forms of subjection to the logic of the commodity – something wholly lacking in Althusserianism),15 I also sought to conceive that theory is never critique in and of itself, but only by dint of a problematic (‘aleatory’) relationship to emancipatory processes, real rebellion or revolution, which it anticipates or whose repercussions it experiences. In short, in the mode of philosophical activity which I believed I had discovered in Marx (and possibly others), the requirement of knowledge is taken so far that it risks not only undermining the dominant ideologies, but also revealing the illusions that inform the desire for emancipation. The requirement of revolution (or the refusal to adapt endlessly to the intolerable ‘existing state of affairs’) is pushed so far that it always risks revealing its aims to be not so much possible as impossible, given what we perceive of the tendencies to transformation of capitalism (and, more generally, ‘market’, ‘bourgeois’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘imperial’ society) and their counter-tendencies. But this double risk is precisely what must be run to introduce something new, in philosophy as well as in existence.
Today, with as much conviction as yesterday, I believe I can say that Marx did indeed run that risk to the benefit of science as well revolution, creating between them, in an interface which can only be grasped via its effects, a field of critical intervention and conceptual creation with very few equivalents in the history of modern thought. I repeat it here, even if much has changed in the way I would now attempt to think for my own part, or through new readings, the philosophical ‘objects’ with which Marx was concerned: the collective (or, rather, relational, trans-individual) political subjectivity he called praxis; the effect of misrecognition inherent in social relations of domination (which he alternately called ideology and fetishism, sometimes prioritizing the relationship between individuals and classes and sometimes their relationship to the commodity and monetary form); the repercussion on capitalism’s individualistic and utilitarian logic of its own destructive effects (what, in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx called the ‘bad side’ by which history ‘progresses’ – if it progresses).
That is also why, to put it in a word when a whole discussion (out of place here) is required, I did not introduce into the discussion the notion of an ethics peculiar to Marxism, which might be said to be the requisite ‘systematic’ complement of any articulation of scientific knowledge with revolutionary politics. I know that this absence will astonish or even shock some readers. It will be taken as evidence of an inveterate anti-humanism that has resisted all the bereavements and lessons of history. Might I hazard a rather different working hypothesis? Ethics does not need to be named as such to inhere in thought. Or rather, as soon as it is named as such and proposes to represent the philosophical ‘mediation’ between the standpoints of knowledge of the world and transformation of the world, it inevitably becomes an enterprise of conciliation and reconciliation (Versöhnung), albeit in a hypothetical, ‘normative’ form. In my view, what is required to give ethics its due, in knowledge and politics alike, is instead to dwell in contradiction: not in immobile, passive fashion, but in the form of a constant, uneasy endeavour to find their shared points of application and to effect the convergence therein of substantial intellectual and social forces. I have certainly changed a lot in twenty years, while the conjuncture in which we live is now almost the complete opposite: not the terminal crisis of an attempt to build ‘socialism’, but a structural crisis, whose development is unpredictable, of a (productivist) mode of accumulation and a (financial) mode of regulation of capitalism, at the cost of extremely violent ruptures in the consciousness and affectivity of subjects. But I still think that with Marx, as I construe him at least, the ethics we need is one which divides between irreconcilable demands, rather than assuming they will emerge as two sides of the same coin if only human beings demonstrate a modicum of good will. Science must no more be sacrificed to revolution than revolution to science; it is the malaise or ‘angst’ consequent upon this permanent tension that should stop us from slumbering.
Marxist Philosophy or Marx’sPhilosophy?
The general idea of this little book is to understand and explain why Marx will still be read in the twenty-first century, not only as a monument of the past, but as a contemporary author – contemporary both because of the questions he poses for philosophy and because of the concepts he offers it. Limiting myself to what seem to me the essentials, I would like to give readers a means of finding their bearings in Marx’s writings and introduce them to the debates which they have prompted. I would also like to defend a somewhat paradoxical thesis: whatever may have been thought in the past, there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be; on the other hand, Marx is more important for philosophy than ever before.
We have first to come to some understanding on the meaning of ‘Marxist philosophy’. This expression might refer to two quite different things, though the tradition of orthodox Marxism, which developed at the end of the nineteenth century and was institutionalized by the Communist state-parties after 1931 and 1945, considered them indissociable: the ‘world-view’ of the socialist movement, based on the idea of the historic role of the working class, and the system attributed to Marx. Let us note right away that neither of these ideas is strictly connected with the other. Various terms have been invented to express the philosophical content common to Marx’s work and to the political and social movement which acted in his name: the most famous of these is ‘dialectical materialism’, a relatively late term and one inspired by the use Engels had made of various of Marx’s formulations. Others have contended that, strictly speaking, Marxist philosophy is not to be found in Marx’s writings, but emerged retrospectively, as a more general and more abstract reflection on the meaning, principles and universal significance of his work; or, indeed, that it still remains to be constituted or formulated in systematic fashion.1 Conversely, there has never been any shortage of philologists or critical thinkers to emphasize the distance between the content of Marx’s texts and their later ‘Marxist’ fate, and to show that the existence of a philosophy in Marx in no way implies the subsequent existence of a Marxist philosophy.
This debate may be settled in a manner as simple as it is radical. The events which marked the end of the great cycle during which Marxism functioned as an organizational doctrine (1890–1990), have added nothing new to the discussion itself, but have swept away the interests which opposed its being opened up. There is, in reality, no Marxist philosophy, either as the world-view of a social movement, or as the doctrine or system of an author called Marx. Paradoxically, however, this negative conclusion, far from nullifying or diminishing the importance of Marx for philosophy, greatly increases it. Freed from an illusion and an imposture, we gain a theoretical universe.
Philosophy and non-philosophy
A new difficulty awaits us here. Marx’s theoretical thinking presented itself, at various points, not as a philosophy, but as an alternative to philosophy, a non-philosophy or even an anti-philosophy. And it has perhaps been the greatest anti-philosophy of the modern age. For Marx, philosophy as he had learnt it, from the tradition which ran from Plato to Hegel, including more or less dissident materialists like Epicurus or Feuerbach, was in fact merely an individual undertaking aimed at interpreting the world. At best this led to leaving the world as it was; at worst, to transfiguring it.
However, opposed as he was to the traditional form and usages of philosophical discourse, there can be little doubt that he did himself interlace his historico-social analyses and proposals for political action with philosophical statements. He has been sufficiently criticized by positivism for doing this. What we need to establish, then, is whether these statements form a coherent whole. My hypothesis is that this is not the case at all, at least if the idea of coherence to which we are referring continues to be informed by the idea of a system. Having broken with a certain form of philosophy, Marx was not led by his theoretical activity towards a unified system, but to an at least potential plurality of doctrines