Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 193

the paradigmatic processes of the quintessentially ambivalent phenomenon of

abjection: birth and, more insistently, evacuation.

Marx associates Jews with the production of excrement, an obscene mode

of material production, and ascribes to “Jewish” civil society the ability to de-

liver itself of the political state. As noted, Hess had equated money with excre-

ment. But whereas Hess casts money as a purely negative force that vampiri-

cally drains, sacrifices, and cannibalizes human life activity, Marx has a use for

precisely the human detritus that remains, stripped of its human essence. In an

emphatic rebuttal to Bauer’s conception of history as the progress of Christian

and post-Christian consciousness and his assessment of the Jews as geschichts-

widrig—as a dead, spiritless, but stubborn obstruction to humanity’s histori-

cal advancement—Marx insists that “Judaism has not sustained itself despite

but rather through history.”^160 History’s driving force is not the Christian spirit

that needs only to be secularized in the form of universal self-consciousness, as

Bauer maintains; rather, the force pushing history is “Jewish” bowels, intestines,

and entrails. To capture the at once humanly negating yet also—in contrast to

the impotent illusions of Christian spirit (however secularized)—productive

quality of this material historical motor, Marx employs the apt metaphor of def-

ecation. History advances according to a cycle in which “out of its own entrails

[Eingeweiden], civil society ceaselessly produces [erzeugt] the Jew.”^161 As this

passage continues, Marx associates base Jewish concerns with defecation in fur-

ther ways, and he likens modernity’s strict bifurcation of state and civil society

to a far-from-immaculate process whereby ( Jewish) society “births the political

state out of itself ”: “What actually was the foundation of the Jewish religion?

Practical need, egoism. Hence, the Jew’s monotheism is actually the polythe-

ism of many needs, a polytheism that makes even the toilet an object of divine

l a w. Practical need, egoism is the principle of civil society and appears purely

as such as soon as civil society has fully birthed the political state out of itself

[sobald die bürgerliche Gesellschaft den politischen Staat vollständig aus sich

herausgeboren (my interpellation)]. The god of practical need and self-interest

is money.”^162 Marx follows Feuerbach (Wesen) and Bauer (“Die Fähigkeit”) in

deploying practical “need” (Bedürfnis) as a key term to characterize the essence

of Jewish religion. However, when he characterizes Judaism as a polytheism of

many needs, extending even to the toilet, Marx puns on Bedürfnis (need) as a

(now antiquated) synonym for “Notdurft” or “call of nature.” He identifies the

foundation (Grundlage) of Judaism as practical need and deploys the “need” of

defecation as the privileged synecdoche for Judaism’s whole system of needs.

Judaism as a polytheism of vulgarly practical needs not only extends to the toi-

let (Abtritt), but this Bedürfnis signifies the essence of all others. As though