Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
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170 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany
age in Die heilige Familie). The text—and with it the new journal—opens with
a broadside against the historical irrelevance of the German liberal bourgeoi-
sie, whom Bruno Bauer now subsumes under the derogatory label “die Masse,”
and then addresses specific non-Jewish and Jewish critics of his provocative
positions. Bauer now deems the German liberal bourgeoisie to be complicitous
with the state for making compromises with, rather than radically opposing, its
principle of privilege—notably, in the bourgeoisie’s support of Jewish emanci-
pation.^92
Bauer proceeded via a critique of the purported pure particularity of the
Jews to a notion of “massiness” that redefined and displaced his earlier un-
derstanding of the Volk. In contrast, Marx deployed the Jews as a middle term
between the Volk and the proletariat. Bauer’s conceptual realignment renders
explicit the ideal quality of the Volk as he—and Marx—had been using it. This
was not a problem for Bauer, since his turn to postliberal radicalism proceeded
via a supercilious and self-aggrandizing posture that set his own critical practice
(characterized by true reality and revolutionary agency) emphatically against
the only apparent reality of the institutions and opponents he subsumed under
the protean category of massiness. For Marx, who was striving to overcome the
sort of abstraction and theoretical solipsism he saw Bauer embracing and to
position his analysis on a solid basis in social reality, the loss of the Volk as a
viable theoretical and political protagonist was more problematic. Although
Bauer set himself apart from the mass, Marx needed a massy social counterpart
to legitimize his antiphilosophy. It was on the way to the massy protagonist—the
proletariat—that Marx had his brief encounter with the massy antagonist, real
Jews.
Bauer’s Secular Salvation History
A full account of Bauer’s writings on Jewish rights exceeds the scope of this
chapter. Since these are the texts to which Marx responds in “Zur Judenfrage,”
however, and because they provide much of the very language Marx uses by
both direct and indirect citation, some familiarity with Bauer’s argument is
indispensable for understanding how Marx uses Bauer’s discourse as a con-
ceptual and performative foil. Bauer insists that meaningful liberation requires
overcoming particularistic identity—the logic of monopoly and privilege that
divides and enslaves humanity. In demanding emancipation, Jews make a partic-
ularistic appeal (they appeal as Jews) for rights, a universal category. Bauer thus
sees any Jewish appeal to rights as caught in a self-disqualifying enunciatory
paradox.^93 In appealing to the Christian state, moreover, Jews make demands