capital, Vol. II.
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1840-44: the Early Works
(4) The period of Marx's Early Works (1840-5), that is, the period of his ideological works, can itself be subdivided into two moments:
1845: the Works of the Break.
1845-57: the Transitional Works.
1857-83: the Mature Works.
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I have permitted myself these remarks so as to clarify the meaning of the pages devoted to Feuerbach and the Young Marx, and so as to reveal the unity of the problem dominating these Notes, since the essays on contradiction and on the dialectic equally concern a definition of the irreducible specificity of Marxist theory.
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La Nouvelle Critique has asked me to situate the writings by Feuerbach published a few months ago in the Collection Epimétheé (P.U.F.). I am glad to be able to do so by giving brief answers to a number of questions.
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T H E O R E T I C A L Q U E S T I O N S
life to a young man called Marx.
efforts, never quitted the realm of philosophy.
Far from examining its general philosophical
premises, the whole body of its inquiries has
actually sprung from the soil of a definite
philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only
in their answers but also in their questions
there was a mystification.'
Karl Marx, The German Ideology
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The periodical Recherches Internationales offers us eleven studies by Marxists from abroad 'on the Young Marx'. One article by Togliatti, already old (1954), five from the Soviet Union (three of which are by young scholars, twenty-seven to twenty-eight years old), four from the German Democratic Republic, and one from Poland. Exegesis of the Young Marx might have been thought the privilege and the cross of Western Marxists. This work and its Presentation show them that they are no longer alone in the perils and rewards of this task.[1]
The Political Problem
1. The interest shown in the study of Marx's Early Works by young Soviet scholars is particularly noteworthy, It is an important sign of the present direction of cultural development in the U.S.S.R. (cf. the 'Presentation', p. 4, n. 7).
2. Incontestably dominated by the remarkable essay by Hoeppner: 'A propos de quelques conceptions erronées du passage de Hegel à Marx ' (pp. 175-90).
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3. See Molitor, trans., (OEuvres philosophiques de Marx, Ed. Costès, Vol. IV, 'Introduction' by Landshut and Mayer: 'It is clear that the basis for the tendency which presided over the analysis made in Capital is . . . the tacit hypothesis that can alone restore an intrinsic justification to the whole tendency of Marx's most important work . . . these hypotheses were precisely the formal theme of Marx's work before 1847. For the author of Capital they by no means represent youthful errors from which he progressively liberated himself as his knowledge matured, and which were cast aside as waste in the process of his personal purification. Rather, in the works from 1840 to 1847 Marx opened up the whole horizon of historical conditions and made safe the general humane foundation without which any explanation of economic relations would remain merely the work of a good economist. Anyone who fails to grasp this hidden thread which is the subject-matter of his early work and which runs through his works as a whole will be unable to understand Marx . . . the principles of his economic analysis are directly derived from "the true reality of man"' (pp. XV-XVII). 'A slight alteration in the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto would give us: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the self-alienation of man . . ."' (p. XLII), etc. Pajitnov's article, 'Les Manuscrits de 1844 ' (Recherches, pp. 80-96) is a valuable review of the main authors of this 'Young-Marxist' revisionist current.
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4. Obviously, they could calmly adopt their opponents' theses (without realizing it) and rethink Marx through his youth -- and this paradox has been tried, in France itself. But ultimately history always dissipates misunderstandings.
5. W. Jahn, 'Le contenu économique de l'aliénation ' (Recherches, p. 158).
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6. Cf. Schaff: 'Le vrai visage du jeune Marx ' (Recherches, p. 193) and also the following extract from the Presentation (pp. 7-8): 'Marx's work as a whole cannot be seriously understood, nor Marxism itself as thought and as action, on the basis of the conception of his early works he happened to have when he was working them out. Only the opposite approach is valuable, that is, the approach which understands the significance and appreciates the value of these first fruits (?) and enters those creative laboratories of Marxist thought represented by writings such as the Kreuznach notebooks and the 1844 Manuscripts via Marxism as we have inherited it from Marx and also -- it must be plainly stated -- as it has been enriched by a century in the heat of historical practice. In default of this there is nothing to prevent an evaluation of Marx by criteria taken from Hegelianism if not from Thomism. The history of philosophy is written in the future anterior: ultimately, a refusal to admit this is a denial of this history and the erection of oneself as its founder in the manner of Hegel. ' I have emphasized the last two sentences deliberately. But the reader will have done so himself, astonished to see attributed to Marxism precisely the Hegelian conception of the history of philosophy and, as the summit of this confusion!, find himself accused of Hegelianism if he rejects it. . . . We shall soon see that there are other motives at issue in such a conception. At any rate, this quotation clearly demonstrates the movement I have been pointing out: Marx is threatened in everything by his youth, so he is recuperated as a moment of the whole and a philosophy of the history of philosophy is constructed to this end, a philosophy which is quite simply -- Hegelian. Hoeppner calmly brings this into perspective in his article ('A propos du passage de Hegel à Marx ', Recherches, p. 180): 'History must not be studied from the front backwards, searching for the heights of Marxist knowledge its ideal germs in the past. The evolution of philosophical thought must be traced on the basis of the real evolution of society.' This is Marx's own position, extensively developed in the German Ideology for example.
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The Theoretical Problem
7. 'Presentation', p. 7. The reasoning is unambiguous.
8. Cf. Hoeppner (op. cit., p. 178): 'It is not a question of knowing what Marxist content a Marxist investigation might today be able to read into such passages but rather of knowing what social content they had for Hegel himself. ' Hoeppner's excellent position on Hegel, opposing Kuczynski who looks in Hegel for 'Marxist' themes, is also unreservedly valid for Marx himself when his early works are being read from the standpoint of his mature works.
9. Togliatti, 'De Hegel au marxisme ' (Recherches, pp. 38-40).
10. N. Lapine, 'Critique de la philosophie de Hegel ' (Recherches, pp. 52-71).
11. W. Jahn, 'Le contenu économique du concept d'aliénation du travail dans les oeuvres de jeunesse de Marx ' (Recherches, pp. 157-74).
