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I

I venture to publish together these jottings, which have appeared in various magazines during the last four years. Some of them are now unobtainable; this is my first, purely practical, excuse. If, hesitant and incomplete as they are, they nevertheless make some sense, this should be brought out by grouping them together; this is my second excuse. Ultimately, I must present them for what they are: the documentation of a particular history.

    Nearly all these pieces were born of some conjuncture: a comment on a book, an answer to criticisms or objections, an analysis of a theatrical production, etc. They are marked by their date of birth, even in their inconsistencies, which I have decided not to correct. I have struck out a few passages of unduly personal polemic; I have inserted the small number of words, notes or pages that had then to be cut, either to spare the feelings of those with certain prejudices, or to reduce my expositions to a suitable length; I have also corrected a few references.

    Each the result of a special occasion, these pieces are none the less products of the same epoch and the same history. In their own way they are witnesses to the unique experience which all the philosophers of my generation who tried to think with Marx had to live: the investigation of Marx's philosophical thought, indispensable if we were to escape from the theoretical impasse in which history had put us.

    History: it had stolen our youth with the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War, and in the War as such it had imprinted in us the terrible education of deeds. It surprised us just as we entered the world, and turned us students of bourgeois or petty bourgeois origin into men advised of the existence of classes, of their struggles and aims. From the evidence it forced on us we drew the only possible conclusion, and rallied to the political organization of the working class, the Communist Party.

    The War was just over. We were brutally cast into the Party's

 
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great political and ideological battles: we had to measure up to our choice and take the consequences.

    In our political memory this period remains the time of huge strikes and demonstrations, of the Stockholm Appeal and of the Peace Movement -- the time when the great hopes aroused by the Resistance faltered and the long and bitter struggle began in which innumerable human hands would push back the shadow of catastrophe into the Cold War horizon. In our philosophical memory it remains the period of intellectuals in arms, hunting out error from all its hiding-places; of the philosophers we were, without writings of our own, but making politics out of all writing, and slicing up the world with a single blade, arts, literatures, philosophies, sciences with the pitiless demarcation of class -- the period summed up in caricature by a single phrase, a banner flapping in the void: 'bourgeois science, proletarian science'.

    To defend Marxism, imperilled as it was by Lysenko's 'biology', from the fury of bourgeois spite, some leaders had relaunched this old 'Left-wing' formula, once the slogan of Bogdanov and the Proletkult. Once proclaimed it dominated everything. Under its imperative line, what then counted as philosophy could only choose between commentary and silence, between conviction, whether inspired or forced, and dumb embarrassment. Paradoxically, it was none other than Stalin, whose contagious and implacable system of government and thought had induced this delirium, who reduced the madness to a little more reason. Reading between the lines of the few simple pages in which he reproached the zeal of those who were making strenuous efforts to prove language a superstructure, we could see that there were limits to the use of the class criterion, and that we had been made to treat science, a status claimed by every page of Marx, as merely the first-comer among ideologies. We had to retreat, and, in semi-disarray, return to first principles.

    I write these lines for my own part and as a Communist, inquiring into our past solely for some light on our present which will then illuminate our future.

    Neither bitterness nor nostalgia makes me recall this episode -- but the wish to sanction it by a comment that will supersede it. We were at the age of enthusiasm and trust; we lived at a time when the enemy gave no quarter, the language of slander sustaining his

 
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aggression. But this did not save us from remaining long confused by this detour into which certain of our leaders, far from holding us back from the slope of theoretical 'Leftism', had actively led us, without the others showing any sign of restraining them or giving us any warning or advice. So we spent the best part of our time in agitation when we would have been better employed in the defence of our right and duty to know, and in study for production as such. For we did not even take this time. We knew nothing of Bogdanov and the Proletkult, or of Lenin's historic struggle against political and theoretical Leftism; we were not even intimately familiar with Marx's mature works, as we were only too eager and happy to rediscover our own burning passions in the ideological flame of his Early Works. But what of our elders? Those whose responsibility it was to show us the way -- how was it that they too were living in the same ignorance? This long theoretical tradition, worked out in so many trials and struggles, blazoned by the testimony of so many great texts, how could it have become a dead letter for them?

