Abstract
This chapter brings into proximity, but divides with a virgule, two passages of reading and thinking: the first, a close reading of a poem by Anna Mendelssohn that proposes a speculative description of her writing as a practice of ‘free dissociation’ that keeps open a space of radical imaginative freedom; the second, a set of reflections on Karl Marx’s complex relationship with logic, both in his own work and in the works of a number of philosophers and political economists. The two passages are fixed together in an uneasy and indeterminate correspondence, to let the thoughts of each one resound with and through the thoughts of the other.
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Notes
- 1.
Anna Mendelssohn, Implacable Art (Cambridge: Salt, 2000), 17.
- 2.
Deborah P. Britzman, Novel Education: Psychoanalytic Studies of Learning and Not Learning (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 29.
- 3.
François Roustang, How to make a paranoid laugh, or, What is psychoanalysis?, trans. Anne C. Vila, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, 26.
- 4.
Unpublished draft of an article. With grateful thanks to Lauren Berlant for permission to quote.
- 5.
David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa, vol.1, Cambridge: CUP, 1951, 93; Marx to Engels, 16 January 1858, MECW, 40, 249.
- 6.
Marx to Lassalle, 22 February 1858, MECW, 40, 268.
- 7.
The ‘Briefwechsel von 1843’ [‘Correspondence from 1843’] is a collection of letters exchanged between Marx, Ruge, Bakunin, and Feuerbach and printed in the first (and only) issue of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. The same issue also contained Marx’s ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction’, in which Marx uses the famous phrase of Kant’s, ‘categorical imperative’, not ironically, or as leftovers from a philosophy long ago surpassed, but as an unblunted ‘weapon of criticism’ fully assimilated into his own materialist arsenal: ‘The critique of religion ends in the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man; thus it ends with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being—conditions which cannot be better described than by the Frenchman’s exclamation about a proposed tax on dogs: ‘Poor dogs! They want to treat you like men!’ Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. Arnette John and Joseph O’Malley, ed. Joseph O’Malley, Cambridge: CUP, 1970, 137.
- 8.
‘[…] die rücksichtslose Kritik alles Bestehenden, rücksichtslos sowohl in dem Sinne, dass die Kritik sich nicht vor ihren Resultaten fürchtet und eben so wenig vor dem Conflikte mit den vorhandenen Mächten.’
- 9.
Marx, ‘Economic Manuscript of 1861–3’, MECW, 30, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988, 302, translation revised (‘contentlessness’ for Fowkes’s ‘vacuity’); MEGA, II, vol.3, book 1, 276.
- 10.
Marx to Engels, 18 July 1877, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence 1846–1895, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1943, 346. ‘Rücksichtlosigkeit—erste Bedingung aller Kritik’, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Der Briefwechsel, Band 4, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983, 458–9.
- 11.
Marx used this phrase in one of the notebooks that comprise the Economic Manuscript of 1861–3, the second rough draft of volume one of Das Kapital. Marx records his admiration for what he calls, in a mixture of English in German, the ‘exquisite Ironie’ of a paradoxical remark found in William Petty’s A treatise of taxes and contributions, a work of ‘classical political economy’ published in 1662. Among a number of passages Marx copied out from the Treatise is the following sentence: ‘Religion best flourishes when the priests are most mortified, as…the law…best flourishes when lawyers have least to do.’ ‘Die Pfaffen behandelt Petty mit exquisite Ironie’, comments Marx: ‘Petty handles the clergy with exquisite irony.’ Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, 34, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1994, 171; MEGA II 3.62208.
- 12.
Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Leonard Tancock, London: Penguin, 1966, 52.
- 13.
Diderot, Œuvres, ed. André Billy, Paris: Gallimard, 1951, 411.
- 14.
Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, 58.
- 15.
Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, 63.
- 16.