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12. For example, the two quotations invoked by Togliatti to prove that Marx superseded Hegel are precisely a plagiarism of writings of Feuerbach! Hoeppner, hawk-eyed, has spotted this: 'The two quotations from the Manuscripts (of 1844) used by Togliatti to show that Marx had by then liberated himself from Feuerbach merely reproduce in essentials the ideas of Feuerbach expressed in the Provisional Theses and the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future ' (op. cit., p. 184, n. 11). It would be possible to dispute the proof-value of the quotations invoked by Pajitnov on pp. 88 and 109 of his article 'Les Manuscrits de 1844 ' in the same way. The moral of these mistakes is that one should closely read one's authors. It is not superfluous where Feuerbach is concerned. Marx and Engels discuss him so much, and so well, that it is easy to believe that one knows him intimately.
13. For example, Jahn: a suggestive comparison between the theory of alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts and the theory of value in Capital.
14. See footnote 5.
15. This formalism is excellently criticized by Hoeppner with respect to Kuczynski (op. cit., pp. 177-8).
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16. In the theory of sources it is the origin that measures the development. In the theory of anticipation it is the goal that decides the meaning of the moments of the process.
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17. Lapine, 'Critique de la Philosophie de Hegel ' (Recherches, p. 68).
18. Lapine, op. cit., p. 69.
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19. Cf., e.g. Bakouradzé, 'La formation des idées philosophiques de K. Marx ' (Recherches, pp. 29-32).
20. Jahn, op. cit., pp. 160 and 10. 21. Pajitnov, op. cit., p. 117.
22. Lapine, op. cit., pp. 58, 67 and 69. 23. Schaff, op. cit., p. 202.
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24. I ask this question with regard to some third party. But we all know that it is asked of all Marxists who make use of Marx's Early Writings. If their use of them lacks discernment, if they take essays like On the Jewish Question or the 1843 and 1844 Manuscripts for Marxist writings, if this inspiration gives rise to conclusions for theory and for ideological action, they have in fact answered the question, what they do answers for them: the Young Marx can be taken as Marx, the Young Marx was a Marxist. They give openly the answer that the critique I am discussing gives under its breath (by avoiding any answer at all). In both cases, the same principles are at work, and at stake.
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25. Jahn, op. cit., p. 173, 'In The German Ideology . . . historical materialism found its adequate terminology. ' But as Jahn's own essay shows, it is a matter of something quite different from terminology.
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26. Lapine, op. cit., p. 69.
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27. Of course, like any other scientific discipline, Marxism did not stop at Marx any more than physics stopped at Galileo who founded it. Like any other scientific discipline, Marxism developed even in Marx's own lifetime. New discoveries were made possible by Marx's basic discovery. It would be very rash to believe that everything has been said.
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28. Cf. Auguste Cornu: Karl Marx et F. Engels (PUF Paris), Vol. 1, 'Les années d'enfance ef de jeunesse. La Gauche hégélienne ', the chapter on 'la formation de la Gauche hégélienne ', especially pp. 141 ff. Cornu quite correctly insists on the role of von Cieskowski in the elaboration of a philosophy of action of neo-Hegelian inspiration, adopted by all the young liberal intellectuals of the movement.
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29. This is not the place to embark on a study of the concepts at work in the analyses of The German Ideology. Instead, one quotation that says everything. On 'German criticism' he says: 'The whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their answers, but in their very questions there was a mystification .' It could not be better said that it is not answers which make philosophy but the questions posed by the philosophy, and that it is in the question itself, that is, in the way it reflects that object (and not in the object itself) that ideological mystification (or on the contrary an authentic relationship with the object) should be sought.
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30. This conclusion is crucial. What actually distinguishes the concept of the problematic from the subjectivist concepts of an idealist interpretation of the development of ideologies is that it brings out within the thought the objective internal reference system of its particular themes, the system of questions commanding the answers given by the ideology. If the meaning of an ideology's answers is to be understood at this internal level it must first be asked the question of its questions. But this problematic is itself an answer, no longer to its own internal questions -- problems -- but to the objective problems posed for ideology by its time. A comparison of the problems posed by the ideologue (his problematic) with the real problems posed for the ideologue by his time, makes possible a demonstration of the truly ideological element of the ideology, that is, what characterizes ideology as such, its deformation. So it is not the interiority of the problematic which constitutes its essence but its relation to real problems: the problematic of an ideology cannot be demonstrated without relating and submitting it to the real problems to which its deformed enunciation gives a false answer. But I must not anticipate the third point in my exposition (see footnote 45).
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31. Such is the meaning of the 'basic question' distinguishing materialism from all the forms of idealism.
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32. Cf. the excellent passage by Hoeppner, op. cit., p. 188. See also p. 184, n. 11.
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33. Already, because the success of this rupture as of the whole of this liberation process, presupposes that real history is being taken seriously.
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The Historical Problem
[Transcriber's Note: There is no footnote 34 in this edition of the text. -- DJR]
35. op. cit.
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36. Let us say: of pedagogic truth. As for the famous 'inversion' of Hegel, it is a perfect expression for Feuerbach's project. It was Feuerbach who introduced it and sanctioned it for Hegel's posterity. And it is remarkable that Marx correctly attacked Feuerbach in The German Ideology for having remained a prisoner of Hegelian philosophy precisely when he was claiming to have 'inverted' it. He attacked him for accepting the presuppositions of Hegel's questions, for giving different answers, but to the same questions. In philosophy only the questions are indiscreet, as opposed to everyday life, [cont. onto p. 73. -- DJR] where it is the answers. Once the questions have been changed it is no longer possible to talk of an inversion. No doubt a comparison of the new relative rank of questions and answers to the old one still allows us to talk of an inversion. But it has then become an analogy since the questions are no longer the same and the domains they constitute are not comparable, except, as I have suggested, for pedagogic purposes.
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37. Cf. footnote 36.
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38. This desire to dissipate all ideology and return to 'the things themselves', to 'unveil existence' (zur Sache selbst . . . Dasein zu enthüllen ) animates the whole of Feuerbach's philosophy. His terms are the moving expression of this. His tragedy was to have carried out his intentions and yet to have remained a prisoner of the very ideology he desperately hoped to deliver himself from, because he thought his liberation from speculative philosophy in the concepts and problematic of this same philosophy. It was essential to 'change elements'.
