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Karl Marx at Tomis: The role of Shakespeare in the transformations of Marx’s juvenilia and university writings.

Christian Smith University of Warwick

One December day in 1836 in Rhineland, , the eldest daughter of Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a highly-placed government official, received a letter from her beloved, , a student newly-enrolled at the University of Berlin. The letter contained Marx’s words of love and longing for her and it also contained a set of poems, titled Book of Love, written by Marx for Jenny. When she read them, Jenny cried “tears of joy and sorrow”1 (Heinrich Marx an Karl Marx 28 Dec. 1836. MEGA III.1. 304).2 The concluding sonnet in the book begins with this quatrain:

So nimm sie hin, die Lieder alle, Die Liebe Dir zu Füssen legt, Wo frei in vollem Lyraschalle Der Seele Gluth sich hinbewegt (MEGA I 1 519).3

The opening of Marx’s sonnet nearly quotes the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 40:

Take all my loves, my love; yea, take them all; What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call; All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more (Sonnets 191).

Marx would have read Shakespeare Sonnet 40 in the translation by Dorothea Tieck:

Nimm was ich liebe, Liebster, alles hin, Du hast was Du gehabt, und hast nicht mehr; Denn, was ich je geliebt mit treuem Sinn, War, eh Du’s nahmst, Dein, lange schon vorher (Sonette 99).

Marx’s sonnet tells his beloved, Jenny, to take all of the songs/poems in his Book of Love, because Love laid them at her feet. Marx misses the work that this line (“Take all my loves”) is doing in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 40, where the poet is calling out the fair youth for having had an affair with the poet’s mistress. The multiple loves (“all my loves”) include the love the poet has for his mistress and for the fair youth. Since the fair youth has all of the poet’s heart, he also already has everyone the poet loves. The key line is the second one: “What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?” Dorothea Tieck also misses the poet’s reproachful subtext in the question asked in the second line.

1 “Gestern war [Jenny] noch bei uns, und weinte bei Empfang Deiner Gedichte Thränen der Wonne und des Schmerzes.“ (Yesterday, Jenny was at our place and upon beginning to read your poetry, she wept tears of joy and sorrow). Sophie’s postscript to Heinrich Marx’s letter to Karl Marx 28 December, 1836. 2 MEGA is Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. MECW is Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works. 3 Translated by Alex Miller as: “Take all, take all these songs from me/ That Love at your feet humbly lays,/ Where, in the Lyre’s full melody,/ Soul freely nears in shining rays” (MECW I 517). Miller’s translation is closer to Shakespeare’s English than to what Marx actually wrote or to Tieck’s translation of the Sonnets. 2

She translates it too literally: “Du hast was Du gehabt, und hast nicht mehr”.4 Sonnet 40 is part of a three-sonnet episode—Sonnets 40-42—in which the poet handles his feelings about the affair that the fair youth is conducting with the poet’s mistress. Her identity is subtly alluded to in the fourth line: “All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more”. The more is the Moor, the Dark Lady.5 The third line—“No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call”—refers both to the notion that the fair youth already had all of the poet’s love and to the idea that an affair with a mistress is not true love. Tieck’s translated lines—“Denn, was ich je geliebt mit treuem Sinn”6—lay the emphasis of the appeal on the poet’s loyalty. By shifting the emphasis of the lines, Tieck blunts the sharpness of the poet’s reproach. The young Marx in love has lifted a line from Tieck’s translation, out of context from Shakespeare’s sonnets, for use in his love poetry.

This allusion to Sonnet 40 is Marx’s first intertextual engagement with Shakespeare. In his forty year writing career, Marx will quote from or allude to Shakespeare’s plays at least 171 more times across his collected works.7 Marx used lines, imagery, plot and ideas from Shakespeare’s plays to give examples of what he was writing, add a literary feeling to the conditions that he was depicting, provide logic to his rhetoric, and signal moves and turning points in his theory. Many of the quotations and allusions occur at significant points where Marx is using the multiple layers of Shakespeare’s meaning to register the multiple layers of his method—historical and dialectical materialism. Yet, in 1836, Marx had not yet become the Marx of Marxism. He was, in his first year at the University of Berlin, a young Romantic. His engagement with world literature and aesthetic theory would serve as the grounds for his transformation first into a Young Hegelian and then into a dialectical materialist.

The Schoolboy

In August 1835, during his last year of attendance at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, Marx wrote an essay titled, “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession”8 (MEGA I.1 454; MECW I 3). It seems to be a standard schoolboy essay in which the writer is reflecting back to his teachers some of the values he may have learned from them. The headmaster of the gymnasium was Hugo Wyttenbach, an adept of Kantian philosophy. He took part in forming the Casino Club, a gathering of Liberals in that included Marx’s father, Heinrich Marx, and the Baron von Westphalen among its members.9 Wyttenbach was, at one point, placed under police surveillance for sedition (McLellan, Karl Marx 9). In the essay, Marx writes that one should not choose a profession that “glitters” and “arouses ambition”. One will soon tire of that. One should also not choose a profession because it will make one famous. Instead, one should choose the profession that allows one to work on becoming perfect and to help serve the welfare of humankind (MEGA I.1. 454-57; MECW 1 3-9). Wyttenbach qualified the essay as “fairly good” and praised Marx for his ideas, but critiqued his

4 You have what you had, and have not more. 5 If the fair youth is the Earl of Southampton, this Sonnet can give some support to Jonathan Bate’s vote for the identity of the Dark Lady. He picks John Florio’s wife, who lived in Southampton’s house (Genius 56). Shakespeare may have also been a resident at that house in 1593-4, while the plague kept the theatres shut in London. This places the poet, the fair youth and the Dark Lady all under the same roof. 6 Because, what I ever loved with loyal sense/meaning. 7 I have listed all of these intertextual instances in my doctoral thesis: Shakespeare’s Influence on Marx, Freud and the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists (2013). 8 Betrachtung eines Jünglings bei der Wahl eines Berufes 9 Marx was born in Trier, Rhineland on 5 May, 1818. 3

“exaggerated desire for rare and imaginative expression” (McLellan, Karl Marx 14). One of these exaggerations may have been Marx’s use of the word “glitter”, which he may have recently read in Timon of Athens. He writes:

Das Große glänzt, der Glanz erregt Ehrgeitz und der Ehrgeitz kann leicht die Begeisterung, was wir dafür gehalten, hervorgerufen haben;... Und nicht zu dem Stande sind wir berufen, in welchem wir am meisten zu glänzen vermögen; (MEGA I.1 455)10

Marx was introduced to Shakespeare’s plays by Ludwig von Westpahlen, Jenny’s father. Marx was a frequent visitor to the von Westphalen house and considered the baron to be like a father to him (McLellan, Karl Marx 16). Von Westphalen would take Marx on long walks around the hills near Trier and recite Shakespeare to him (McLellan Karl Marx 15). They read from the Schlegel-Tieck translation, which had recently been published in 1833 (Larson, 1987). In Dorothea Tieck’s translation of Timon of Athens, she uses the word “glänzender” (glittering) for the word brilliant in one of Timon’s rants against gold/wealth (Timon von Athens 4.3.410). Shakespeare has Timon call gold “glittering” in the scene where he is digging for roots and finds gold instead:

Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods, I am no idle votarist – Roots, you clear heavens! Thus much of this will make Black white, foul fair, wrong right, Base noble, old young, coward valiant (4.3.26-29).

Tieck translates glittering in this passage as “flimmernd”—flickering (Timon von Athens 4.2.27). Marx may have even heard the line in English, because von Westphalen spoke and read English. This description of gold/wealth made an impression on Marx’s consciousness; Marx used it to describe the problems with money in Capital Vol 1, and in all five of his preparatory economic writings that led up to Capital (Smith, Shakespeare’s Influence).

In the section on money in Capital, Vol. 1, Marx writes: “Just as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too for its part, as a radical leveller, it extinguishes all distinctions” (229-230). A footnote is inserted here that leads the reader to an extended quotation from Timon of Athens. In Marx’s Capital, the unnaturally powerful characteristics of money, which Marx uses Shakespeare’s lines to describe, is the end result of a process that began in history with the leveling of distinctions between products, facilitating their exchange. In his 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx writes:

Money, as purely abstract wealth – in which every specific use value is extinguished, and hence also every individual relation between possessor and commodity – comes under the power of the individual likewise as an abstract person, relating to his individuality as totally alien and extraneous. At the same time, it gives him universal power as his private power, a contradiction depicted, for instance, by Shakespeare (451-2).

10 What is great glitters (gläntz), its glitter (Glanz) arouses ambition, and ambition can light enthusiasm. Nor is our profession to be a position in which we are able to shine (glänzen) most. (Translation by author. I will attempt to translate most of the quotations, because many of the translations in MECW are unhelpfully wrong. I am not fluent in German, so I welcome any criticism of my translations). 4

Then he inserts the same quotation from Timon’s speech at 4.3.26-46 that he used in Capital. In these passages from his mature writings in 1867, Marx is working through his theory of the alienation caused by the shift towards the supremacy of exchange value. He uses a word from Timon of Athens that entered into his consciousness thirty years earlier as he was graduating from secondary school.

The school essay offers another hint of what is to come from Marx. Seventeen-year-old Marx writes:

But we cannot always attain the position to which we believe we are called; our relations in society have to some extent already begun to be established before we are in a position to determine them (MECW 1 4).

Is it possible that this idea may have been a precursor in Marx’s mind to his famous central tenet of historical materialism?

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past (The 18th Brumaire 15).

Franz Mehring writes, "Thus the first flash of an idea shows itself like summer lightening in the mind of the lad, an idea whose development and completion was to be the immortal service of the man" (Karl Marx 5). David McLellan disagrees:

This sentence has been hailed as the first germ of Marx’s later theory of historical materialism. However, the fact that human activity is continuously limited by the prestructured environment is an idea at least as old as the Enlightenment and the Encylopedists. It would indeed be surprising if even the germ of historical materialism had already been present in the mind of a seventeen-year-old schoolboy. It would be a mistake to think that, in his early writings, Marx was raising questions to which he would later produce answers: his late work, coming as it did after the tremendous impact on him of Hegel and the Hegelian School, contained quite different questions— and therefore quite different answers (Karl Marx 13).

McLellan is correct to reject matching Marx’s schoolboy thinking to his mature writings. Marx the schoolboy thought differently from Marx the university student and Marx the post-Hegelian dialectical materialist. However, there are two threads that show continuity between Marx’s juvenilia and his mature writings. The first is the presence of Shakespearean intertextuality. From the years that he started reading Shakespeare as an adolescent until two years before his death in 1883, Marx quoted Shakespeare in his writings and letters. The 171 instances of Shakespearean intertextuality provide a space in which researchers can work to establish continuity across Marx’s lifetime of writing. The second thread is a basic Hegelian and Marxist notion that the development of theory across history undergoes a Bildung. All theory is situated in its historical period. Philosophy advances as the material conditions of society allow for changes in the condition of consciousness, which then reflects back onto and changes the material conditions. According to S. S. Prawer, the Bildungsroman, the story of yearning for fullness of development which can be seen in Marx’s essay, is a central notion of this time period in . It can be found in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, in Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man, and in Hölderlin’s Hyperion (Marx and World 5

Literature 2). Marx the schoolboy in Trier, Rhineland in 1835, taught by Liberal teachers within the context of Vormärz Germany used what he learned from his Enlightenment-inspired teachers and his Shakespearean mentor to start on his intellectual journey. Viewed as a Bildung, of an individual within a society that itself is undergoing a historical Bildung, Marx’s schoolboy essay does contain the germ of his future thinking.