    In this way we came to realize that under the protection of the reigning dogmatism a second, negative, tradition, a French one this time, had prevailed over the first, a second tradition, or rather what, echoing Heine's 'German misery', we might call, our 'French misery': the stubborn, profound absence of any real theoretical culture in the history of the French workers' movement. The French Party may have been able to reach its present position by using the general theory of the two sciences in the form of a radical proclamation, it may have been able to make it the test and proof of its indisputable political courage, but this also meant that it was living on meagre theoretical reserves: those it had inherited from the past of the French workers' movement as a whole. In fact, other than the utopians Saint-Simon and Fourier whom Marx loved to invoke, Proudhon who was not a Marxist at all, and Jaurès who was, but only slightly, where were our theoreticians? In Germany there were Marx and Engels and the earlier Kautsky; in Poland, Rosa Luxemburg; in Russia, Plekhanov and Lenin; in Italy, Labriola, who (when we had Sorel!) could correspond with Engels as equal to equal, then Gramsci. Who were our theoreticians? Guesde? Lafargue?

 
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    A whole theoretical analysis would be necessary to account for this poverty, so striking when compared with the richness of other traditions. With no pretensions to undertake this analysis, a few reference points can at least be established. Without the efforts of intellectual workers there could be no theoretical tradition (in history or philosophy) in the workers' movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The founders of historical and dialectical materialism were intellectuals (Marx and Engels), their theory was developed by intellectuals (Kautsky, Plekhanov, Labriola, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Gramsci). Neither at the beginning, nor long afterwards, could it have been otherwise -- it cannot be otherwise, neither now nor in the future: what can change and will change is the class origin of intellectual workers but not their characterization as intellectuals.* This is so for those reasons of principle that Lenin, following Kautsky, impressed upon us: on the one hand, the 'spontaneous' ideology of the workers, if left to itself, could only produce utopian socialism, trade-unionism, anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism; on the other hand, Marxist socialism, presupposing as it does the massive theoretical labour of the establishment and development of a science and a philosophy without precedent, could only be the work of men with a thorough historical, scientific and philosophical formation, intellectuals of very high quality. That such intellectuals appeared in Germany, Russia, Poland and Italy, either to found Marxist theory or to become masters of it, is not a matter of isolated accidents; the social, political, religious, ideological and moral conditions prevailing in these countries quite simply denied their intellectuals any activity, the ruling classes (the nobility and the bourgeoisie, allied and united in their class interests and supported by the Churches) could in general only offer them servile and de-

 
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risory employment. Under these conditions, the intellectuals could only seek their freedom and future at the side of the working class, the only revolutionary class. In France, on the contrary, the bourgeoisie had been revolutionary, it had long been able to assimilate intellectuals to its revolution and to keep them as a whole at its side after the seizure and consolidation of power. The French bourgeoisie had successfully carried through a complete, clear revolution, driving the feudal class from the political stage (1789, 1830, 1848), it had set the seal of its own command on the unity of the nation in the process of revolution itself, it had defeated the Church and then adopted it, but only to separate itself at the right moment and cover itself with the slogans of liberty and equality. It had been able to use both its position of strength and its past standing to offer the intellectuals a sufficient space and future, sufficiently honourable functions and a sufficient margin of freedom and illusion to keep them within its authority and under the control of its ideology. With a few important exceptions, who were precisely exceptions, French intellectuals accepted this situation and felt no vital need to seek their salvation at the side of the working class; and when they did rally to the working class, they could not radically cast off the bourgeois ideology in which they were steeped and which survived in their idealism and reformism (Jaurès) or in their positivism. Nor was it accidental that the French Party had to devote a long and courageous struggle to the reduction and destruction of a reflex 'ouvriériste ' distrust of intellectuals, which was in its own way the expression of a long historical experience of continual deception. Thus it was that the forms of bourgeois domination themselves long deprived the French workers' movement of the intellectuals indispensable to the formation of an authentic theoretical tradition.

    Need I add another national reason? This is the pitiful history of French philosophy in the 130 years following the Revolution of 1789, its spiritualist persistence in reaction, not just conservatism, from Maine de Biran and Cousin to Bergson, its contempt for history and for the people, its deep but narrow-minded ties with religion, its relentless hostility to the only mind worthy of interest that it produced, Auguste Comte, its incredible ignorance and lack of culture. In the last thirty years things have taken another turn. But the burden of a long century of official philosophical

 
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stupidity has also played a part in crushing theory in the workers' movement itself.

