Metamorphoses and Anamorphoses of 'On the Jewish Question' by Marx

chapter 6 15 Theses about Communism and Yugoslavia, or the Two-Headed Janus of Emancipation through the State (Metamorphoses and Anamorphoses of ‘On the Jewish Question’ by Marx) In memory of my Praxis colleagues and comrades at the Faculty of Philos- ophy, Zagreb: Rudi Supek, Gajo Petrović, Branko Bošnjak, Predrag Vran- icki, Veljko Cvjetičanin, Milan Kangrga For Boris Buden, who fought for truth and justice ∵ 6.1 Introductory1 The State everywhere presupposes that reason has been realised. But in this very way it everywhere comes into contradiction between its ideal mission and its real preconditions. marx, 1844 ∵ 1 Footnotes don’t go well with Theses, I have avoided further ones, except for two afterthoughts. This goes for the apparatus too, so that from the large library on the subject treated here I have cited only the indispensable Kouvelakis and Zolo, also the best treatment of the polysemic minefield of civil society in Hegel that I found in Bobbio 143–50, 185–7, and passim, though I do not agree with his stance on Marx. On religion and the ‘reoccupation’ of its terrain I was much influenced not only by Marx but also by the tradition of Curtius, Löwith, and Blumenberg. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004325210_008 106 chapter 6 6.1.1 The Basis of Theses I have taken over the basic epistemological approach to people, the State, and emancipation from the first part of On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage, publ. 1844, mew 1: 352–61) by Karl Marx. He counterposes – in the terms of his age, which at times do not correspond to today’s historical semantics – political and legal emancipation to complete emancipation. Marx’s approach here uses Feuerbach’s term ‘species-being’ (Gattungswesen, that is, the natural being of the genus Homo sapiens), to which I shall return. This way to speak about human potentials rather than about privatised individuals has however much deeper roots, in the French Revolution and in Spinoza’s discovery that human freedom is primarily threatened by a belief in a predetermined, holy teleol- ogy, consubstantial to power and rule. I take it that this approach transcends Marx’s epoch, and that at its core would in today’s semantics be: what is the relationship of special political (primarily State-building) alienation to general social alienation as well as to ‘species-specific’ de-alienation or disalienation as the individuals’ emancipation or classless freedom? The relationship between emancipation and alienation remains a constant horizon for Marx. True, he still lacks here the key field between theory and practice: the economy, where commodity reification and fetishism will appear as the antagonists of freedom. But this is no Althusserian coupure épistemologique, as the new terminology will be a more precise reformulation of the old one from which it evolved. Its absence means however that my theses do not address economic rela- tionships: this is their limit. Their conclusions would have to be supplemented (and perhaps significantly re-metamorphosed) with further considerations, starting primarily from Marx’s rich considerations about alienation and exploi- tation of living labour, which I approached in my essay ‘Living Labour’: I would have to advance from its conclusions. But the State and politics must be dealt with first. My attempt does not deal in Marxology, although I take it into account in 6.1.2. It is a reworking, a genre of its own. This is a quintessentially Marxian stance: he starts with reworking Hegel, and then continually and gluttonously reworks himself and other incomplete and new cognitions (for example, Adam Smith or the experience of the Paris Commune). Since Marx’s argument in the 1840s is literally inapplicable today – who cares about the State of King Freder- ick William iv? – I am violently tearing out, assembling, and re-functioning ten segments from Part 1 of The Jewish Question for today’s purposes. I completely or partly metamorphosise them using specified operators, and the resulting metamorphic text then demands to be supplemented with other considerations. This makes the whole of this chapter anamorphic in relation to that of Marx: rotated into the dimension of Post-Fordism, the new Leviathan. The text.

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