The Wandering Minstrel

Marx’s first choice of profession was to be a poet. He entered the in October 1835 to study jurisprudence, but he also attended lectures on Homer by August W. Schlegel and lectures on Greek and Roman mythology by Friedrich Gottleib Welcker. Welcker wrote a book on Aeschylus titled Die Äschyleische Trilogie (1824).11 While at Bonn, Marx copied out extracts from books on aesthetic theory including: Lessing’s Laocoon, Solger’s Erwin – Four Talks on Beauty and Art—and Winckelmann’s History of Art (Mehring, Karl Marx 11; Prawer, Marx and World Literature 3). In Marx’s extant writings, there are poems from 1833, and 1835 - 1837. Many are to Jenny, some are to his sister and others are to his father. Marx admits that his poetic style is poor, and he and Jenny frequently laughed at his early literary experiments when they talked about them later in life. He writes about his poems: “Feeling stamped flat and formless; nothing natural about them; everything up in the air; utter contradiction between what is said and what should be; rhetorical reflections instead of poetic ideas" (Mehring Karl Marx 11). Only two were ever published in his lifetime. His Wilde Lieder—“Der Spielmann“ and “Nachtliebe“—were published in Anthenäum in January 1841. However, Marx’s poems are significant because they display a stage of development of Marx’s consciousness.

Many of the poems to Jenny are crammed with Romantic clichés about, for example, “the lyre’s deep melodious sighs” (MECW 1 517), “the Soul’s deep yearning to confess” (MECW 1 518), and the minstrel whose “soul is troubled deep inside” and who grabs his lyre and sings: “The Lyre plays from my own heart,/ It is myself, its pangs—the Art/ That gushed from my soul” (MECW 1 537). Marx is working clumsily with the Romantic notion that art is the expression of the self that is overflowing with feeling. He also writes about not wanting to be a part of the world as it is. Here one stanza from his poem “Feelings”:

I am caught in endless strife Endless ferment, endless dream; I cannot conform to Life, Will not travel with the stream (MECW 1 525).

In 1937, he transferred to the University of Berlin. His first poems from there are similar to his earlier ones—Romantic cliché. None of Marx’s early literary experiments (except for that one sonnet for Jenny) are influenced by Shakespeare. They lack the depth and layering of Shakespeare’s lines.

11 According to Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, Marx read Aeschylus in the original Greek at least once a year (Mehring Karl Marx 503). Marx said in a family game called Confessions that his favourite poets were Shakespeare, Aeschylus and Goethe (MacLellan Karl Marx 457). If this is true, then it was most likely Welcker who inspired the love of Aeschylus in Marx. Also, Aeschylus wrote a play about Prometheus who is significant in Marx’s writings. 6

Then, a transformation can be seen in his poetry. The first phase is noticeable in a set of poems that he sent to his father. Marx writes four poems criticising the medical students at Berlin. His “Medziner-Psychologie” (Medical Student Psychology) goes like this:

Wer des Abends Nudeln und Klöse verschlückt, Der wird des Nachts – von Träumen gedrückt.12

In “Mediziner-Metaphysic” he writes that medical students cannot find the soul because:

Man kann sie im Magen nicht finden, Und wär sie irgendwo nur zu ergründen, ‘ne jede Pille trieb sie wohl herbei.13

In these poems, Marx is beginning to develop his sarcastic wit. The sarcasm that he uses is still weak and lacks cleverness, but it is significant to the present study, because, when Marx sharpens his sarcasm in later writings, he will do it through his use of lines from Shakespeare. Sarcasm is a step away from Romanticism. It critiques the world as the Romantics do, but not with utopian or escapist language. Sarcasm lives in the corrupt world and speaks to it from that location.

During his first year at Berlin, Marx began to translate Ovid’s Tristia into German. He wrote to his father that his translation is “freely translated” (MEGA I 1 628). In the Tristia, Ovid writes about his exile from Rome by Augustus Caesar in 8 A.D. allegedly for writing books that encouraged breaking Augustus’ laws proscribing adultery. Ovid was relegated to the town of Tomis, a remote location on the Black Sea, far from the cultural metropolis of Rome that he loved so much. Peter Green writes that “the choice of Tomis as Ovid’s place of enforced residence was a master-stroke. It cut him off, not only from Rome, but virtually from all current civilised Graeco-Roman culture” (Ovid, Poems of Exile, xxv). Ovid’s poem is a lamentation of exile, loneliness, and estrangement. Ovid speaks to his book—Tristia—which he is sending to Rome, from whence he has been exiled. He hopes that people will read the book and remember him. He fears Augustus, but also hopes for some mercy. He ends the first elegy with: "Meanwhile my habitation/remains the world's end, a land from my land remote."14 Marx's freely translated version ends with: "das ich mit Scythen theile,/Land vom Land weggewandt!"(MEGA I.1 637). Alex Miller translates this as: “Remotest of all lands/Here with the Scythians I must share;/ Estranged from all the rest it stands" (MECW 1 557) Weggewandt means to have turned against/ to oppose. This notion of estrangement or alienation occurs elsewhere in Book I. In the seventh elegy, Ovid writes about a nameless friend who did not help him when Ovid was being relegated. He declares that this friend is therefore not from civilised Rome and that his mother was a tigress, else “[he’d] not be so alienated today from [Ovid’s] misfortunes or stand accused by [Ovid] of hard-heartedness” (Tristia I.8.42-47). In Latin, Ovid writes “aut mala nostra minus quam nunc aliena putares” (Latin Library). Here he means that the friend is separated/estranged from his consideration/valuation of Ovid. While this is not the sense of alienation or estrangement that Marx

12 Who consumes a supper of noodles and dumplings,/Will be at night with dreams depressed. (Translation by author) 13 One cannot find it in the stomach,/And if one were to discover it,/Then any pill could drive it well here (cure it). (Translation by author) 14 nobis habitabitur orbis/ultimus, a terra terra remota mea 7

will write about later in his life, it does begin to move in the direction of expressing the problem of people being estranged from each other, and the sadness of the consequences that follow.

Marx does not give any indication why he chose to translate this text by Ovid. It must have been significant for him at this point in the development of his consciousness. It must have spoken to something that he may have been feeling. During his first term at Berlin, Marx felt longing because he was living far away from Jenny. He stayed up many nights studying and copying out notes from books on aesthetics, jurisprudence and philosophy. He exhausted himself and, towards the end of his first term at Berlin, in 1837, Marx was sent by a doctor to rest in Stralau, a peaceful fishing village on the Spree. Marx exhausted not only his physical body, but also the hold that Romanticism had on him. His translation work with Ovid took him—physically and mentally—to the furthest extent of estrangement from the world at this stage in his development. It was at this point that his mind took two turns that would launch him into his next phase—he read Hegel’s philosophy and he began to use Shakespeare in his writings.

The Young Hegelian

Marx began writing a satirical novel titled Scorpion and Felix in 1837. In it, he uses a mock philosophical logic to create the humour. There are four allusions to Shakespeare’s plays among the extant fragments of this unfinished novel.15 The first one sits by itself in Chapter 12. Marx writes:

“A Horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” said Richard III. “A husband, a husband, myself for a husband,” said Grethe.

Grethe is a character who is a cook. Marx paints her as ugly, bearded and desirous of a husband. He uses geological terminology—hills and outcroppings—to describe her face. There is a hint of Nell the cook from The Comedy of Errors in his description. In the next fragment that is available, Chapter 16, Marx writes:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.” Innocent, beautiful thought! Yet these associations of ideas led Grethe onward to the thought that the Word dwells in the thighs, just as in Shakespeare Thersites believes that Ajax wears his wit in his belly and his guts in his head, and being convinced— Grethe, not Ajax—and filled with understanding of how the Word had been made flesh, she saw in the thighs its symbolic expression, she beheld their glory and decided—to wash them.

Marx begins this passage by quoting from John 1. The first part is John 1.1 and the second part of the sentence is from John 1.14. They are not together in the Bible, but when placed together, they express the first move of logic in Hegel's religious philosophy. For Hegel, the abstract notion of God, the Word, does not determine him. In order to gain logical determination, God’s immortality must

15 Marx complains in a letter to his father that “idealism pervades forced humour” in this novel. He writes that he burned many of his poems and outlines of stories (MECW 1 17 25). This may be one reason why there are only fragments of the novel extant. 8

be negated by being made mortal—flesh, dying and then resurrecting. The Logic works through the process of sublation (Aufhebung)—a dialectical inversion in which the categories (being, something, reality, the Absolute) are determined through a double negation. Marx had just begun to study Hegel’s Logic when he wrote Scorpion and Felix. Later in his life, Marx will develop the method of dialectical materialism, which will work as a system of dialectical inversions—double negations.

However, at this point in his studies, where Marx is practicing his logic, and developing his method, he uses Shakespeare’s inversions as a formative influence. Richard III’s offer to exchange his kingdom for a horse is an inversion. It points out the importance of the animal as a tool of battle. Richard’s kingdom is worth nothing to him if he loses his life because he has lost his horse and is down on the pitch of battle. Thersites is the clown of Troilus and Cressida, and, similar to all of Shakespeare’s clowns, he deals in inversions—locating Ajax’s wit in his belly and his guts in his head. In another inversion, the greasy, bearded and desirous cook, Grethe, whose full name in the novel is Magdalene Grethe, finds God between her thighs, and decides to wash them. The fourth Shakespearean allusion is also inversion in which a dog says grace at a dinner table because he is thought to be one and the same as Saint Boniface. The line is as follows:

The gap [at the dinner table], which no human creature might occupy, was not filled by Banquo’s ghost but by Merten’s dog, which had every day to say grace at the table (MECW 1 627).

In 1837, Marx was only a few years away from becoming an atheist, but his humorous swipes at religion played a much more serious role in the development of his thinking than simply as atheist jokes. Marx last wrote about the Gospel by John when he was in secondary school.16 In an 1835 Religious Studies essay, he defends John's message in a flat, propagandistic manner using very little logic and no dialectic. The essay is pure dogma and was probably following the precepts of his religion teacher. In 1837, Marx returns to his thinking about religion and subjects it to a dialectical inversion. He uses Shakespeare to do it.

In Chapters 22 and 23 of the novel, Marx quotes from Ovid’s Tristia, first in Latin and then in a freely rendered paradigma. He quotes from Book I, section 4 where Ovid is relating his perilous sea journey through a storm on his way to Tomis. The waves are high and the ship is being thrown about. The storm is too powerful for the helmsman to control the boat. Marx writes:

“Look where you may, there is nought to be seen but Scorpion and Merten, The former in torrents of tears, the latter beclouded with wrath. Wild is the storm of words that rages between them unceasing, Nor does the tossing sea know which of the two to obey. I, the helmsman, can make no choice twixt writing and silence, From the commotion art cowers in corners and holes.” Thus Ovid relates in his libri tristium the sad story which as the sequel comes after what went before. The task was clearly beyond him, but I continue the story as follow:--- Chapter 23

16 “The union of believers with Christ according to John 15: 1-14, showing its basis and essence, its absolute necessity, and its effects.” This examination essay was written between 10 and 16 August 1835 (MECW 1 636- 639). 9

Ovid sat in Tomi, whither the god Augustus had hurled him in his anger, because he had more genius than sense.

The humour of Scorpion and Felix is barely visible above the Trauerspiel that is supporting it. The helmsman is Marx. In his second year of university, he has glimpsed the tragic reality of the world— of history. He knows that he must drop his desire to be a poet and instead enter into philosophy and politics. The contradictions of the world rage about him as waves in a tempest. The commotion makes his art cower. He knows (or maybe senses?) that, when he makes his move from art to politics, he will be exiled from the Romantic land of love about which he delighted to write. The world he will write about in his future work, capitalism, is marked by alienation—the exile of the self from the human, the domination of the subject by the object. After his intellectual turn to radical philosophy and politics, Karl Marx will be Ovid at Tomis.17

The turn to philosophy is marked by a letter of equinox to his father on 10 November, 1837.18 Marx’s father closely followed and guided Marx’s education. It is thought that Heinrich Marx may have schooled Marx at home until age twelve (McLellan Karl Marx 9). Heinrich enrolled Marx in the gymnasium run by his political ally and family friend, Hugo Wyttenbach (McLellan Karl Marx 9). While Marx was at university, he and his father kept in touch through frequent letters. Heinrich was upset that Marx spent part of his time at the University of Bonn engaging in riotous behaviour, including duelling, and spending too much money. Marx was, in fact, jailed for “disturbing the peace of night with drunken noise” (McLellan Karl Marx. 17). Heinrich Marx then decided that his son should transfer to a more serious university—the University of Berlin.19 The letter of equinox was written during the first term of Marx’s second year at Berlin. In it, Marx details, as he does in most of his university letters to his father, what he had been studying and how that study had changed his thinking.20

