What Matters Most

Here is my favorite Žižek quotation:
"The division it mobilizes is not the division between two well-defined social groups, but the division, which runs 'diagonally' to the social division in the order of Being, between those who recognize themselves in the call of the Truth-Event, becoming its followers, and those who deny or ignore it."
The Ticklish Subject, p. 227

A More Balanced Portayal of Marx

As compared to Marx the Social Thinker and Marx the Revolutionary, Marx the Philosopher and Marx the Historian are the least represented in the English-speaking academy. References to three main texts would help to portray Marx the Philosopher more adequately. The three Marx's pieces where his philosophical genius showed itself at his best are, of course, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, Theses on Feuerbach and Das Kapital.

In the Anglo-American academia, Marx the Historian is usually represented by his vision of the Laws of History in a trivial chain like: "labor – the progress of production – the modernization of the means of production – more surplus – different distribution – reconsideration of the socio-productive relations – reshaping the relation of ownership – reshaping society – different ideology – different spiritual life – etc.".

On Marx's Capital

In 1867, the first volume of Marx’s magnum opus Das Kapital was published in Hamburg. Marx’s analyses of capitalism were rigorous and comprehensive. The work dealt with important Marxian concepts such as the division of labor (and a description of the degeneration of the social lives of workers to a thing-like status as mere tools of capitalists), surplus value (the observation that workers do not receive the use-value, but only the exchange-value of their labor), and the industrial reserve army (the account of how unemployment harms workers but tends to benefit capitalists by keeping down the price of labor). However, these detailed analyses and evaluations of existing capitalist societies stand in stark contrast to the comparatively superficial treatment of his conception of the economic workings of socialism.

As Lenin once said, "Marx did not leave us a 'Logic' (with a capital 'L'), but he did leave us the logic of 'Capital'". Above all political and economical implications, Das Kapital is the place where Marx's original Dialectic appears in its full difference from Hegel's (Dialectical) Logic. For Marx, such a single and abstract "Dialectical Logic" is impossible because humans deal each time with "the specific logic of a specific subject" ("die eigenthümlishe Logik des eigenthümlishen Gegenstandes", as Marx said once in Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie). So the dialectical "flow" of categories, each one into the next one, appears here primarily as the self-movement of Capital and production, and not as a self-movement of "pure" logical entities. Structurally, this opens a way to detecting various kinds of dialectical oppositions and contradictions, and also various kinds of measures and quantity/quality relations (structural options both neglected in Hegel's Logic).

In addition, Marx's "logic of Capital", as compared to Hegel's Logic, presupposes a different ontological status for logical concepts, and even a different status for dialectical demonstration (the latter is actually represented by the text of Das Kapital as a whole). To put the point in one statement, Marx's "logic of Capital" proved out to embody a kind of "materialistic Dialectic" which was not only ontologically but even structurally different from the one developed in Hegel's Logic. For me personally, this methodological implication of Das Kapital seems to exceed in its philosophical importance all that had been said there about the "division of labor", "surplus value" etc.

A question of translation regarding Marx's Theses on Feuerbach

While in Brussels in 1845 Marx jotted down some notes which he called Theses on Feuerbach. Engels described this work as “the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook”. He and Engels together would later enlarge these notes into a book, The German Ideology. Marx was persuaded by Feuerbach’s arguments that Hegel’s philosophy was rationalized religion, and that in Hegelianism humans are the self-alienation of God. Feuerbach argued that, on the contrary, God is the self-alienation of humans. Marx’s critiques of Hegelianism relied on Feuerbach’s work: Marx argued that it is not primarily abstract mental labor, but rather the natural interactions with real objects and other humans that constitute humanity. However, Marx claimed that Feuerbach forgot historical development in his criticisms of Hegel: “As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist”. Marx’s synthesis of Feuerbach’s materialism and Hegel’s historicism is often referred to as “historical materialism”.

But in addition, this text (Theses on Feuerbach) is where Marx's vision of human essence had been expressed most aphoristically. I mean, of course, the beginning of the sixth thesis that goes in German as: "…das menschliche Wesen ist kein dem einzelnen Individuum innewohnendes Abstraktum. In seiner Wirklichkeit ist es das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse".

In recent English translation the same text goes like: "…the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." (Translated by Cyril Smith 2002, based on work done jointly with Don Cuckson; http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/index.htm).

I cannot comment on this translation because I cannot decide whether the meaning of the German word “Wirklichkeit” is adequately represented by the English word “reality”. Obviously, these words have quite different etymological connotations and, are also different in meaning. In my opinion, "actually" would be much closer to what Marx seems to have in his German mind; "in fact" or "in its truth" or "verity" might also be possible substitutes for "in reality". Anyway, this text used to be one of the most famous of Marx's statements in Soviet Philosophy. It is indeed telling.

On Marx's Philosophical Anthropology

In the spring and summer Marx worked on his first systematic critique of bourgeois political economy, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, 1844. In this work Marx argued that alienation has an economic base, and he identified three types of alienation in capitalist society: the alienation of the worker from the products of his labor, the alienation of the worker from himself, and the alienation of people from one another. He argued that the equality of opportunity allowed under communism would lead to greater fulfillment of human potentiality and the overcoming of alienation in a more cooperative society.

In the best Soviet comments, this work is represented as the cornerstone of Marx's original philosophical anthropology. Marx regards a human subject as a conscious creature who is, due to his/her consciousness, not equal to his/her own living activity. This "outsidedness" towards his/her own existence gives him/her an option to treat the world universally and to behave freely. Treating the world like this, humans re-create consciously the material world around them and create their own "second nature". This process is where the phenomena of "labor" and "production" appear. Thus, labor becomes for Marx the universal way of human beings to be human, and that is why the alienation of labor products in a class-divided society seems to Marx as a crime against the very human nature. In my view, later on this "anthropological turn" of the still young Marx will become the deepest philosophical fundamental of Das Kapital.

On Žižek’s Tarrying with the Negative

In Tarrying with the Negative Žižek argues--against deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler--that Hegel makes thematic a fundamental negativity that prevents dialectical synthesis. He convincingly develops his reading of Hegel through Lacan and, in the process, shows that nationalistic identity is based on a gap or negativity that allows the illusion of consistency and harmonious synthesis. The mythic point of origin around which nationalisms revolve is actually nothing but a hole or rupture that is positivised through the actions of believers in a way that camouflages the real and present antagonisms within any regime. Put simply, nationalist mobilizations are based on a sublime illusion.

Žižek shows in what sense philosophy involves a stepping back from relativistic orientations, a radical distancing from the artificial and contingent character of all master signifiers. He shows how Lacan (like Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Marx) accomplishes this abstraction from starting points: philosophy reinvents theory by revealing current presuppositions about the conditions of possibility for truth. Žižek elaborates the Hegelian theme of “tarrying with the negative” in order to show how ruptures and paradigm shifts in theoretical systems are homologous to the analysand’s efforts to come to grips with trauma through psychoanalysis.

Žižek’s Re-inscription of Hegel (1)

Žižek’s Hegel is fully aware that various, competing attempts to adequately define any concept are all doomed to fail: any conceptual synthesis is disrupted from within by an indefinable ‘something’ that proves to be essential to the very concept in question. If Žižek’s reading of Hegel strikes you as far-fetched, then remember that Kant already realized that being is not a predicate; that is, that existence cannot be reduced to the conceptual properties of entities. Žižek’s interpretation of German Idealism reveals correspondences not only with Lacanian psychoanalysis, but also with recent Anglo-American philosophy (e.g., the work of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam).