Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

192 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

the immaturity of Marx’s economic conceptions in ZJ 2 and how Marx’s equa-

tion of Judaism, trade, and bourgeois society tends “to see in commerce and

circulation, rather than in production, the characteristic traits and the funda-

mental structure of the capitalist system.”^158 Rather than oppose “Jewish” circu-

lation and (proletarian) production, I argue that we should look at Marx’s early

conception of circulation as his inchoate—highly rhetorical and conceptually

weak—theory of production. Marx is attempting to explain historical agency

in material terms and to theorize a material substrate that engenders forms of

religious and political alienation before he has the conceptual tools to theo-

rize production in a satisfying way. In ZJ 2 Marx is no longer content to expose

the structural dualism, the structural Christianity, of the secular world, and he

now posits material social relations as more fundamental than the secularized

Christian spirit he sees behind Bauer’s exalted critical consciousness. Financial

power (Geldmacht) has become a world power (Weltmacht). Money (Geld) and

the Jewish money man (Geldmensch) have become the true driving force (Welt-

macht) of which religion is a mere epiphenomenon.

In the absence of a viable theory of production, however, Marx can construct

his critique only on the dubious foundation of a rhetoric of the real, a predica-

ment that leads to the notorious slippage in ZJ 2 between registers of the fig-

ural and the real. The more emphatically Marx can conjure the reality of the

real Jew as the embodiment of social reality under the conditions of modern

commerce—the more obscene the reality that accrues to this figure—the more

Marx can believe he is anchoring his analysis in a solid substratum beneath

the “Christian” abstraction of Bauer’s self-consciousness and political liberal-

ism alike. This, however, renders Marx’s debasement of the real Jew extremely

ambivalent. Marx marshals the real Jew’s obscene reality even as precisely the

obscenity of the Jew’s reality simultaneously renders the Jew a material agent

with whom the radical social critic could not possibly partner. Marx’s real

Jews become both more and less useful to Marx’s project the more abject they

become.

Even as Marx takes an important step toward grounding historical agency

in the materiality of society, he continues to work largely within—or at the very

least he as yet has no viable alternative to—an idealist conception of the agency of

consciousness.^159 To understand the intense ambivalence the figure of the real

Jew embodies for Marx it is important to appreciate that he takes his first incho-

ate steps toward articulating a theory of material agency or productivity essen-

tially within a conceptual and rhetorical framework that continues to denigrate

materiality as the base and disgusting foil of human freedom. This fundamental

ambivalence is evident in Marx’s figuration of material productivity in terms of