Marx opens his letter stating that he has arrived at the moment of completion of a period and the beginning of a new direction in his thinking. He compares this moment to those in which world

17 In Book III, section 9 of the Tristia, Ovid tells the story of how Tomis came to get its name. Medea had fled there to escape her enraged father. He chased her there and she needed a way to delay him, so that she could escape. She did this by killing her brother and cutting him up into pieces, which she then scattered all over town so that her father would be delayed by collecting them. Ovid writes that Tomis is named so because the sister anatomised (cut into pieces – atomi) her brother’s body (III.9.33-4). While Marx did not yet have a notion about how capitalism anatomises labour and the worker through the division of labour and alienation, it is interesting to note that he would have found this description of literal chopping up of a body in a literary text that he translated. 18 I am borrowing the term—“letter of equinox”—from Jean Laplanche who uses it to describe Sigmund Freud’s letter to Wilhelm Fliess on 21 September, 1897 in which Freud declares that he no longer believes in his “neurotica”—the seduction theory. In the next letter of 15 October 1897, Freud writes to Fliess that his reading of Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, along with his analysis of his own dreams, have convinced him that all humans go through a process whereby they desire their mothers and feel jealousy towards their fathers. This moment can be pointed to as the first major turn in psychoanalysis towards its mature form. It is similar in process to the turn that Marx will make at this point in his development. 19 History might give a nod of thanks to Heinrich Marx for placing Karl Marx in the social environment in which he found the necessary conditions of consciousness from which to construct dialectical materialism. 20 In the letter, Marx notes: “And where could a more sacred dwelling place [for the memorial of what we have lived through] be found for it than in the heart of a parent, the most merciful judge, the most intimate sympathiser, the sun of love whose warming fire is felt at the innermost centre of our endeavours!” (MECW 1 10) I will leave the psychoanalytic exploration of this for a future paper. 10

history sits back in an armchair and surveys its own activity. He writes that “at such moments, however, a person becomes lyrical, for every metamorphosis is partly a swan song, partly the overture to a great new poem, which endeavours to achieve a stable form in brilliant colours that still merge into one another” (MECW 1 12). Marx is here describing a historical function of art. Art not only depicts both personal changes and world historical changes, but it plays a role in navigating those changes. In Marx’s case, the shift from his juvenilia and University of Bonn writings to his more mature writings is navigated by lyric and dramatic poetry. In fact, it is guided by a shift in style and genre of poetry – from the Romanticism of his mentor Ludwig von Westphalen and the University of Bonn (a centre of German Romanticism and the home university of August W. Schlegel) to the more dialectical dramatic poetry of Shakespeare.21

In the letter, Marx critiques his own poetry. He writes that he attacked the world in which he lived. He looked for a world beyond it, which was symbolised by his love for Jenny. He writes that “owing to [his] attitude and whole previous development [his lyrical poetry] was purely idealistic” (MECW 1 11). He writes that the opposition between what is and what ought to be is a defect of idealism. He will now devote himself to studying law and “wrestling with philosophy” (MECW 1 11). He also announces a shift in his study of philosophy from Kant and Fichte to Hegel. He writes:

I arrived at the point of seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its centre (MECW 1 18).

His transformation of consciousness caused a bout of madness in which he “ran about madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree, which ‘washes souls and dilutes the tea’22” (MECW 1 18). The long hours that he spent studying leading up to his transformation also caused physical exhaustion. When he went to rest in Stralau, he met a group of Hegelian scholars who called themselves the Doctors’ Club. The Club included Hegelians of all three political stripes—Left, Right and Centre Hegelians. While he was convalescing, he read Hegel “from beginning to end, together with most of his disciples” (MECW 1 19). The Doctors’ Club included Bruno Bauer and Adolf Rutenberg—Left Hegelians with whom Marx would later work with on the Rheinische Zeitung—and the Right Hegelian Heinrich Hotho, who attended and copied Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics (Marx-Engels- Lenin-Institut-Moskau, Chronik 5). Hotho would then publish the lectures that serve as the basis for the current text of Hegel’s Aesthetics.

Marx announces to his father that he is going to start a journal of aesthetic criticism and that “all the aesthetic celebrities of the Hegelian school have promised their collaboration” (MECW 1 20). Marx

21 I have, in other conference papers, given evidence that Shakespeare may have been one of the first to work with the dialectic in a modern manner, presaging the turn in speculative philosophy caused by Hegel’s Logic, yet occurring many years before Hegel. 22 This is a (frequently omitted) line from Heinrich Heine’s poem “Frieden”, Die Nordsee I. The line is in a bitingly satirical passage in which Heine mocks upwardly-mobile piety in Berlin (Gelber, Jewish Reception of Heine. 38). The full passage is:

In the pious city where sand and religion blossom, and the holy Spree’s patient water washes souls and thins tea.

This is another example of Marx’s use of the inversions that he finds in literature. 11

had been studying aesthetics throughout his university career. Even as early as 1835 in a secondary school Latin essay, Marx wrote about the relationship of art and history:

At no time were the Romans more disinclined to pursue the fine arts than in the period before the Punic Wars: learning was least valued since the most important men of those times chiefly devoted their efforts and labours to agriculture (MECW 1 640).

He spent as much time in the study of aesthetics at the University of Bonn as he did in his chosen field, jurisprudence. Now at Berlin, in 1837, Marx had landed in the centre of European aesthetic philosophy, the Hegelian School. Marx’s move towards studying “reality” and “the world as it is” was not a move away from aesthetics, but a move towards it. In his first professional writings, his articles for the Rheinische Zietung critiquing the proceedings of the Rhenish Diet, Marx’s study of aesthetics comes into service for his politics. He uses nuanced readings of Shakespeare’s plays to build the rhetoric and logic of his arguments.

