Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

156 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Even as Marx invokes the Volk as the real foundation beneath the abstraction

of Hegel’s Idea, it is real qua human (ideal, rational, conscious) in contrast to the

animal realm that, in Marx’s assessment, Hegel’s philosophy mystifies without

transforming. There is no contradiction per se in Marx’s use of different con-

ceptions of (good and bad) materialism and (good and bad) idealism, but it is

important to note the double nature of each. As Marx continues his project of

rethinking Feuerbachian species-being in social terms, the idealized Volk yields

to other, more emphatically material signifiers: first to the “real Jews” of “Zur Ju-

denfrage,” then to the proletariat of “Einleitung.” In the course of this evolution,

good and bad reality—kept neatly separate in the Kreuznach Kritik—intersect,

and it is precisely this intersection that defines the theoretical ambivalence of

“Zur Judenfrage,” to anticipate my reading of this text.^48

Marx charges that Hegel “does not allow society to become a truly determin-

ing thing because this would require a real subject while he has nothing more

than an abstract one, a figment of the imagination.”^49 In the works that immedi-

ately followed the Kreuznach Kritik, Marx continued to grapple with how to

theorize society as the “real subject.” Although Marx appropriated Feuerbach

to overcome Hegel’s abstraction, Marx would soon have to confront what he

would come to see—by spring 1845 , when he wrote “Theses on Feuerbach”—

as Feuerbach’s own abstraction. Feuerbach never convincingly integrated his

celebration of sensuous existence with his privileging of the agency of species

consciousness, and Marx would place the integration of agency and social

materiality at the center of his theoretical agenda. His quest to replace Hegel’s

abstraction of ethical spirit in the state with a real social subject demanded a

rethinking of the relationship between social materiality and consciousness as

these pertained to revolutionary agency and the closely related role of criticism

and the critic.

These questions were at the core of Marx’s debate with Bruno Bauer, and it

was largely in and through this debate that Marx’s theorization of this tangle of

issues rapidly evolved. Examining texts by Marx from the Deutsch-französische

Jahrbücher that exemplify his thinking on these issues before and after “Zur

Judenfrage” will bring into focus the conceptually ambivalent and pivotal nature

of that text and the work that the figure of “real Jews” performs in it.

Bookends of “Zur Judenfrage”

Marx’s pieces in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher that bookend “Zur Ju-

denfrage”—his letters to Ruge that precede and the “Einleitung” that follow it—

dramatize the volatility of Marx’s ideas in 1843. The upheaval in his conception