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39. Lapine (op. cit., pp. 60-61) is excellent on this point. But these intellectual 'experiments' of Marx's do not measure up to the concept of 'tendency' (a concept too broad and abstract for them, and one which also reflects the end of the development in progress) in which Lapine wants to think them. On the other hand, I am in profound agreement with Hoeppner (op. cit., pp. 186-7): 'Marx did not reach his solution by resorting to some manipulations of the Hegelian dialectic, but essentially on the basis of very concrete investigations into history, sociology and political economy . . . the Marxist dialectic was in its essentials born of the new lands which Marx cleared and opened up for theory . . . Hegel and Marx did not drink at the same source.'
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40. If there is any meaning to the term 'supersede' in its Hegelian sense, it is not established by substituting for it the concept of 'the negation-which-contains-in-itself-the-term-negated', thereby stressing the rupture in the conservation, for this rupture in conservation presupposes a substantial unity in the process, translated in the Hegelian dialectic by the passage of the in-itself into the for-itself, then to the in-itself-for-itself, etc. But it is precisely the substantial continuity of a process containing its own future in germ in its own interiority which is in dispute here. Hegelian supersession presupposes that the later form of the process is the 'truth' of the earlier form. But Marx's position and his whole critique of ideology implies on the contrary that science (which apprehends reality) constitutes in its very meaning a rupture with ideology and that it sets itself up in another terrain, that it constitutes itself on the basis of new questions, that it raises other questions about reality than ideology, or what comes to the same thing, it defines its object differently from ideology. Therefore science can by no criteria be regarded as the truth of ideology in the Hegelian sense. If we want a historical predecessor to Marx in this respect we must appeal to Spinoza rather than Hegel. Spinoza established a relation between the first and the second kind of knowledge which, in its immediacy (abstracting from the totality in God), presupposed precisely a radical discontinuity. Although the second kind makes possible the understanding of the first, it is not its truth.
41. Cf. The German Ideology pp. 447-54: 'The theory which for the English still was simply the registration of a fact becomes for the French a philosophical system.' (p. 452).
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42. See Hoeppner, op. cit., pp. 186-7. One further word on the term 'retreat'. Obviously it should not be understood as meaning the exact opposite of 'supersession', except metaphorically. It is not a question of substituting for the understanding of an ideology via its end some kind of understanding of it through its origins. All I wanted to illustrate was the fact that even within his ideological consciousness the Young Marx demonstrated an exemplary critical insistence: an insistence on consulting the originals (French political philosophers, English economists, revolutionaries, etc.) which Hegel had discussed. But with Marx himself, this 'retreat' ultimately lost the retrospective aspect of a search for the original in the form of an origin, as soon as he returned to German history itself and destroyed the illusion of its 'backwardness', that is, thought it in its reality without measuring it against an external model as its norm. This retreat was therefore really the current restoration, recuperation and restitution of a reality which had been stolen and made unrecognizable by ideology.
43. This was the 'liberal' moment of the Young Hegelian movement. Cf. Cornu, op. cit., Ch. IV, pp. 132 ff.
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44. A theme widely developed by the neo-Hegelians. Cf. Feuerbach: Provisional Theses for the Reform of Philosophy, paras. 46 and 47 (Manifestes philosophiques, op. cit., pp. 116-17).
45. At the heart of this problematic was the implication of the deformation of real historical problems into philosophical problems. The real problems of bourgeois revolution, political liberalism, the freedom of the Press, the end of censorship, the struggle against the Church, etc., were transformed into a philosophical problem : the problem of the reign of Reason whose victory was promised by History despite the appearances of reality. This contradiction between Reason, which is the internal essence and goal of History, and the reality of present history was the neo-Hegelians' basic problem. This formulation of the problem (this problematic) naturally commanded its solutions : if Reason is the goal of History and its essence, it is enough to show its presence even in its most contradictory appearances: the whole solution is thus to be found in the critical omnipotence of philosophy which must become practical by dissipating the aberrations of History in the name of its truth. For a denunciation of the unreasons of real History is merely an exposition of its own reason at work even in its unreasons. Thus the State is indeed truth in action, the incarnation of the truth of History. It is enough to convert it to this truth. That is why this 'practice' can be definitively reduced to philosophical critique and theoretical propaganda: it is enough to denounce the unreasons to make them give way, and enough to speak reason for it to carry them away. So everything depends on philosophy which is par excellence the head and heart (after 1840, it is only the head -- the heart is to be French) of the Revolution. So much for the solutions required by the way the basic problem was posed. But what is infinitely more revealing, and of the problematic itself, is to discover by comparing it to the problems raised for the neo-Hegelians by real History that although this problematic does provide solutions to real problems, it does not correspond to any of these real problems ; there is nothing at issue between reason and unreason, the unreason is neither an unreason nor an appearance, the State is not liberty in action, etc., that is, the objects which this ideology seems to reflect in its problems are not even represented in their 'immediate' reality. By the end of such a comparison, not only do the solutions given by an ideology to its own problems fall (they are merely the reflection of these problems on themselves), but also the problematic itself -- and the full extent of the ideological deformation then appears: its mystification of problems and objects. Then we can see what Marx meant when he spoke of the need to abandon the terrain of Hegelian philosophy, since 'not only in their answers, but in their questions there was a mystification'.
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46. Cf. Marx, Letter to Ruge, September 1843.
47. Cf. Engels: 'Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nazionalökonomie ; Marx later referred to this article as 'genial' -- it had a great influence on him. Its importance has generally been underestimated.