The Radical Journalist

In April 1842, while working as an editor of and writer for the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx wrote a long article describing and analysing the proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly’s debates on press freedom (MECW 1 132-81; MEGA I. 1 121-69). This article contains an allusion to The Merchant of Venice that editors of both MECW and MEGA have overlooked. The allusion is Marx’s first use of the play and opens his project of expressing and transforming Hegel’s concept of Geist. In the article, Marx roots Hegel’s Geist23 in the debate about press freedom, positing that freedom of the press and one’s feelings about it are indicators of the condition of Geist. He describes a rival newspaper’s, the Preussiche Staats-Zeitung, support of press censorship as, “the first awakening to self- consciousness of a semi-official press-child” (MECW 1132). He writes that the newspaper is aware only of sensuous perceptions, (MECW 1 132) and is missing an aspect of self-consciousness he calls Bedürfniß (necessity – translated as ‘vital need’ in MECW): “They [the opponents of free press] have never come to know freedom of the press as a vital need. For them it is a matter of the head, in which the heart plays no part” (MECW 1 137). Marx cites Goethe to further explain what he means by Bedürfniß:

Goethe once said that the painter succeeds only with a type of feminine beauty which he has loved in at least one living being. Freedom of the press too has its beauty – if not exactly a feminine one – which one must have loved to be able to defend it. If I truly

23 According to Helmut Schmitz, “The term Geist has no unified meaning and both translations as mind and spirit are valid depending on the context. For example the problem with Hegel’s Phenomenologie des Geistes and its translation as Phenomenology of the Mind is that Geist also denotes a disembodied entity: and it appears in Hegel as the World Spirit moving through history towards self-consciousness.” He translates the adjective geistige as intellectual and says that, “when Marx talks about a “gesitige Revolution” he means an intellectual development, a change in mental attitudes. He also states that the distinction between mind and spirit does not work in German (Helmut Schmitz, Associate Professor of German, University of Warwick. Personal communication, 3-15-2010). According to Stephen Houlgate, in Hegel, Geist is self-consciousness and it is expressed both in the people’s character, or how they understand themselves, and in their material relationship to nature. Being itself comes to self-consciousness in and through human beings. Houlgate explains that, for Hegel, Geist is agency and its development occurs in changes in the way we understand ourselves. (Stephen Houlgate, Professor of Philosophy, University of Warwick. Personal communication. 15-3- 2010). 12

love something, I feel that its existence is essential, that it is something which I need, without which my nature can have no full, satisfied, complete existence (MECW 1 137).

Marx locates self-consciousness about one’s vital needs in the heart as well as the head.24 To ensure that his readers understand that by heart he means one’s emotional life, he equates love with vital necessity. Advancement in the development of self-consciousness travels through the emotional centre of humans.

In the second installment of the article,25 Marx establishes the need for a developed self- consciousness to conscienticise (vergeistigen – translated in MECW as ‘spiritualize’) the material conditions of social change. When discussing the Belgian revolution, he links the development of a people’s Geist with the material conditions for revolution and with the functioning of the press. Marx writes, “Die belgische Revolution ist ein Produkt des belgischen Geistes. Also hat auch die Presse, die freieste Weise, in welcher heut Tag der Geist erscheint, ihren antheil an der belgische Revolution“(MEGA I.1 132).26 For Marx, the material activity of Geist exists in a state of reciprocal causality with the activity of its consciousness: “The government can materialize a spiritual revolution; a material revolution must first spiritualize (vergeistigen) the government” (MECW 1 143).

In the fourth installment of the article, Marx uses an allusion to The Merchant of Venice to root the emotional heart centre that expresses Bedürfniß in the struggle for a free press and in the historical journey of Geist. He starts with a conceit that the supporters of press censorship view freedom as an illness and that the censor is a country surgeon who only knows how to cut (MECW 1 163). Marx writes;

You regard it as despotic to cut a free person’s hair against his will, but the censorship daily cuts into the flesh of thinking people and allows only bodies without hearts, submissive bodies which show no reaction, to pass as healthy! (MECW 1 163).

While this allusion to cutting into the flesh and bodies without hearts might look, at first glance, proverbial and unrelated to The Merchant of Venice, it can be read as a deep allusion. Imagery from Shakespeare’s plays is embedded deeply in Marx’s consciousness and that of his readers. Marx cited the play on four other occasions during this period of his early journalism (1842-44). The play was on his mind.

The sentence before this passage reads, “You think it barbaric to blind nightingales, but it does not seem to you at all barbaric to put out the eyes of the press with the sharp pens of the censorship” (MECW 1 163). This is an allusion to the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear. Marx quoted lines from King Lear on four other occasions in 1842. The two most quoted plays in Marx’s writings that year

24 A psychoanalytic reading of this would use Freud’s notion of Anlehnung—leaning on (translated as Anaclisis) (Laplanche Language of Psychoanalysis 29). Sexual desire for one’s mother leans on the feeding and caring function that she performs. Anaclitic desire is rooted in the mothering relationship, which is essential for self- preservation. Marx’s notion of heart-felt desire for press freedom, which he compares to how one would love a woman, leans on the self-preservative function that press freedom plays for a society. 25 The article was printed in six installments from 5 – 19 May 1842. 26 The Belgian revolution is a product of the Belgian spirit. So the press, too, the freest manifestation of the spirit in our day, has its share in the Belgian revolution (MECW 1 143). 13

were The Merchant of Venice and King Lear. The metaphors can be read as the press censor cutting the heart out of Geist, as Shylock demands to cut the heart out of Antonio, and cutting the eyes out of the press, as Cornwall cuts Gloucester’s eyes. The theme that bodies without hearts—without that emotional and loving function that recognizes Bedürfniß – can only be submissive bodies which are not self-aware enough to know that press freedom and its potential for spiritualizing a revolution are a vital need, is a theme in Marx’s early journalism and throughout his writing career.

