Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 157

of the role of materiality in social agency left a certain theoretical void at the

center of Marx’s evolving critical project, a conceptual lack for which, I argue,

he attempts to compensate in no small part through rhetorical effets de réel. At

this turning point between idealism and inchoate materialism, Marx’s work re-

veals an abiding preoccupation with abjection. Abject positivity (or animal ma-

terialism) had served as a foil for human rationality and autonomous agency in

Marx’s thinking up to this juncture, but in 1843 it becomes a complex and vexed

focal point in its own right.

Three letters that Marx wrote to Ruge while working on the Kreuznach Kri-

tik appeared (probably in revised form) in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher

as part of a wider correspondence that served as an introduction of sorts to

that new journal.^50 In the first letter (March 1843 ) Marx savages the stupidity,

despotism, and Romantic delusions of Friedrich Wilhelm IV but ends on a

hopeful note: the German ship of fools will eventually drift to its own demise

in political revolution. Ruge replied pessimistically that Germans are too re-

signed and docile to make a revolution. In his letter of May 1843 Marx disputes

Ruge’s pessimism about the political maturity of the German nation and insists

that Germany will, eventually, achieve political freedom. Still conceiving of real

engagement and change under the banner of politics, Marx faults Ruge’s re-

signed pessimism for not being “political.” The political protagonist in whom

Marx refuses to abandon hope remains, here, the Volk. Ruge’s letter was “a fine

elegy, a funeral song that takes one’s breath away; but there is absolutely nothing

political about it. No people wholly despairs [kein Volk verzweifelt (my addi-

tion)], and even if for a long time it goes on hoping merely out of stupidity, yet

one day, after many years, it will suddenly become wise and fulfill all its pious

wishes.”^51

Yet Marx combines this broadly optimistic view of the German Volk’s po-

litical future with a dramatically bleak assessment of its present. He savages the

self-confirming “realism” of the philistine Germans, both rulers and ruled, and

vividly depicts Germany as a sub-human “politische Tierwelt” (political animal

kingdom). Here Marx goes Ruge one further and declares Germany and Ger-

mans hopeless, brainless, and utterly abject:

The Germans are such prudent realists that their desires and loftiest thoughts

do not go beyond bare life. And this reality—nothing more—is accepted by

those who rule over them. These latter people, too, are realists, they are

very far removed from any kind of thoughts and from any human greatness;

they are ordinary officers and country squires, but they are not mistaken,

they are right; just as they are, they are quite capable of exploiting [benutzen