Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

178 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

cal practice—over against Bauer’s “theological” orientation—as the critique of

emphatically secular politics, the innovative thrust of his critique of politics is

to expose its lack of substantive reality, its essentially theological nature. Thus

Marx’s attempt to ground his critique solidly in reality paradoxically erodes the

solidity of the very reality—the world of secular politics—to which he lays claim.

Ironically, at the precise moment at which it becomes more urgent for Marx

to distinguish his theory and praxis from Bauer’s, it also becomes more difficult

to do so. By diagnosing the secular state as the completion or consummation

of the Christian state (die Vollendung des christlichen Staats),^118 Marx becomes

trapped in a certain circularity: he insists both that secular politics represents

the true basis of the religious epiphenomena on which Bauer remains narrowly

focused and that secular politics is inherently more theological than religion

per se could ever be. Secular political conditions are the foundation of religious

consciousness, but a foundation that eventually morphs into its own theological

antithesis. Lacking a pragmatic engagement ( journalism) and faith in political

pragmatism, Marx—at the moment of his pivoting to radicalism—seemed, like

Bauer, to have little more to fall back on than critique itself.

The insufficiency of Marx’s finally circular attempt to ground his analysis in

empirical conditions in part 1 of his “Zur Judenfrage” (hereafter ZJ 1 ) is a cru-

cial preamble to the markedly different tone, strategy, and analytic model he

adopts in part 2 (hereafter ZJ 2 ), where he leans heavily on the emphatic reality

of “real Jews.” Although Marx does not ultimately remedy the circularity of his

argumentation in ZJ 1 , he clearly strives to unearth the driving forces of secular

reality. He attempts to anchor his analysis more emphatically in social reality.

Society now becomes the active agent of which politics is the effect. This move

is a crucial step in Marx’s attempt to wed his critical practice to a social real-

ity below the heaven of politics rather than, as was the case with Bauer, above

the bourgeois Masse. I have argued that Marx’s treatment of the proletariat in

“Einleitung” is an attempt to think beyond the agency of pure consciousness by

attributing productivity to social abjection itself. This process begins, however,

in a more inchoate and ambivalent form, in Marx’s treatment of the figure of the

real Jew (den wirklichen weltlichen Juden, [das] real[e] Judentum) in ZJ 2.

Marx’s real Jews are antagonists and not protagonists, agents of humanity’s

alienation and not its emancipation; but real Jews are nonetheless also the first

agents whose agency Marx theorizes as emphatically tied to their materiality, not

their free or human consciousness. In this way Marx’s construction of real Jews

forms a bridge between the agency of the Volk as collective will and the construc-

tion of the proletariat as the agent of human liberation, or between his political

and his postpolitical theoretical heroes. Marx’s infamous anti-Jewish rhetoric