In an 1842 Rheinische Zeitung article, “Debate on the Law on Thefts of Wood”, Marx uses two quotations from The Merchant of Venice to develop his notion of subject/object inversion. This mechanism by which the subject is reified while the object is personified and fetishised is the central dynamic of his theory of alienation that arises out of his economic critique. The inversion is stated most clearly in his 1867 Capital Vol. I, “Personifizierung der Sache und Versachlichung der Personen” (Das Kapital I 128).27 The first expression of this inversion can be found in the 1842 article on the debates on theft of wood where two instances of inversion imagery come from The Merchant of Venice.28

Marx’s argument in the article unfolds in the same manner as the plot of the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice; the argument moves towards its climax in a similar fashion to the scene. The turning points are caused by inversions of the subject and the object. Marx first establishes the setting, “Wir spielen jetzt auf ebener Erde” (MEGA I.1 199). Erde means earth or soil. Marx is obviously meaning to say “ground level” as it is translated in the MECW (1 224), but he uses a word that calls up nature, the earth in the forests from which the people gather wood. This imagery brings Geist down to a moist, earthy location. Marx’s use of spielen is translated as “come down to” in MECW, but this translation misses the pun in German. Spielen means to play, including theatrical playing. Marx is using theatrical imagery. The earthy ground level of the German forests with fallen wood lying about is the stage for this scene of Geist’s development.29

The poor who gather wood are described by Marx as “feel[ing] an urge to satisfy a natural need (ein natürliches Bedürfniß), but equally…feel[ing] the need to satisfy a rightful urge (einen rechtlichen Trieb) (MECW 1 233-4; MEGA I.1 208). Fallen wood is, according to Marx “alms of nature” for the poor who gather it (MECW 1 234). It satisfies their natural need, but, further, the satisfaction of this need through gathering wood is a rightful urge. As a tragic dramatist would do, Marx establishes the crucial need of the protagonist – the wood gatherers. The antagonists are the forest owners who ask the Rhine Province Assembly to prohibit wood gathering by the poor.

The turning point in the wood gatherer’s drama is signaled by two inversion images, including the first Shylock reference. Marx writes that, with the passing of this law prohibiting wood gathering, “the wooden idols triumph and human beings are sacrificed!” (MECW 1 226) This imagery has the

27 Personification of things and reification of persons. 28 Marx writes in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that his article on the theft of wood was the first instance in which he turned his attention to economic issues. (MECW 29 262). 29 Wolfgang Clemen in an introduction to his book on Shakespeare’s tragedies writes about Shakespeare’s imagery: The imagery may also emphasize and accompany the dramatic action, repeating its themes; it often even resembles a second line of action running parallel to the real plot, and providing a counterpoint to the events on the stage” (“Tragedies” Shakespeare Criticism 50). Marx’s writings also exhibit this quality in the relation between their imagery and the logic of their argument (plot). The line “wir spielen auf ebener Erde” is an example of this. 14

objects (fallen wood) experience a human event (triumph) while the humans become objects of sacrifice. He sets up the next inversion with a logic that follows the trial scene of Shakespeare’s play.

Marx contrasts on the one hand “the wise legislator [who] will prevent crime in order not to have to punish it…by doing away with the negative aspect of every instinct of right, giving the latter a positive sphere of action” with, on the other hand, the “petty, wooden, mean and selfish soul of interest [that] sees only one point, the point in which it is wounded, like a coarse person who regards a passer-by as the most infamous, vilest creature under the sun because this unfortunate creature has trodden on his corns” (MECW 1 235). The soul of interest, in the forest owner, sees other people through his interest, his private property. Private property causes an inversion in human relations. Marx writes: “Private interest makes the one sphere in which a person comes into conflict with this interest into this person’s whole sphere of life” (MECW 1 236). All humans appear as, and are reduced to, threats to the owner’s interests. Then Marx uses an allusion from the court scene in The Merchant of Venice; “It [private interest] makes the law a rat-catcher who wants only to destroy vermin” (Marx’s italics) (MECW 1 236). When the Duke exhorts Shylock to be merciful with Antonio, Shylock explains that his decision to pursue the forfeiture of the bond is firm and he gives four reasons for this. In the explanation of the fourth reason Shylock says; “What if my house be troubled with a rat,/ And I be pleas’d to give ten thousand ducats to have it ban’d? what are you answer’d yet?” (4.1.44-5)30 In the paragraph after the rat-catcher image, Marx quotes two lines from the trial scene, thereby tying his essay to the precedent. The quote is from the exchange between Bassanio and Shylock:

Bass: Do all men kill the things they do not love? Shy: Hates any man the thing he would not kill?

It provides Marx with a powerful image of inversion to depict the inverted consciousness that private property has caused in people and in the history of Geist. Before the quotation, Marx writes sarcastically, “Interest…is practical and nothing in the world is more practical than to strike down one’s enemy” (MECW 1 236). The sarcasm refers to the deadly inversion. Then he writes, “‘Hates any man the thing he would not kill,’ we are already told by Shylock.” (“’Wer haßt ein Ding, und brächt’ es nicht gern um!’ lehrt schon Shylock“) (MEGA I.1 211).31 Bassanio’s question and Shylock’s answer are an inversion of each other. Shylock inverts the position of the verb ‘hate’ from serving in the noun phrase that is the object of the sentence (the things they do not love), to serving as the verb in his sentence – the action of the subject. Bassanio is questioning why men kill the things they do not love (i.e. hate), but Shylock makes the act of hating into the central action of the subject. The act of hating becomes the defining characteristic of the subject, as does the distrust of others under the influence of the consciousness of private property.

30 Rats from literature are alluded to many times in Marx’s writings. In Capital, he also quotes Brander’s Poisoned Rat Song from the Auerbach’s Tavern scene in Goethe’s Faust. In Brander’s song, the rat’s dying symptoms after he has been poisoned by the cook are described as appearing as if he was in love (Als hätte sie Lieb im Leibe) (Faust Erster Teil 2132-33, 2140-41, 2148-49). Marx calls capital in the process of valorizing, “ein beseeltes Ungeheuer, das zu arbeiten beginnt, als hätt’ es Lieb’ im Liebe“ (Das Kapital 209). (“an animated monster which begins to work, ‘as if its body were by love possessed.’”) (Capital 302) 31 This is a direct quotation of Shylock’s line at 4.1.71 in the Schlegel translation. 15

The metrical difference between the two lines also tropes the centrality of hating. Bassanio’s line scans as a regular iambic pentameter:

ˇ ′ ˇ ′ ˇ ′ ˇ ′ ˇ ′ Do all men kill the thing they do not love?

Shylock’s line begins by landing as a trochaic on “hates”:

′ ˇ ˇ ′ ˇ ′ ˇ ′ ˇ ′ Hates any man the thing he would not kill?

