【新书马克思主义研究】大陆哲学对马克思的理解（误解）、 .pdf

(Mis)readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy Also by Jessica Whyte CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (2013) THE AGAMBEN DICTIONARY ( edited with Alex Murray , 2011) (Mis)readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy Edited by Jernej Habjan Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia and Jessica Whyte University of Western Sydney, Australia Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte 2014 Remaining chapters © Contributors 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 610 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martins Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN: 9781137352828 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. v Contents Notes on Contributors vii Introduction 1 Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte 1 A Historical Materialism with Romantic Splinters: Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx 19 Michael Löwy 2 Adorno s Account of the Anthropological Crisis and the New Type of Human 34 Massimiliano Tomba 3 The Republican and the Communist: Arendt Reading Marx (Reading Arendt) 51 Charles Barbour 4 Ricardo Marx / Foucault Althusser 67 Rastko Monik 5 Foucault against Marxism: Althusser beyond Althusser 83 Mark G. E. Kelly 6 Deleuze and Guattari and Minor Marxism 99 Eugene W. Holland 7 The Grundrisse beyond Capital ? Negri s Marx and the Problem of Value 111 Dave Eden 8 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Jacques Derrida 128 Jernej Habjan 9 The Visibility of Politics: Jacques Rancière s Challenge to Marxism 145 Tim Fisken 10 I, Ideology, Speak. Elements of iek s Ideological Prosopopoeia 162 Simon Hajdini vi Contents 11 Man Produces Universally : Praxis and Production in Agamben and Marx 178 Jessica Whyte 12 The Discreet Charm of Bruno Latour 195 Benjamin Noys 13 The Fate of the Generic: Marx with Badiou 211 Bruno Bosteels Index 227 vii Notes on Contributors Charles Barbour is Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of Western Sydney. Along with The Marx Machine: Politics, Polemics, Ideology (2012), he has had articles published in such journals as Journal of Classical Sociology , Law, Culture and Humanities , Philosophy statelessness; the economic war; the global market; accumulation by foreign debt; the arms trade; nuclear weapons; interethnic wars; mafias; international law) was not only preceded by Jameson s (1994, pp. 171) 1991 list of the four antinomies of post-modernity (constant change vs. absolute stasis; spatial heterogeneity vs. global homogeneity; a hostility to nature vs. a renewed sense of nature; utopia vs. anti-utopia) but has also more recently been met by such disparate lists as Slavoj iek s (2011, p. x) four riders of the coming apocalypse (the ecological crisis; economic imbalances; the biogenetic revolution; exploding social divisions), David Harvey s (2010, pp. 12383) seven activity spheres of capitalism (technologies; social relations; institutional arrangements; production processes; relations to nature; the reproduction of the species; mental conceptions of the world ), Darko Suvin s (2010, pp. 269320) three plagues of our time (mass murder; mass prostitution; mass drug use) or even, less recently and more benignly, Arjun Appadurai s (1996, Introduction Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte 2 Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte pp. 3243) five scapes of the globalised world (ethnoscapes; medias- capes; technoscapes; financescapes; ideoscapes). The list goes on. This list of lists does not end here. It goes beyond a list of lists, beyond yet another list of the vicissitudes of our time; instead of one more list, it suggests a structure, even a symptom. This list of lists proposes that these lists be approached as so many attempts to reconstruct a universalist cognitive mapping of the contemporary social reality, something akin to exactly that which Whither Marxism? (and especially Specters of Marx ) mourned Marxism. Most of these lists resemble attempts to supplement the symbolic network that was cata- strophically decomposed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, not unlike the way a psychotic s paranoid network is both a symptom of the destruction of the symbolic order and an attempt to reconstruct that order. As if in the wake of the real-socialist disaster, with the Name- of-the-Father ( Marx ) being foreclosed, theory lost, willingly or not, the very tools that enabled it to grasp the present and was thus forced to resort to constructing lists. This is, of course, not to say anything about the symptomatology of these theories. Rather, it is a claim about the very social reality that these theories try to conceptualise in these ways: the fact that even the most elaborate of these lists can suggest no more than an abstract anticipa- tion of a new form of socialist culture (Jameson, 1994, pp. 734), the New International (Derrida, 1994, pp. 846), a new communist politics (iek, 2011, p. 185) or zero growth economy (Harvey, 2010, pp. 21560) reveals less about them and more about the social totality of which they are a part or maybe even a collection of symptoms. Likewise, the fact that Derrida s list is soon (Derrida, 1994, p. 142) followed by his critique of Marx s own lists and that Harvey s list is a comment on a list made by Marx who, moreover, himself offered a lot more insight on the past bourgeois revolutions than on the coming proletarian ones speaks less about Marx himself than about his time, its state of class consciousness, class struggle and, indeed, spirit. The social totality of the time in which these returns to Marx are taking place is the ultimate horizon that this collective volume tries to sketch. For a generation of leading European philosophers in the late twentieth century, Marxism was no longer the untranscendable philos- ophy for our time (as Jean-Paul Sartre 2004, p. 822 had proclaimed) but a philosophy in need of transcending. ( Mis)readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy provides new readings of the ways in which these thinkers related to Marx s thought. It starts from the premise that the readings of Marx provided by philosophers in the late twentieth century Introduction 3 were overdetermined by the spectre of Stalinism and the reality of the Stalinised communist parties in Europe. Today, with the memory of the Soviet Bloc exerting less of a hold over intellectual life, it is possible to reconsider Marx s writings outside the context of the Cold War. In a context of renewed attempts to theorise a crisis-prone capitalist system, there