Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

162 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

is perpetrated against it; which can no longer invoke a historical but only a

human title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the conse-

quences but in an all-round antithesis to the premises of the German state;

a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself

from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres

of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win it-

self only through the complete rewinning of man. This dissolution of society

as a particular estate is the proletariat.^63

The toads living and dying in the German muck, below the threshold of po-

litical life, reappear here, but with a dialectical difference. German reality is

no longer defined in terms of a political deficit but rather, as embodied in the

German proletariat, as a social force for overcoming the illusions and structural

shortcomings of politics. The proletariat as the negation of humanity negates

the negating force, agonistic civil society, and ushers in true human emancipa-

tion. This—Marx’s first—proletariat figures a way out of civil society defined as

a sphere of narrow egoism and self-interest precisely by manifesting the abject

dissolution of the very possibility of selfhood. Marx posits the proletariat as the

embodiment of “universal suffering”—that is, suffering so general and diffuse

that it precludes the consolidation of any self-consciousness or class interest.

By speaking for the proletariat Marx can claim to speak from a position at once

universal and grounded. Indeed, he constructs his own perfect counterpart:

material, the proletariat figures the possibility that Marx’s ideas can be real-

ized; mute, it leaves all the thinking and talking to him. The proletariat thus fills

the void left by the derealization of politics, the reconception of the political in

terms of alienation and illusion.

As ponderous as these questions are, I will bracket both the merits and short-

comings of Marx’s particular discrediting of political modernity in order to un-

derscore how Marx, in inserting the proletariat into a theoretical space once

occupied by politics and the Volk, makes a new, powerful rhetorical strategy pos-

sible. In a kind of rhetorical multiplier effect Marx can now deploy the rhetorical

force of his description of human suffering in support of his theory of social

revolution. Human abjection is no longer the foil of human agency; instead, it

is its motor. To the same extent that Marx theoretically abuses the proletariat—

to the extent that he reduces them to an abject state beneath all possible self-

interest, or selfhood tout court—he also enlists them in the service of a universal

social revolution against the principles of private property and self-interest. The

theoretical violence Marx directed at the German toads was essentially wasted;

it served only to establish German animal conditions as the Other of the politi-