Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 199

neath true human agency, Marx is reckoning not only with Feuerbach but also

with his own Feuerbachian attempts to move beyond philosophical abstraction.

Marx’s criticism of Feuerbach is valid for his own attempt to confront Hegel’s

abstract philosophical state with a real social agent, the Volk, and in his attempt

to extend Feuerbach’s critique of religion and speculative philosophy into the

realm of society and politics in his Kreuznach Kritik. Even as Marx tried to

ground Feuerbach’s anthropology in a social locus (the Volk), he continued to

align agency with human consciousness, defined in opposition to brute mate-

riality or animal nature. It was with ZJ 2 that Marx first emphatically situated

his analysis on the level of practical needs. This is the beginning of his move

beyond Feuerbach into a theory of material agency. As we have seen, whatever

theoretical advance this represented for Marx was rendered equivocal by the

fact that he chose the figure of obscene reality, the real Jew, to expose the linger-

ing idealism (the theological antitheology) in Bauer’s (and Feuerbach’s) concep-

tion of historical agency. The real Jew could indeed figure only a “dirty Jewish”

materiality. Although Judentum could briefly and ambivalently provide Marx

with a partner in his attempt to overcome abstraction, it “could not create a

new world.”^181 Marx would need, and he immediately invented, a more viable

partner to carry forward a theory of material agency and to reenvision his own

emerging role as a radical social critic in terms of “practical-critical activity.”

With his remark in “Theses on Feuerbach” about the limitations of conceiv-

ing material reality in “dirty-Jewish,” rather than revolutionary, practical-critical

terms, Marx is referring less to Feuerbach than to himself.