Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

196 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

features Marx’s “Zur Judenfrage” prominently in his book’s introduction and

returns to it in a later chapter “because it provides such a powerful example of

the phenomenon this book is about.”^172 What makes Marx’s essay a key text for

Nirenberg is the slippage it exhibits between the figurative and the real. Marx

clearly seems to have insight into how the stereotypical figure of the “Jew” is

produced by a social semantics that has nothing to do with actual Jews; “Jews”

are not real. Because Marx does have this insight, Nirenberg finds it all the more

unforgivable that he nonetheless creates a “new and powerful confusion of the

figural and the real” by so emphatically insisting that “Jews” are real.^173 Niren-

berg aptly poses the question that Marx’s essay presents to us: “What led Marx

to embrace these confusions and amplify them?”^174 Nirenberg, however, essen-

tially sidesteps his own question instead of trying to answer it.^175 His chief inter-

est lies not in contextual analysis but rather in locating Marx’s essay in a long

history of anti-Jewish structures of thought. Yet the question of why Marx in-

sists on the reality of “Jews” demands a more precise answer than that it partici-

pates in a long tradition of “habits of thought that understood human life and

history in terms of the struggle to achieve the proper relation between law and

love, thing and person, letter and spirit, and the failure to achieve that ideal ‘Ju-

daism.’”^176 It is obvious enough that Marx’s discourse is thoroughly indebted to

this tradition of thought, but this tells us little about how and why Marx deploys

elements of this tradition of anti-Jewish discourse in particular ways in an at-

tempt to arrive at new theoretical insights and a new critical posture.

Read against a Pauline master semantics of spirit versus matter, what is most

striking is indeed the way Marx so emphatically (exuberantly, violently, even

hysterically) insists on the denigrated reality of real Jews not as a foil to validate

Christian spirit, but to expose as an impotent illusion belief in the agency of

Christian spirit in its various forms. Marx insists that Jews are real not only or

primarily to denigrate Jews, but to be able to lay claim to the real itself, which

he could—and in essence could only—evoke through his rhetorical abuse of

the despised figure of the bodily, material, venal Jew. Marx’s violent rhetorical

excess, his assault on the real Jew, is not simply a rejection but in fact an abusive

embrace of this figure.

Marx’s ambivalent relationship to abject real Jews falls chronologically and

conceptually between his relationship to the subpolitical German toads of his

May 1843 letter to Ruge and his mobilization of the proletariat’s abjection as a

universally emancipating force in “Einleitung.” In his pivoting away from the

Volk, Marx was able to avail himself of stereotypes of Jews as, on the one hand,

material and dirty and, on the other hand, ubiquitous and international. Jews

are both obscenely there and everywhere, a quality that permits Marx to use