is a need both for critical reflection on the way major continental philosophers positioned themselves in the Cold War conflict through attacks on or misreadings of Marx and for the identification of areas of common concern and new possibilities for combining Marx s insights with those of recent continental thought. In speaking of (mis)readings our intention is not to initiate an exercise in correction or, much less, what Bruno Bosteels, in his own chapter in this volume, refers to as a summary trial . Indeed, this book would not be necessary if the readings of Marx offered by the leading European philosophers of the twentieth century were without value and could simply be discarded or even purged in the course of a retreat to a time before the twentieth and even the nineteenth centuries, back to Marx s own texts in their uncorrupted purity . Rather, we are interested in the productivity of the readings and (mis)readings of Marx offered by these figures as they used Marx to think with and to think against. In this spirit, this book brings together leading and upcoming theorists of Marxism, post-structuralism and continental philosophy to address the readings of Marx offered by the major European thinkers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It provides new accounts of the work of Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière and Slavoj iek. Not only are these thinkers major figures in the tradi- tion of continental philosophy and important influences on contem- porary philosophical and political thought, they are thinkers who have grappled with Marx s thought in the course of formulating their own philosophical and political positions even if only in often frustrated attempts to break free of his legacy. Today we are seeing a renewed attention to Marx which takes place in a context dramatically different to that in which mid- to late-twentieth century thinkers such as Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault wrote. Don t talk to me about Marx any more! Michel Foucault (quoted in Eribon, 1991, p. 266) angrily exclaimed to a young militant in 1975. I never want to hear anything about that man again. Like many philosophers writing in the wake of May 1968, Foucault s experience of Marx was overshad- owed by the question of Stalinism and the hegemony exerted over the 4 Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte left by Stalinised communist parties, such as the French Communist Party (PCF); hence Foucault s (quoted in Eribon, 1991, p. 66) reproach to his interlocutor, Ask the Marxist functionaries . As Marx s legacy was mobilised to legitimise the Soviet states, there was a tendency to invert this picture and hold his thought responsible for everything from gulags to the Stasi, thus detracting from a careful examination of his texts and of the complex history of the socialist bloc itself, which included both the country leading the Warsaw Pact and the country introducing the Non-Aligned Movement. While Marx s thought continued to haunt continental philosophy from the 1970s onwards, the general political climate often led to distorted or one-sided accounts of it, if not to outright attempts at exorcism. And yet, as Hannah Arendt (2002, p. 275) remarked in the early 1950s, in a surprising defence of the thinker to whom she attributes the nineteenth century s only serious philosoph- ical consideration of the emancipation of the working class, Marxism in this sense has done as much to hide and obliterate the actual teachings of Marx as it has to propagate them. This obliterating force of Marxism becomes clear, for instance, when Foucault builds his theory of power in opposition to what he terms Marx, or what passes for Marxism today , referring to a view of power as a commodity to be possessed or traded. As Wendy Brown (1995, pp. 1213) points out, this dramatically understates the subtlety of Marx s account of the commodity as a social relation rather than a thing to be possessed , and, in fact, what Foucault terms Marxism bears little relation to Marx s writings. That Foucault (2007) devoted a 1976 lecture to outlining the extent to which Marx s Capital contains elements that can be used to construct a theory of power that is not repressive but positive, not unitary but regional, suggests the importance of not simply conflating Marx and Marxism if we are to adequately assess the legacy of Marx s thought. This, of course, does not simply mean that it is Marxism that needs to be exorcised from the body of Marx s work. On the contrary, and building on the above-mentioned understanding of (mis)readings , a truly Marxian operation would be to see a dialectical totality in Marx s work plus its Marxist appropriations, starting from Engels s grounding of his pre-theoretical notion of false consciousness in the base/super- structure metaphor (Engels, 2004, p. 164), which Althusser (2014, pp. 23742) traces back to Marx s own merely descriptive theory of the state, and proceeding up to, say, the post-autonomist optimism about the communism inherent to global capitalism (see, e.g., Hardt and Negri, 2000, pp. 351413), which iek (2008, pp. 35062) reflects back Introduction 5 into Marx s notion of general intellect. In this way, Marx can be seen not as a teacher, as a leader or, in Foucault s words, as that man but as what Foucault (1984, pp. 11314) dubbed in 1969 a founder of discursivity : an author of a textual practice irreducible to anyone s body of work, even the author s. However, as suggested already by the differences between Foucault s 1969, 1975 and 1976 statements about Marx, there have been multiple readings, rejections and misreadings of Marx and not only in philos- ophy sensu stricto. In theoretical and scientific practice, these misread- ings have contributed to the revisionism of the third generations of three continental traditions: the Annales School since François Furet and Pierre Nora, the Frankfurt School since Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, and Workerism since late Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno. Outside of these traditions, too, work based on Marxian theory was to a large extent evacuated to fields that seemed at a safe remove from anything like political economy or historiography, and even in those marginal fields, such figures of Marxist political science and cultural theory as Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács and, later, Fredric Jameson were appropriated as protodeconstructive thinkers of subalternity, the bygone novelistic hero and the deserted modernity, respectively. As protestors return to remaining sections of the Berlin wall not t