Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 197

Jews as figures of a civil society that spans the Christian nations he explores

(Germany, France, and the United States). Marx’s turn to the proletariat contin-

ues, and further productivizes, this wedding of the material and the universal.

Marx’s phantasmatic realism—the figure of the obscenely empirical Jew and

the obscure model of material production as the production of waste—is a rhetori-

cal gambit that exploits the very disgust it provokes to suggest having critically

unearthed a real motor driving history and generating religion and the political

state. Marx’s relationship (as a radical critic) to real Jews, however, remains ir-

reducibly ambivalent.Real Jews authorize his radical social critique to the ex-

tent that they embody—but offer few means of resolving—the problem of base

egoism that he deems social revolution necessary to overcome. As figures of

the abject, Jews are objects of both disgust and desire. They embody human-

ity’s universal denigration but therefore are also a necessary step in its libera-

tion from the illusions of Christian and post-Christian abstraction. The path

to humanity’s freedom runs through the Jewish muck, not through Christian

heaven or its secular political analogue. Marx’s obscenely real Jews make clear

that human redemption must pass through material degradation, yet the ob-

scure forms of productivity Marx ascribes to Jews only proliferate the excre-

mental materiality of “Jewish” society without revolutionizing it. To get out of

this impasse—Marx’s own Jewish problem, if you will—Marx would have to

theorize a class more basic than civil society itself; a class of civil society that is

not of civil society; a manifestly material class whose abjection would nonethe-

less render impossible the Leibegoismus that the real Jews, even in their obscene

fecundity, embody and consolidate. After his inchoate and insolubly ambivalent

attempt to productivize the abject in “Zur Judenfrage,” Marx would have to in-

vent the proletariat.^177

Coda: A Thesis on Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”

Marx’s condensed remarks on Feuerbach of spring 1845 are widely read as one

of the earliest articulations of the dialectical conception of historical material-

ist praxis—humanity’s collective self-creation out of historically specific forms

of productive interchange with nature, which also structure social relations

in classes. Marx would soon elaborate these ideas more fully in The German

Ideology and is not “there yet” in his conception or, perforce, his exposition in

the brief “Theses on Feuerbach.” To my knowledge it has gone unnoticed how

Marx, as part of the breakthrough this text makes in the theorization of historical

materialism, reckons, however obliquely, with his earlier conception of “Jewish”

materiality.