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48. It will be readily understood that to speak of a logic of emergence is not to suggest, with Bergson, a philosophy of invention. For this emergence is not the manifestation of I know not what empty essence, freedom or choice; [cont. onto p. 83. -- DJR] on the contrary, it is merely the effect of its own empirical conditions. I should add that this logic is required by Marx's own conception of the history of ideologies. For ultimately, our conclusion as to the real history of Marx's discoveries arising from this development challenges the very existence of the history of ideology. Once it is clear that the immanentist thesis of the idealist critique has been refuted, that ideological history is not its own principle of intelligibility, once it has been grasped that ideological history can only be understood through the real history which explains its formations, its deformations and their restructurations, and which emerges in it, then it is essential to ask, what survives of this ideological history itself as a history, and admit that the answer is nothing. As Marx says, 'Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking' (The German Ideology, p. 38). To return to our starting-point, I say -- and the following two reasons are one and the same reason -- that 'the history of philosophy' can not be written 'in the future anterior', not simply because the future anterior is not a category of historical understanding -- but also because strictly speaking the history of philosophy does not exist.
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N O T E S F O R A N I N V E S T I G A T I O N
must be turned right side up again, if you
would discover the rational kernel within
the mystical shell.'
Karl Marx, Capital
In an article devoted to the Young Marx,[1] I have already stressed the ambiguity of the idea of 'inverting Hegel'. It seemed to me that strictly speaking this expression suited Feuerbach perfectly; the latter did, indeed, 'turn speculative philosophy back on to its feet', but the only result was to arrive with implacable logic at an idealist anthropology. But the expression cannot be applied to Marx, at least not to the Marx who had grown out of this 'anthropological' phase.
1. See the preceding chapter ['On the Young Marx'].
2. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Afterword to the second edition. This is a literal translation of the German original. The Molitor translation also follows this text (Costès, Le Capital, t. I, p. xcv), not without fantasy. As for Roy, whose translation Marx inspected in proof, he edulcorates the text, for example, translating 'die mystifizierende Seite der h. Dialektik ' by 'le côté mystique ' -- where he does not just cut it. For example, the original text says, 'With him (Hegel) it (the dialectic) is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell'; but Roy has 'chez lui elle marche sur la tête ; il suffit de la remettre sur les pieds pour lui trouver la physionomie tout à fait raisonnable '! The kernel and its shell have been spirited away. Perhaps it is not without interest, but who can tell?, to add that with the Roy version Marx accepted a less 'difficult', or even less ambiguous, text than his own. Did he then admit after all the difficulty of certain of his original expressions?
Here is a translation of the important passages from the German text:
'In principle (der Grundlage nach ) my dialectical method is not only distinct from Hegel's but its direct opposite. For Hegel, the process of thought, which he goes so far as to turn into an autonomous subject under the name of the Idea, is the demiurge of the real, which only represents (bildet ) its external phenomenon. For me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing but the material transposed and translated in man's head. The mystificatory (mystifizierende ) side of the Hegelian dialectic I criticized about thirty years ago while it was still fashionable . . . I then declared myself openly a disciple of that great thinker, and, in my chapter on the theory of value I went so far as to flirt (ich kokettierte . . . mit ) here and there with his peculiar mode of ex- [cont. onto p. 90. -- DJR] pression. The mystification the dialectic suffered at Hegel's hands does not remove him from his place as the first to expose (darstellen ) consciously and in depth its general forms of movement. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again if you would discover the rational kernel (Kern ) within the mystical shell (mystische Hülle ).
'In its mystified form the dialectic was a German fashion because it seemed to transfigure the given (das Bestehende ). In its rational image (Gestalt ) it is a scandal and abomination for the bourgeoisie. . . . As it includes in the understanding of the given (Bestehende ) the simultaneous understanding of its negation and necessary destruction, as it conceives any mature (gewordne ) form as in motion and thus equally in its ephemeral aspect it allows nothing to impose on it, and is in essence critical and revolutionary.'
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3. 'Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy' in Marx Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, pp. 360-402 (two-volume edition).
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4. On the kernel, see Hegel: The Philosophy of History, Introduction (Sibree translation, New York: Dover, 1956, p. 30): Great men 'may be called Heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm, regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but from a concealed fount -- one which has not attained to phenomenal, present existence -- from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, which, impinging on the outer world as on a shell, bursts it in pieces, because it is another kernel than that which belonged to the shell in question '. A curious variant on the long history of the kernel, the pulp and the almond. Here the kernel plays the part of a shell containing the almond; the kernel is outside and the almond inside. The almond (the new principle) finally bursts the old kernel which no longer suits it (it was the kernel of the old almond); it wants a kernel of its own : new political and social forms, etc. This reference should be borne in mind whenever the problem of the Hegelian dialectic of history arises.
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5. Cf. Engels: 'Feuerbach . . .', op. cit. Perhaps we should not take too literally all the formulations of a text on the one hand destined for wide popular diffusion, and therefore, as Engels himself admits, somewhat schematic, and on the other set down by a man who forty years previously had lived through the great intellectual adventure of the discovery of historical materialism, and himself passed through the philosophical forms of consciousness whose broad history he is writing. The essay does, in fact, contain a noteworthy critique of Feuerbach's ideology (Engels sees that for him 'nature and man remain mere words ', (p. 384) and a good sketch of the relations between Marxism and Hegelianism. For example, Engels demonstrates Hegel's extraordinary critical virtue as compared to Kant (this I think particularly important), and correctly declares in plain terms that 'in its Hegelian form this (dialectical ) method was unusable', p 386. Further, and basic: the development of philosophy is not philosophical; it was the 'practical necessities of (their) fight' in religion and politics that forced the neo-Hegelians to oppose Hegel's 'system' (p. 367), it is the progress of science and industry which overturns philosophies (p. 372). We should also note the recognition of the profound influence of Feuerbach on The Holy Family (p 368), etc. But the same essay contains formulations which, if taken literally, can only lead to dead ends. For example, the theme of the 'inversion' is taken so seriously that Engels draws the unfortunately logical conclusion that 'ultimately, the Hegelian system represents merely a materialism idealistically turned upside down in method and content' (p. 372). If the inversion of Hegel into Marx is well-founded, it follows that Hegel could only have been already a previously inverted materialism; two negations make an affirmation. Later (p. 387), we discover that the Hegelian dialectic was unusable in its Hegelian form precisely because it stands on its head (on the idea, not the real): 'Thereby the dialectic of concepts itself becomes merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world and thus the dialectic of Hegel was placed upon its head ; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet .' Obviously these are only approximate formulations, but their very approximation points towards a difficulty. Also noteworthy is a singular affirmation of the necessity for all philosophers to construct a system (Hegel 'was compelled to make a system and, in accordance with traditional requirements, a system of philosophy must conclude with some sort of absolute truth' -- p. 363), a necessity which 'springs from an imperishable desire of the human mind -- the desire to overcome all contradictions' (p. 365); and another statement that explains the limitations of Feuerbach's materialism by his life in the country and his consequent rustication in isolation (p. 375).
