Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
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.