Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

180 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

[Phänomen] of secular political narrowness, and to “reduce” the bifurcations of

religious consciousness to the antagonisms that structure the world of secular

politics is vitiated by his own critique of politics, the thrust of which is to drain

the political of real substance and to define it as, in essence, a form of religion.^120

As a consequence of his derealization of politics, Marx abandons faith in

the political collective, the Volk, which he had championed during his repub-

lican phase and which he still upheld as the real ground beneath the abstrac-

tion of Hegel’s state in his Kreuznach Kritik. Although Marx would almost

immediately begin to reconceive revolutionary agency and his relation to it as

a theorist via the proletariat, in “Zur Judenfrage” he tries to theorize radical

social change while lacking a clear revolutionary protagonist. The resulting in-

stability of Marx’s conceptions of agency at this juncture causes him to oscil-

late between a lingering idealist line of argument that privileges Christianity as

a stage in human development culminating in the state-society dualism of the

modern secular world (the dominant perspective in ZJ 1 ) and a competing argu-

ment that more emphatically privileges social materiality—the base materiality

of civil society—as the active agent propelling history and producing the state in

what we can recognize as an inchoate base-superstructure vector (the predomi-

nant position of ZJ 2 ). In the framework of the first argument Jews figure as but

one group among others haplessly limited, particularized, and rendered egoistic

by the reigning structure of secularized, perfected Christianity. In the terms of

the second argument, however, Jews become the privileged signifier of the base

materiality and self-interest of civil society as an active principle.

Despite Marx’s claim that “we do not turn secular questions into theologi-

cal questions. We turn theological questions into secular ones,”^121 he had as yet

none of the tools for secular analysis that would become the backbone of his his-

torical materialism.^122 Marx insists that “only the criticism of political emancipa-

tion itself would have been the conclusive criticism of the Jewish Question and

its real merging in the ‘general question of the time,’” yet since he defines poli-

tics in strict analogy to religion, the critique of secular politics only displaces the

critique of religion without fundamentally changing its terms.^123 Indeed, Marx

relies on tools developed by Feuerbach and Bauer precisely in their critiques of

religion. Marx’s reliance on insights cribbed from radical theological critique

leaves his argument circular and unstable. Marx “turn[s] theological questions

into secular ones” only by discovering theological structures at the core of the

secular world.

Feuerbach provides the main model for Marx’s critique of political democ-

racy in “Zur Judenfrage.”^124 The democratic state—political heaven—atomizes

and alienates species-being in the precise ways that Christian heaven does in