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6. Mao Tse-tung's pamphlet On Contradiction (1937) contains a whole series of analyses in which the Marxist conception of contradiction appears in a quite un-Hegelian light. Its essential concepts would be sought in vain in Hegel: principal and secondary contradiction; principal and secondary aspect of a contradiction; antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradiction; law of the uneven development of a contradiction. However, Mao's essay, inspired by his struggle against dogmatism in the Chinese Party, remains generally descriptive, and in consequence it is in certain respects abstract. Descriptive: his concepts correspond to concrete experiences. In part abstract: the concepts, though new and rich in promise, are presented as specifications of the dialectic in general rather than as necessary implications of the Marxist conception of society and history.
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7. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. XIII, pp. 370-71 (English translation): 'It was the objective conditions created by the imperialist war that brought the whole of humanity to an impasse, that placed it in a dilemma : either allow the destruction of more millions of lives and utterly ruin European civilization, or hand over power in all the civilized countries to the revolutionary proletariat, carry through the socialist revolution .' [Transcriber's Note: This passage is from Lenin's "Farewell Letter to Swiss Workers" which appears on the above-cited pages in Vol. XXIII (not XIII). -- DJR]
8. Lenin, 'Report of the Central Committee to the Eighth Congress of the RCP(B)', Collected Works, Vol. XXIX, p 153.
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9. Lenin, 'Pages from a Diary', Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 809 (three volume English edition).
10. Lenin, 'Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder', Selected Works, Vol. III, pp. 412-13; 'The Third International and its Place in History', Collected Works, Vol. XXIX, p. 311.
11. Lenin, 'Our Revolution', Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 821.
12. Lenin, 'Left-Wing Communism . . .', op. cit., p. 379.
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13. Lenin, 'The Third International . . .', op. cit., p. 311.
14. Lenin, 'Report to the Petrograd City Conference of the RSDLP(B)', Collected Works, Vol. XXIV, p. 141.
15. See particularly: 'Left-Wing Communism . . .', op. cit., pp. 379, 412, 435 6, 439, 444-5; 'The Third International . . .', op. cit., p. 310; 'Our Revolution', op. cit., pp. 820 ff; ' Letters from Afar (No. 1)', Selected Works, Vol. II, pp. 31 ff; 'Farewell Letter to Swiss Workers', Collected Works, Vol, XXIII, pp. 367-73.
Lenin's remarkable theory of the conditions for a revolution ('Left-Wing Communism . . .', op. cit., pp. 434-5, 444-6) deals thoroughly with the decisive effects of Russia's specific situation.
16. Stalin, 'The Foundations of Leninism', Problems of Leninism (11th English edition), pp. 13-93, particularly pp. 15-18, 29-32, 71-3. Despite their 'pedagogical' dryness, these texts are excellent in many respects.
17. Lenin, 'Our Revolution', op. cit., p. 821.
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18. The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 121 (English translation).
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19. For the whole of this passage see (1) Lenin: 'Left-Wing Communism . . .', op. cit., pp. 430, 444-5; especially: 'Only when the "lower classes " do not want the old way, and when the "upper classes " cannot carry on in the old way -- only then can revolution triumph' (p. 430); these formal conditions are illustrated on pp. 444-45.
(2) Lenin: 'Letters from Afar (No. 1)', op. cit., pp. 35-6, notably: 'That the revolution succeeded so quickly . . . is only due to the fact that, as a result of an extremely unique historical situation, absolutely dissimilar currents, absolutely heterogeneous class interests, absolutely contrary political and social strivings have merged . . . in a strikingly "harmonious" manner . . .' (p, 35 -- Lenin's emphasis).
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20. Lenin goes so far as to include among the causes of the success of the Soviet Revolution the natural wealth of the country, its geographical extent, the shelter of the Revolution in its necessary military and political 'retreats'.
21. The 'crisis' situation, as Lenin remarked, has a revelatory role for the structure and dynamic of the social formation that lives it. What has been said for a revolutionary situation can therefore be referred cautiously to the social formation in a situation prior to the revolutionary crisis.
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22. Cf. Mao's development of the theme of the distinction between antagonistic (explosive, revolutionary) contradictions and non-antagonistic contradictions' ('On Contradiction', Selected Works, Vol. 1, pp. 343 ff. -- English translation, Peking, 1965).
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23. In 1890 Engels wrote (in a letter to J. Bloch, 21 September 1890), 'Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasize the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries who denied it and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to allow the other elements involved in the interaction to come into their rights ' (Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 490). For Engels's view of determination 'in the last instance' see the Appendix pp. 117-28.
In the context of these necessary investigations, I should like to quote the notes which Gramsci devoted to the mechanistic-fatalistic temptation in the history of nineteenth-century Marxism: 'the determinist fatalist element has been an immediate ideological "aroma" of the philosophy of praxis a form of religion and a stimulant (but like a drug ) necessitated and historically justified by the "subordinate" character of certain social strata. When one does not have the initiative in the struggle and the struggle itself is ultimately identified with a series of defeats mechanical determinism becomes a formidable power of moral resistance of cohesion and of patient and obstinate perseverance. "I am defeated for the moment but the nature of things is on my side in the long run" etc. Real will is disguised as an act of faith, a sure rationality of history a primitive and empirical form of impassioned finalism which appear as a substitute for the predestination providence etc. of the confessional religions. We must insist on the fact that even in such cases there exists in reality a strong active will . . . We must stress the fact that fatalism has only been a cover by the weak for an active and real will. This is why it is always necessary to show the futility of mechanical determinism which explicable as a naïve philosophy of the masses becomes a cause of passivity of imbecile self-sufficiency when it is made into a reflective and coherent philosophy on the part of the intellectuals . . . (Antonio Gramsci: Opere, Vol. II, Il materialismo storico e la filosofia de Benedetto Croce, pp. 13-14, The Modern Prince, pp. 69-70). This opposition (intellectuals/masses) might appear strange from the pen of a Marxist theoretician. But it should be realized that Gramsci's concept of the intellectual is infinitely wider than ours, that is, it is not defined by the idea intellectuals have of themselves, but by their social role as organizers and (more or less subordinate) leaders. In this sense, he wrote, 'The claim that all the members of a political party should be regarded as intellectuals lends itself to jokes and caricature; but on reflection nothing could be more accurate. There must be a distinction of levels with a party having more or less of the higher or lower level but this is not what matters: what does matter [cont. onto p. . -- DJR] is their function, which is to direct and to organize, that is, it is educational, which means intellectual ' (Opere, Vol. III, Gli intellettuali e l'organizzazione della cultura, p. 12).