Another message lies embedded in the accented words:

Bassanio: all-kill-thing-do-love

Shylock: hates-man-thing-would-kill

These two lines, stripped down to their accented words, express aspects of the inverted reading of the play as a tragedy: Shylock’s revenge and the Christians’ (Bassanio, Portia, Gratiano, Nerissa) antagonistic relations in marriage. Shylock wants to kill those that he hates, but the Christians will kill, through the battle of the selves for dominion depicted between the newlyweds in Act Five, those whom they love.32

In the play, the Duke wants Shylock to be merciful; not to be a “Turk [or] Tartar never train’d/ To offices of tender courtesy” (4.1.32-3), but Shylock will not budge. Marx uses this cruel Shylock to stand for the alienated property owner. He writes about the owner:

Cruelty is a characteristic feature of laws dictated by cowardice, for cowardice can be energetic only by being cruel. Private interest, however, is always cowardly, for its heart, its soul, is an external object which can always be wrenched away and injured, and who has not trembled at the danger of losing heart and soul? How can the selfish legislator be human when something inhuman, an alien material essence, is his supreme essence? (MECW 1 236)

The Turk and Tartar references in the play trope otherness and externality to the Venetian state. The rigid Shylock, like the property owner who has lost his heart and soul (Herz und Seele) (MEGA I.1 211), cannot be merciful, for that would require recognition of the other, something that a person who has externalised his heart and soul cannot do.

The article continues in the same manner as the trial in the play. Marx describes how the forest owners are awarded by the Assembly not only the passage of the law that defines wood gathering as theft, but also the fines paid by the offenders or, if they cannot pay the fines, their bodies to labour for the forest owner. He writes that, “the infringer of forest regulations is handed over completely to

32 Shylock’s deep love for his wife expressed when he states about his wedding ring, “It was my turquoise: I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys” (3.2.109-11), stands as a counterpoint to Portia’s ring trick and the battle for dominance between her and Bassanio. 16

the forest owner, for whom he has to perform forest labour” (Marx’s emphasis)( MECW 1 253). And then:

We have, however, reached a point where the forest owner, in exchange for his piece of wood, receives what was once a human being. Shy: Most learned judge! – A sentence! come, prepare! Por: Tarry a little, there is something else. This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood; The words expressly are ‘a pound of flesh’: Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh; But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate Unto the state of Venice. Grat: O upright judge! Mark, Jew. O learned judge! Shy: Is that the law? Por: Thyself shall see the act.

You, too, should see the act! (MECW Vol. 1 256)

The metaphor begins with Antonio standing for the poor wood gatherer whose body is delivered to the forest owner. The wood gatherer was once a human being in the sense that he expressed his rightful urge to satisfy his natural/vital need in cooperation with nature who gave him wood. He lost his humanity as a consequence of the system of private property that is being legislated at this early state of capitalism in the Rhine Province, analogous to the early state of capitalism in Shakespeare’s Venice. That system of private property occurs in reciprocal causality with the alienation of the owners, who have lost their heart and soul – required components of Geist for it to advance to the stage of mutual recognition.

The system of jurisprudence that underpins capitalism would allow for Antonio’s trial to continue to its deadly conclusion. This system is emptied of recognition between humans; emptied of the self- consciousness of which Geist is made. Costas Douzinas and Adam Gearey describe the manner in which modern jurisprudence has become a reification of the social consciousness of law, the political philosophy of justice.33 They write that jurisprudence originally explored social relations, the point of contact between the individual and the other. Law was a site of contesting and negotiating selves. However, that changed when law was disengaged from philosophy. Douzinas and Gearey write, “private law turns social conflict into technical disputes” (Critical Jurisprudence 7). When Portia asks, “Have by some surgeon Shylock on your charge,/ To stop his wounds, lest he do bleed to death,” Shylock asks, “Is it so nominated in the bond?” (4.1.253-5) Shylock, the supporter of the emerging system of law in early capitalist Venice, has no self at that moment to recognize Antonio’s self. The social functioning of their selves has been reified into the logos of the law. In Marx’s article, the logos of the act replaces the social relationship of the wood gatherer and the forest owner. The

33 Lukács writes that “economic and legal categories are objectively and substantively so interwoven as to be inseparable” (Class Consciousness History and Class Consciousness 57). 17

wood gatherer, who was once a human but has now been reduced to a transgressor, is handed over to the Geist-less forest owner, who emptied himself of humanity and replaced it with a law.

Yet, a volta occurs in Marx’s representation of Shylock. The lines that Marx quotes from the play are its climax. They depict a reversal from the first instance, in which Antonio’s body is delivered to the state and to Shylock, to the second instance, in which Shylock’s body is delivered to the state. In the first instance Shylock threatens to cut Antonio’s heart out; in the second instance the state pilfers Shylock’s estate and Antonio cuts out Shylock’s heart – his religion.34 Similar to the wood gatherers who have now been defined as wood thieves, Shylock was a plaintiff with a legal case who has now been defined as an attempted murderer by a (new?) law. The subjects have become objects, emptied of their rights, their agency effectively killed. Marx then turns to his reader, like a character in a painting staring straight out at the viewer, and charges him with the responsibility of critical evaluation when he writes, “You, too, should see the act!”35

The demand that the reader see the act places that reader in a position to develop sympathy for the wood gatherer, whose body has been turned over to the state. However, in this reading of Shakespeare’s play, the demand places the reader in a position to develop sympathy for Shylock! On this side of the climax of the play, and of Marx’s use of the play, Shylock stands for the oppressed.

These examples from Marx’s early journalism (1842-44) show Marx’s use of dialectical inversions in Shakespeare’s plays to construct the first moves of his own method—dialectical materialism. Marx’s thinking evolved from a schoolboy Romanticist, looking for an escape from the world as it is, to a dialectical and historical materialist, situated in the land where people are alienated/exiled from their material and subjective selves. He used Shakespeare to depict that alienation – to depict the tristia.

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34 By this point in the play, Shylock has lost all that is dear to him. He lost his wife before the play began. He lost his daughter, Jessica, and some of his wealth, including the cherished ring that he had from his wife, in Act Two. He now loses the rest of his wealth and his religion. 35 The word act doubles in Marx’s article as both the law and the act of Geist’s historical drama. 18

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