Diderot , Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, 65, 69. ‘La reconnaissance est un fardeau, et tout fardeau est fait pour être secoué.’ ‘La vertu se fait respecter, et le respect est incommode.’ Diderot, Œuvres, 421, 426.
- 17.
Marx to Engels, 15 April 1869, Selected Correspondence 1846–1895, 260.
- 18.
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, ed. J.M. Robson, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973, 6. On Marx’s treatment of Mill, see Bela A. Balassa, ‘Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill’, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Bd. 83 (1959), 147–165. ‘Whenever Marx mentions Mill’s name (which does not happen very frequently) he never forgets to add some derogatory comment.’
- 19.
Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, 6.
- 20.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon, 1985, section 318, 205.
- 21.
Marx to Lassalle, 22 February 1858, MECW, 40, 270.
- 22.
Engels, ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, MECW, 3, 418.
- 23.
Marx, MECW, 30, 306–10.
- 24.
Marx , Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 10, 64, 15. Cf. Capital, 497: ‘The human being is a very imperfect instrument for producing uniform and continuous motion.’ Fowkes’s ‘Man’ emended to ‘human being’.
- 25.
Ludwig Feuerbach, Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy (1839), in The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings, trans. Zawar Hanfi, London: Verso, 2012, 76. Cf. 95: ‘What we normally call thought is only the translation into an idiom comprehensible to us of a highly gifted but more or less unknown author who is difficult to understand.’
- 26.
Ludwig Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality from the Papers of a Thinker, Along with an Appendix of Theological-Satirical Epigrams, Edited by One of His Friends (1830), trans. James A. Massey, Berkeley: U of California P, 1980, 29.
- 27.
Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred H. Vogel, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986, 41.
- 28.
Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, 70.
- 29.
Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, 121. Translation emended.
- 30.
This is Marx’s description of Feuerbach’s philosophy, from the preface to the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW, 3, 232.
- 31.
J.G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs, Cambridge: CUP, 1991, 67, 70.
- 32.
Capital, vol.1, 373, fn.70: ‘In a time so rich in reflection and so devoted to raisonnement as our own, he must be a poor creature who cannot advance a good ground for everything, even for what is worst and most depraved. Everything in the world that has become corrupt, has had good ground for its corruption.’
- 33.
Capital, vol.1, 372. In the original German the last of these exclamations is ‘welch querköpfig Volk!’: literally, ‘what queer-headed people!’ On Marx’s relation to the page, see Pierre Macherey, ‘On the Process of Exposition Capital (The Work of Concepts)’, in Althusser et al., Reading Capital. The Complete Edition, trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach, London: Verso, 2015, 185: ‘In fact, if we study the successive corrections, from the first sketch of A Contribution through to the last state of the text of Capital, we perceive that Marx, constantly resuming the exposition to give it a form that would never be definitive (since it was always capable of being resumed), did the work of a scientific writer, with the page of writing as his perspective.’
- 34.
Twelfth Night, II, v, ll.30–1, 42–3.
- 35.
Capital, vol.1, 247.
- 36.
Jacques Bidet, Explication et reconstruction du Capital, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2004, 45. My translation.
- 37.
David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, London: Verso, 2010, 15.
- 38.
Pierre Macherey, ‘On the Process of Exposition of Capital (The Work of Concepts)’, Reading Capital. The Complete Edition, Althusser et al., trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach, London: Verso, 2015, 177. Translation emended: Brewster and Fernbach leadingly translate Macherey’s ‘un savoir’ as ‘a scientific knowledge’, prejudging the outcome in favor of Althusser’s interpretation of Capital as ‘science’. The prejudgment is correct, but Macherey has not yet said as much. Lire Le Capital, Althusser et al., Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996, 203.
- 39.
Macherey, Reading Capital, 177; ‘La lecture du commencement’, Lire Le Capital, 204.
- 40.
Macherey, Reading Capital, 177; Lire Le Capital, 204.
- 41.
Macherey, Reading Capital, 178; Lire Le Capital, 204–5.