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24. Cf. Engels (Letter to Schmidt, 27 October 1890, Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 493): 'The reaction of the state power upon economic development can be one of three kinds: it can run in the same direction, and then development is more rapid ; it can oppose the line of development, in which case nowadays state power in every great people will go to pieces in the long run . . .'. This well suggests the character of the two limit positions.
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25. Of course, as with all 'inversions' this one retains the terms of the Hegelian conception: civil society and the State.
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26. Letter from Engels to J. Bloch, 21 September 1890 (Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, pp. 488-9).
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27. Engels adds: 'Marx hardly wrote anything in which this theory did not play a part. But especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a most excellent example of its application. There are also many allusions in Capital' (ibid., p. 489). He also cites Anti-Dühring and Ludwig Feuerbach.
28. Engels, 'Political conditions . . . and even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part ' (ibid., p. 488).
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29. Lukács 's attempts, which are limited to the history of literature and philosophy, seem to me to be tainted by a guilty Hegelianism: as if Lukács wanted to absolve through Hegel his upbringing by Simmel and Dilthey. Gramsci is of another stature. The jottings and developments in his Prison Notebooks touch on all the basic problems of Italian and European history: economic, social, political and cultural. There are also some completely original and in some cases genial insights into the problem, basic today, of the superstructures. Also, as always with true discoveries, there are new concepts, for example, hegemony : a remarkable example of a theoretical solution in outline to the problems of the interpenetration of the economic and the political. Unfortunately, at least as far as France is concerned, who has taken up and followed through Gramsci's theoretical effort?
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First Level
Glossary |
Glossary | |
A B S T R A C T (abstrait ). For Althusser, the theoretical opposition | |
|
between the abstract and the concrete lies wholly in the
realm |
A L I E N A T I O N (aliénation, Entdusserung ). An ideological concept | |
|
used by Marx in his Early Works (q.v.) and regarded by
the parti- sans of these works as the key concept of Marxism.
Marx derived the term from Feuerbach's anthropology where it
denoted the state of man and society where the essence of
man is only pre- sent to him in the distorted form of a god,
which, although man created it in the image of his essence
(the species-being), ap- pears to him as an external,
pre-existing creator. Marx used the concept to criticize the
State and the economy as confiscating the real
self-determining labour of men in the same way. In his later
works, however, the term appears very rarely, and where it
does it is either used ironically, or with a different
conceptual content (in Capital, for instance). |
B R E A K, E P I S T E M O L O G I C A L (coupure epistémologique ). A con- | |
|
cept introduced by Gaston Bachelard in his La Formation de
l'esprit scientifique, and related to uses of the term in
studies |
C O N C R E T E - I N - T H O U G H T / R E A L - C O N C R E T E (concret-de-pensée/ | |
|
concret-réel ). In Feuerbach's ideology, the
speculative abstract (q.v.), theory, is opposed to the
concrete, reality. For the mature Marx, |
| |
|
however, the theoretical abstract and concrete both exist
in thought as Generalities I and III (q.v.). The concrete-in-thought |
C O N J U N C T U R E (conjoncture ). The central concept of the Marxist | |
|
science of politics (cf. Lenin's 'current moment'); it denotes the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination (q.v.) of the contradictions at any given moment to which political tactics must be applied. |
C O N S C I O U S N E S S (conscience ). A term designating the region | |
|
where ideology is located ('false consciousness') and
supersed- |
C O N T R A D I C T I O N (contradiction ). A term for the articulation of | |
|
a practice (q.v.) into the complex whole of the social
formation (q.v.). Contradictions may be antagonistic or
non-antagonistic according to whether their state of
overdetermination (q.v.) is |
C O N T R A D I C T I O N S, C O N D E N S A T I O N, D I S P L A C E M E N T A N D | |
|
F U S I O N O F (condensation, déplacement et fusion des
contra- dictions ). Condensation and displacement were used by
Freud |
D E V E L O P M E N T, U N E V E N (développement inégal ). A concept of | |
|
Lenin and Mao Tse-tung: the overdetermination (q.v.) of all the
contradictions in a social formation (q.v.) means that none
can develop simply; the different overdeterminations in
different times and places result in quite different
patterns of social development. |
D I A L E C T I C O F C O N S C I O U S N E S S (dialectique de la conscience ). | |
|
The Hegelian dialectic, or any dialectic where the
various ele- ments or moments are externalizations of a
single, simple, in- ternal principle, as Rome in Hegel's
Philosophy of History is an expression of the abstract legal
personality, etc. |
E F F E C T I V I T Y, S P E C I F I C (efficacité spécifique ). The character- | |
| |
|
istic of Marx's later theory: the different aspects of the social
formation are not related as in Hegel's dialectic of
conscious- ness (q.v.) as phenomena and essence, each has its
precise influ- ence on the complex totality, the structure in
dominance (q.v.). Thus base and super-structure (q.v.) must
not be conceived as vulgar Marxism conceives them, as
essence and phenomenon, |
E M P I R I C I S M (empirisme ). Althusser uses the concept of empir- | |
|
icism in a very wise sense to include all 'epistemologies' that
oppose a given subject to a given object and call knowledge
the abstraction by the subject of the essence of the object.
Hence |
F O R M A T I O N, S O C I A L (formation sociale ). [A concept denoting | |
|
'society' so-called. L. A.].[*] The concrete complex whole
com- prising economic practice, political practice and
ideological practice (q.v.) at a certain place and stage of
development. Historical materialism is the science of social
formations. |
G E N E R A L I T I E S I, I I A N D I I I (Généralités I, II et III ). In the- | |
|
oretical practice (q.v.), the process of the production of
knowl- edge, Generalities I are the abstract,
part-ideological, part- scientific generalities that are the
raw material of the science, Generalities III are the
concrete, scientific generalities that |
H U M A N I S M (humanisme ). Humanism is the characteristic feature | |
|
of the ideological problematic (q.v.) from which Marx
emerged, and more generally, of most modern ideology; a
particularly conscious form of humanism is Feuerbach's
anthropology, which dominates Marx's Early Works (q.v.). As
a science, however, his- torical materialism, as exposed in
Marx's later works, implies a theoretical anti-humanism.
'Real-humanism' characterizes the works of the break (q.v.):
the humanist form is retained, but us- ages such as 'the
ensemble of the social relations' point for- ward to the
concepts of historical materialism. However, the ideology
(q.v.) of a socialist |
| |
| |
|
society may be a humanism, a proletarian 'class humanism'
[an expression I obviously use in a provisional,
half-critical sense. |
I D E O L O G Y (idéologie ). Ideology is the 'lived' relation between | |
|
men and their world, or a reflected form of this unconscious
relation, for instance a 'philosophy' (q.v.), etc. It is
distinguished from a science not by its falsity, for it can
be coherent and log- ical (for instance, theology), but by the
fact that the practico- social predominates in it over the
theoretical, over knowledge. Historically, it precedes the
science that is produced by making an epistemological break
(q.v.) with it, but it survives alongside science as an
essential element of every social formation (q.v.),
including a socialist and even a communist society. |
K N O W L E D G E (connaissance ). Knowledge is the product of theor- | |
|
etical practice (q.v.); it is Generalities III (q.v.). As such
it is clearly distinct from the practical recognition
(reconnaissance ) of a theoretical problem. |
M A T E R I A L I S M, D I A L E C T I C A L A N D H I S T O R I C A L (matérial- | |
|
isme, dialectique et historique ). Historicists, even those who
claim to be Marxists, reject the classical Marxist
distinction between historical and dialectical materialism
since they see philosophy as the self-knowledge of the
historical process, and hence identify philosophy and the
science of history; at best, dialectical materialism is
reduced to the historical method, while the science of
history is its content. Althusser, rejecting historicism,
rejects this identification. For him, historical materialism
is the science of history, while dialectical materialism,
Marxist philosophy, is the theory of scientific practice
(see T H E O R Y). |
N E G A T I O N O F T H E N E G A T I O N (négation de la négation ). A He- | |
|
gelian conception that Marx 'flirts' with even in his mature |
O V E R D E T E R M I N A T I O N (surdétermination, Überdeterminierung ) | |
|
Freud used this term to describe (among other things) the
re- presentation of the dream-thoughts in images privileged
by |
| |
|
describe the effects of the contradictions in each
practice (q.v.) constituting the social formation (q.v.) on
the social formation |
'P H I L O S O P H Y' / P H I L O S O P H Y ('philosophie '/philosophie ). 'Phi- | |
|
losophy' (in inverted commas) is used to denote the
reflected forms of ideology (q.v.) as opposed to Theory
(q.v.). See Althus- ser's own 'Remarks on the Terminology
Adopted' [in "On the Materialist Dialectic". -- DJR] p. 162 . Philosophy (without in- verted commas) is
used in the later written essays to denote Marxist
philosophy, i.e., dialectical materialism. |
P R A C T I C E, E C O N O M I C, P O L I T I C A L, I D E O L O G I C A L A N D T H E - | |
|
O R I E T I C A L (pratique économique, politique,
idéologique et théorique ). Althusser takes up
the theory introduced by Engels and much elaborated by Mao
Tse-tung that economic, political and ideological practice
are the three practices (processes of production or
transformation) that constitute the social form- ation
(q.v.). Economic practice is the transformation of nature |
P R O B L E M A T I C (problématique ). A word or concept cannot be | |
|
considered in isolation; it only exists in the theoretical
or id- eological framework in which it is used: its
problematic. A re- lated concept can clearly be seen at work
in Foucault's Madness and Civilization (but see Althusser's
Letter to the Translator). |
| |
|
absence of problems and concepts within the problematic
as |
R E A D I N G (lecture ). The problems of Marxist theory (or of any | |
|
other theory) can only be solved by learning to read the texts
correctly (hence the title of Althusser's later book, Lire
le Capital, 'Reading Capital '); neither a superficial
reading, col- lating literal references, nor a Hegelian
reading, deducing the essence of a corpus by extracting the
'true kernel from the mystified shell', will do. Only a
symptomatic reading (lecture symptomale -- see
P R O B L E M A T I C), constructing the proble- matic, the
unconsciousness of the text, is a reading of Marx's work
that will allow us to establish the epistemological break
that makes possible historical materialism as a science
(q.v.). |
S C I E N C E (science ). See I D E O L O G Y and P R A C T I C E. | |
S P O N T A N E I T Y (spontaneité ). A term employed by Lenin to | |
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criticize an ideological and political tendency in the Russian
Social-Democratic movement that held that the revolutionary
movement should base itself on the 'spontaneous' action of
the working class rather than trying to lead it by imposing
on this action, by means of a party, policies produced by
the party's theoretical work. [For Lenin, the real
spontaneity, capacity for action, inventiveness and so on,
of the 'masses', was to be re- spected as the most precious
aspect of the workers' movement: but at the same time Lenin
condemned the 'ideology of sponta- neity' (a dangerous
ideology) shared by his opponents (populists and 'Socialist
Revolutionaries'), and recognized that the real spontaneity
of the masses was to be sustained and criticized |
S T R U C T U R E, D E C E N T R E D (structure décentrée ). The Hegelian | |
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totality (q.v.) presupposes an original, primary essence
that lies |
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behind the complex appearance that it has produced by
external- ization in history; hence it is a structure with a
centre. The Marxist totality, however, is never separable in
this way from |
S T R U C T U R E I N D O M I N A N C E (structure à dominante ). The Marx- | |
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ist totality (q.v.) is neither a whole each of whose elements
is equivalent as the phenomenon of an essence (Hegelianism),
nor are some of its elements epiphenomena of any one of them
(economism or mechanism); the elements are asymmetrically
related but autonomous (contradictory); one of them is
domi- nant. [The economic base 'determines ' ('in the last
instance') which element is to be dominant in a social
formation (see |
S T R U C T U R E, E V E R - P R E - G I V E N (structure toujours-déjà-donnée). | |
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See S T R U C T U R E I N D O M I N A N C E |
S U P E R S E S S I O N (depassement, Aufhebung ). A Hegelian concept | |
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popular among Marxist-humanists, it denotes the process
of historical development by the destruction and retention
at a higher level of an old historically determined
situation in a new historically determined situation -- e.g.
