Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 195
cal text commands Israelites to relieve themselves outside the boundaries of
their camp and to bury their waste, “for the Lord thy God walketh in the midst
of thy camp.”^168 However removed Voltaire and Hegel both, differently, were
from Christian orthodoxy (Protestant Orthodoxy’s dogmatic literalism is one
of Hegel’s targets in this passage), they both adapt without fundamentally sub-
verting a well-worn Christian theological opposition between Jew (body, letter,
and so on) and Christian (soul, spirit, and so on). In contrast to Bauer, and
both like and in contrast to Feuerbach, however, Marx is trying to overcome the
privileging of the agency of Christian spirit in its various secular guises. Far from
recommending a focus on authentic spirituality, Marx is out to reveal Bauer’s
theological assumptions and expose the Christian illusion of the immortality of
the soul as the secret and fundamental flaw of modern secular politics. In other
words, Marx is privileging, however obscurely, material social reality and mate-
rial productivity over misplaced faith in the agency of secular Christian spirit.
Feuerbach devoted a chapter of Das Wesen des Christentums to critiquing the
Jewish God as merely the Jewish people’s egoistic projection of a provider of its
material needs; the Feurbachian Jew relates to God strictly through his stom-
ach.^169 Marx goes Feuerbach one better and associates Jews with bowels and
the worship of money as a form of excrement. Marx counters what he sees as
Bauer’s exaltation of Christian spirit (however secularized) with the Jewish anus
as the obscene model of material production in society. The new Jewish world
power (Weltmacht) is a fetishized process of excretion; it transforms human es-
sence into abject matter devoid of spirit. One of the fundamental insights of Julia
Kristeva’s study of the power of the abject in Western culture is the threat that
the abject poses to subjectivity. Abject matter confuses the distinction between
life and death and between the “I” and the “not-I”; neither subject nor object,
it is what is a part of me yet what I cannot possibly be.^170 Marx deploys the
phantasm of the real Jew aggressively to subvert the forms of subjectivity and
spirit he is trying to move beyond, chiefly political rights and Bauer’s model of
critical self-consciousness. Marx mobilizes the dichotomy privileging Christian
spirit over Jewish matter, but to the aggressive end of rubbing Christian spirit
in Jewish filth.
In Anti-Judaism, David Nirenberg notes how Marx remains within a Pau-
line (and, more broadly, Western) semantics that opposes Christian spirit and
Jewish body and literalism, even as he critiques Bauer’s Christian paradigm of
critique. Nirenberg notes further that Marx deploys this opposition in a way
that goes beyond mere convenient semantic shorthand. What sets Marx’s use
of this trope apart is, in Nirenberg’s phrase, “the centrality of the ‘real.’” Marx,
he observes, “requires the reality of his Jews and his Judaism.”^171 Nirenberg