- 42.
Macherey, Reading Capital, 178.
- 43.
Macherey, Reading Capital, 181, 182.
- 44.
Capital, vol.1, 247.
- 45.
Grundrisse, 197; 111.
- 46.
Grundrisse, 516.
- 47.
Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred H. Vogel, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986, 52: ‘Only in feeling and love has the demonstrative this—this person, this thing, that is, the particular—absolute value […] In this and this alone does the infinite depth, divinity, and truth of love consist. […] And since the demonstrative this owes its absolute value to love alone, it is only in love—not in abstract thought—that the secret of being is revealed.’ The image is from Luke 12:7: ‘But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.’ Philosophy rather than God is this power that counts and recognizes every last human singularity. The attribution of ‘absolute value’ to ‘the demonstrative this’ of feeling and love is a reply to Hegel’s account of ‘sense-certainty: or the ‘this’ and ‘meaning” in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977, 58ff. The frequent reappearance of this style of insistent determination—‘this, this, this’—elsewhere in Feuerbach’s writing makes it a characteristic prosody of his thought. Cf. for example ‘Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy’, The Young Hegelians, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich, Cambridge: CUP, 1983, 157: ‘Historically considered, [the absolute] is nothing other than the old theological-metaphysical entity or non-entity which is not finite, not human, not material, not determined and not created.’
- 48.
Grundrisse 536.
- 49.
Grundrisse 536.
- 50.
Grundrisse 516/415.
- 51.
Capital, vol.1, 733.
- 52.
MEGA, II, 7, 509.
- 53.
Capital, vol.1, 733.
- 54.
Grundrisse 516. Rosa Luxemburg comments on the choppy circulation of money and its difference from the smooth flow of capital in The Accumulation of Capital (1913), trans. Agnes Schwarzschild, London: Routledge, 2010, 68: ‘commodity and money continually change places—possession of the commodity excluding the possession of money, as money constantly usurps the place which the commodity has given up, and vice versa.’
- 55.
Cf. István Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, London: Merlin, 1995, 106: ‘The unalterable temporality of capital is a posteriori and retrospective. There can be no future ahead in a meaningful sense of the term, since the only admissible ‘future’ has already arrived in the form of the existing parameters of the established order well before the question of ‘what is to be done’ is allowed to be raised. […] In reality nothing is allowed to create a genuine opening. […] Everything that can be in a sense already has been.’ Mészáros here effectively sweeps aside David Harvey’s inexplicable claim that Marx ‘was practicing what we now call deconstruction.’ A Companion to Marx’s Capital, London: Verso, 2010, 5.
- 56.
MECW, 30, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988, 180; MEGA, II, Vol.3, Book 1, 158.
- 57.
MECW, 30, 191; MEGA, II, Vol.3, Book 1, 168.
- 58.
MECW, 30, 191; MEGA, II, Vol.3, Book 1, 168.
- 59.
MEGA, II, Vol.3, Book 1, 168–9. Fowkes’s more reasonable English is ‘the labour time of workers prolonged beyond that required for their own subsistence’. MECW, 30, 191.
- 60.
In Capital, ‘living labour’ likewise exists outside the logic of value.
- 61.
MECW, vol.3, 211.
- 62.
MECW, vol.3, 227–8; Karl Marx Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol.1, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968, 462.
- 63.
MECW, vol.3, 239.
- 64.
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 126.
- 65.
MECW, 3, 232.
- 66.
Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni, Cambridge: CUP, 2010, 23.
- 67.
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 18.
- 68.
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 18. ‘Das Wesen gehört der Logik und ist vor der Rechtsphilosophie fertig.’
- 69.
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 91.
- 70.
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 35.
- 71.
MECW, 6, 212.
- 72.
MECW, 6, 212.
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Sutherland, K. (2019). Free Dissociation/Logic. In: Jennison, R., Murphet, J. (eds) Communism and Poetry. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17156-8_11
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