socialism is the super- session of capitalism, Marxism a
supersession of Hegelianism. Althusser asserts that it is an
ideological concept, and he sub- stitutes for it that of the
historical transition, or, in the dev- elopment of a science,
by the epistemological break (q.v.). |
S U P E R S T R U C T U R E / S T R U C T U R E (superstructure/structure ). | |
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In classical Marxism the social formation (q.v.) is analysed into the components economic structure -- determinant in the last instance -- and |
| |
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relatively autonomous superstructures: (1) the State and
law; |
T H E O R Y, 'T H E O R Y', T H E O R Y (théorie, 'théorie ', Théorie ). For | |
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Althusser theory is a specific, scientific theoretical
practice (q.v.). In Chapter 6 'On the Materialist
Dialectic', a distinction |
T O T A L I T Y (totalité, Totalität ). An originally Hegelian concept | |
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that has become confused by its use by all theorists who wish |
W O R K S O F M A R X, E A R L Y, T R A N S I T I O N A L A N D M A T U R E | |
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(Oeuvres de jeunesse, de maturation et de la maturité de Marx ). Althusser rejects the view that Marx's works form a theoretical unity. He |
| |
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divides them as follows: Early Works (up to 1842); Works
of the Break (Oeuvres de la Coupure --1845); Transitional
Works (1845-47); Mature Works (1857-83). It should be
remembered, however, that the epistemological break (q.v.)
can neither be punctual, nor made once and for all: it is to
be thought as a 'continuous break', and its criticism
applies even to the latest |
A Letter to the Translator
Thank you for your glossary; what you have done in it is extremely important from a political, educational and theoretical point of view. I offer you my warmest thanks.
I return your text with a whole series of corrections and interpolations (some of which are fairly long and important, you will see why).
A minor point: you refer twice to Foucault and once to Canguilhem vis-à-vis my use of 'break' and, I think, of 'problematic'. I should like to point out that Canguilhem has lived and thought in close contact with the work of Bachelard for many years, so it is not surprising if he refers somewhere to the term 'epistemological break', although this term is rarely to be found as such in Bachelard's texts (on the other hand, if the term is uncommon, the thing is there all the time from a certain point on in Bachelard's work). But Canguilhem has not used this concept systematically, as I have tried to do. As for Foucault, the uses he explicitly or implicitly makes of the concepts 'break' and 'problematic' are echoes either of Bachelard, or of my own systematic 'use' of Bachelard (as far as 'break' is concerned) and of what I owe to my unfortunate friend Martin (for 'problematic'). I am not telling you this out of 'author's pride' (it means nothing to me), but out of respect both for the authors referred to and for the readers.
As for these authors: Canguilhem 's use of the concept 'break' differs from mine, although his interpretation does tend in the same direction. In fact, this should be put the other way round: my debt to Canguilhem is incalculable, and it is my interpretation that tends in the direction of his, as it is a continuation of his, going beyond the point where his has (for the time being) stopped. Foucault : his case is quite different. He was a pupil of mine, and 'something' from my writings has passed into his, including certain of my formulations. But (and it must be said, concerning as it does his own philosophical personality) under his pen and in his thought even the meanings he gives to formulations he has borrowed from me are transformed into another quite different meaning than my own. Please take these corrections into account; I entrust them to you in so far as they may enlighten the English reader
page 258
(who has access in particular to that great work, Madness and Civilization ), and guide him in his references.
Much more important are the corrections I have suggested for some of your rubrics. In most cases they are merely corrections (precisions) which do not affect the state of the theoretical concepts that figure in the book (For Marx ). They cast a little more light on what you yourself have very judiciously clarified. But in other cases they are corrections of a different kind: bearing on a certain point in Lenin's thought, for example (my interpolation on the question of spontaneity). And finally, in other cases (see my last interpolation), I have tried to give some hints to guide the English reader in the road I have travelled since the (now quite distant) publication of the articles that make up For Marx. You will understand why I am so insistent on all these corrections and interpolations. I urge you to give them a place in your glossary, and add that (1) I have myself gone over the text of the glossary line by line, and (2) I have made changes in matters of detail (which need not be indicated) and a few important interpolations.
As a result, everything should be perfectly dear. And we shall have removed the otherwise inevitable snare into which readers of 1969 would certainly have 'fallen', if they were allowed to believe that the author of texts that appeared one by one between 1960 and 1965 has remained in the position of these old articles whereas time has not ceased to pass. . . . You can easily imagine the theoretical, ideological and political misunderstandings that could not but have arisen from this 'fiction', and how much time and effort would have had to be deployed to 'remove' these misunderstandings. The procedure I suggest has the advantage that it removes any misunderstanding of this kind in advance, since, on the one hand, I leave the system of concepts of 1960 to 1965 as it was, while on the other, I indicate the essential point in which I have developed in the intervening years -- since, finally, I give references to the new writings that contain the new definition of philosophy that I now hold, and I summarize the new conception which I have arrived at (provisionally -- but what is not provisional?).
L O U I S A L T H U S S E R