The Marxian critique of citizenship: For a rereading of on the Jewish question

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 104, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 707-721

  Kouvélakis, Stathis ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950723606     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-104-4-707     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. On this point, I refer the reader to the excellent synthesis of G. Bensusan, "Question juive," in Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, ed. G. Labica and G. Bensusan, new ed. (Paris, 2003).
2. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (hereafter JQ), in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 162. Unless otherwise stated, emphasis in all quotes is in the original.
3. For the original German, see Marx Engels Werke, vol. 1 (hereafter MEW r), 363-64.
4. JQ 164, MEW 1:366.
5. JQ 163, 1:365. Even Rousseau (as Marx emphasizes later in On the Jewish Question), despite his conception of a "civil liberty" that entails not the loss of "natural liberty" but rather the production of a new freedom based on the entire alienation of the individual forces of all those who found the political association, remains a prisoner of this model of liberty-independence.
6. This suspicion nonetheless remains that this "essence" itself functions on the mode of a nature, of an original given altered by the atomism of bourgeois society, which "human emancipation" serves to reestablish. These ambiguities led Marx later (in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach) to repudiate explicitly the concept of "species" and of "generic essence" as "internal, mute universality binding the numerous individuals in a natural fashion" (from Karl Marx: Les thèses sur Feuerbach, ed. G. Labica [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1897], 22).
7. On this question, see D. Losurdo, "Marx: La tradition libérale et le concept universel de l'homme," Actuel Marx, no. 5 (1989): 17-31;
8. and Losurdo, "La construction du concept universel de l'homme: De la tradition libérale à la Révolution française," in La philosophie et la Révolution française, ed. B. Bourgeois and J. d'Hondt (Paris: Vrin, 1993), 49-58.
9. Cf. C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
10. On the political (and foundational) implications of Lockean anthropology, see Neal Wood, The Politics of Locke's Philosophy: A Social Study of "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
11. Quoted in R. Zapperi, introduction to E. Sieyès, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat? (Geneva: Droz, 1970), 46. Sieyès even envisaged, in absolute seriousness, the perfection, through successive crossings, of a new "race" of "anthropomorphic monkeys" destined to be "slaves," alongside the race of "negroes," serving as "auxiliary instruments of labor," and of a "race" of "chiefs of production," composed exclusively of "whites" (ibid., 11).
12. B. Constant, Principes de politique (Paris: Hachette, 1997), 179.
13. Cf. G. Fraisse, Muse de la Raison: Démocratie et exclusion des femmes en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). Fraisse correctly emphasizes that "it can be said that equality is true in theory and false in practice, but the procedure is in fact more perverse, because theory itself bears inequality, the possibility of subordinating women" (286); she concludes that "the Declaration of the Rights of Man is not contradictory with exclusion" (330).
14. A. Tosel, Démocratie et liberalismes (Paris: Kimé, 1995), 20-26. This principle is "hidden" not because the utterances of the exclusion remain implicit (on the contrary, we have seen that they are clearly affirmed) but because they are situated at another level of the discourse, one that is more "empirical," or "concrete," leaving formally intact the primary utterance that was supposed to "subsume" them from the heights of its impassive universality. Thus the fragmented, proliferating, and finally instable character of this particular type of utterance.
15. See esp. "Sur le lieu commun: Il se peut que ce soit juste en théorie, mais, en pratique, cela ne vaut point," in E. Kant, Oeuvres philosophiques, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), cf. esp. 275-78, an eloquent plea for the exclusion from citizenship of women, minors, and all those who sell their force of labor (operaii).
16. See, e.g., E. Laclau's argument in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996).
17. Cf. D. Losurdo, Démocratie ou bonapartisme (Paris: Temps des Cerises, 2003), 25-27;
18. and, for women, Fraisse, Muse de la Raison, 275-76.
19. Losurdo, Démocratie ou bonapartisme.
20. "The political révolution thereby abolished [hob ...auf] the political character of civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft]. It broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and civil position of these individuals." JQ 166, MEW 1.368.
21. J. Rancière suggestively renders this dialectic of the universal by defining the political as an "institution on behalf of those with no share" [institution de la part des sans part], whose irruption reveals the contingency of any social order (the management, the counting, of which defines the "police" for Rancière) that affirms itself as the all, the singular universal that is born, in the polemical mode, of the fundamental wrong, the exclusion ofz the "uncounted." Cf. Rancière, La mésentente (Paris: Galilée, 1995). No doubt, but on the condition that we not oppose (as Rancière does) symbolic exclusion and social determinations - or, in other words, "politics" and "police" - in order to illuminate the "politicity" of the "police" itself.
22. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 320.
23. B. Binoche, Critiques des droits de l'homme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 111.
24. Cf. K. Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 10 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 77-78. "Behind the right to work stands power over capital; behind the power over capital, the appropriation of the means of production, their subordination to the associated working class and, therefore, the elimination of wage labor, of capital and of their mutual relations. Behind the 'right to work' stood the June insurrection" (78).
25. Contrary to what is often claimed, it is under this formulation that the right to work figures in the preamble to the French constitution of 1946, confirmed in 1958, where it appears, furthermore, not as an unconditional right but as counterweight to the "duty" to work.
26. Cf. J.-J. Goblot, Le droit au travail: Passé, présent, avenir (Paris: Syllepse, 2003).
27. E.g., in Class Struggles in France: "The secret of the revolution of the nineteenth century" is "the emancipation of the proletariat" (10:57).
28. Marx, introduction to Critique de la philosophie de droit de Hegel, trans. E. Kouvélakis (Paris: Ellipses, 2000), 16, 18
29. This is S. Petrucciani's objection in his stimulating study "Marx et la critique de l'égalité politique," Actuel Marx, no. 8 (1990): 67-86.