Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
156 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany
Even as Marx invokes the Volk as the real foundation beneath the abstraction
of Hegel’s Idea, it is real qua human (ideal, rational, conscious) in contrast to the
animal realm that, in Marx’s assessment, Hegel’s philosophy mystifies without
transforming. There is no contradiction per se in Marx’s use of different con-
ceptions of (good and bad) materialism and (good and bad) idealism, but it is
important to note the double nature of each. As Marx continues his project of
rethinking Feuerbachian species-being in social terms, the idealized Volk yields
to other, more emphatically material signifiers: first to the “real Jews” of “Zur Ju-
denfrage,” then to the proletariat of “Einleitung.” In the course of this evolution,
good and bad reality—kept neatly separate in the Kreuznach Kritik—intersect,
and it is precisely this intersection that defines the theoretical ambivalence of
“Zur Judenfrage,” to anticipate my reading of this text.^48
Marx charges that Hegel “does not allow society to become a truly determin-
ing thing because this would require a real subject while he has nothing more
than an abstract one, a figment of the imagination.”^49 In the works that immedi-
ately followed the Kreuznach Kritik, Marx continued to grapple with how to
theorize society as the “real subject.” Although Marx appropriated Feuerbach
to overcome Hegel’s abstraction, Marx would soon have to confront what he
would come to see—by spring 1845 , when he wrote “Theses on Feuerbach”—
as Feuerbach’s own abstraction. Feuerbach never convincingly integrated his
celebration of sensuous existence with his privileging of the agency of species
consciousness, and Marx would place the integration of agency and social
materiality at the center of his theoretical agenda. His quest to replace Hegel’s
abstraction of ethical spirit in the state with a real social subject demanded a
rethinking of the relationship between social materiality and consciousness as
these pertained to revolutionary agency and the closely related role of criticism
and the critic.
These questions were at the core of Marx’s debate with Bruno Bauer, and it
was largely in and through this debate that Marx’s theorization of this tangle of
issues rapidly evolved. Examining texts by Marx from the Deutsch-französische
Jahrbücher that exemplify his thinking on these issues before and after “Zur
Judenfrage” will bring into focus the conceptually ambivalent and pivotal nature
of that text and the work that the figure of “real Jews” performs in it.
Bookends of “Zur Judenfrage”
Marx’s pieces in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher that bookend “Zur Ju-
denfrage”—his letters to Ruge that precede and the “Einleitung” that follow it—
dramatize the volatility of Marx’s ideas in 1843. The upheaval in his conception