    The French Party was born into this theoretical vacuum, and it grew despite this vacuum, filling in as best it could the existing lacunas, nourishing itself from our sole authentic national tradition, the political tradition for which Marx had the most profound respect. Despite itself it has been marked by this primacy of politics and a certain failure to appreciate the role of theory, particularly philosophical theory as opposed to political and economic theory. If it was able to rally itself some famous intellectuals, these were above all great writers, novelists, poets and painters, great natural scientists and also a few first-rate historians and psychologists -- and they came primarily for political reasons; but it very rarely attracted men of sufficient philosophical formation to realize that Marxism should not be simply a political doctrine, a 'method' of analysis and action, but also, over and above the rest, the theoretical domain of a fundamental investigation, indispensable not only to the development of the science of society and of the various 'human sciences', but also to that of the natural sciences and philosophy. It was the fate of the French Party to be born and to grow up in these conditions: without the heritage and assistance of a national theoretical tradition, and as an inevitable consequence, without a theoretical school which could produce masters.

    This was the reality we had to learn to spell out, and that all by ourselves. By ourselves because there were no really great philosophical maîtres in Marxist philosophy amongst us to guide our steps. Politzer, who might have become one if he had not sacrificed the great philosophical achievements he had in him to urgent economic tasks, left us only the genius of the errors in his Critique des Fondements de la Psychologie. He was dead, assassinated by the Nazis. We had no maîtres. There was no lack of willing spirits, nor of highly cultivated minds, scholars, literary figures and many more. But I mean masters of Marxist philosophy, emerging from our own history, accessible and close to us. This last condition is not a superfluous detail. For we have inherited from our national past not only a theoretical vacuum, but also a monstrous philosophical and cultural provincialism (our form of chauvinism), we do not read foreign languages, and more or less ignore any

 
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thing that happens to be thought beyond a line of mountains, the course of a river or the width of a sea. Is it an accident that in France the study and commentary of Marx's work has long been the work of a few courageous and tenacious Germanists? If the only name fit for display beyond our frontiers is that of a quiet lone hero, who, unknown to French learning, spent many years in a minutely detailed study of the left neo-Hegelian movement and the Young Marx: Auguste Cornu?

    These reflections throw some light on our predicament, but they do not abolish it. We are indebted to Stalin for the first shock, even within the evil for which he bears the prime responsibility. His death set off the second -- his death and the Twentieth Congress. But meanwhile life had done its work among us as well.

    Neither a political organization nor a real theoretical culture can be created overnight or by a simple fiat. So many of the young philosophers who had come of age in the War or just after it were worn out by exhausting political tasks but had taken no time off from them for scientific work! It is also characteristic of our social history that the intellectuals of petty bourgeois origin who came to the Party at that time felt that they had to pay in pure activity, if not in political activism, the imaginary Debt they thought they had contracted by not being proletarians. In his own way, Sartre provides us with an honest witness to this baptism of history: we were of his race as well; it is no doubt a gain of recent years that our younger comrades seem free of this Debt, which perhaps they pay in some other way. Philosophically speaking, our generation sacrificed itself and was sacrificed to political and ideological conflict alone, implying that it was sacrificed in its intellectual and scientific work. A number of scientists, occasionally even historians, and even a few rare literary figures came through unscathed or at least only slightly bruised. There was no way out for a philosopher. If he spoke and wrote the philosophy the Party wanted he was restricted to commentary and slight idiosyncrasies in his own way of using the Famous Quotations. We had no audience among our peers. Our enemies flung in our faces the charge that we were merely politicians; our most enlightened colleagues argued that we ought to study our authors before judging them, justify our principles objectively before proclaiming and applying them. To

 
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force their best opponents to pay them some attention, some Marxist philosophers were reduced, and by a natural movement which did not conceal a conscious tactic, to disguising themselves -- disguising Marx as Husserl, Marx as Hegel, Marx as the ethical and humanist Young Marx -- at the risk of some day taking the masks for the reality. This is no exaggeration, simply the facts. We are still living the consequences today. We were politically and philosophically convinced that we had reached the only firm ground in the world, but as we could not demonstrate its existence or firmness philosophically, no one else could see any firm ground beneath our feet -- only conviction. I am not discussing the spread of Marxism, which luckily can radiate from other spheres than the philosophical: I am discussing the paradoxically precarious existence of Marxist philosophy as such. We thought we knew the principles of all possible philosophy, and of the impossibility of all philosophical ideology, but we failed to offer an objective and public proof of the apodicity of our convictions.

    Once aware of the vacuity of the dogmatic approach we were left with only one way of accepting the impossible situation we had been reduced to in our efforts towards a real grasp of our philosophy: to treat philosophy itself as impossible. So we were led into that great, subtle temptation, the 'end of philosophy ', encouraged by some enigmatically clear texts in Marx's Early Works (1840-45) and of his epistemological break (1845). Those of us who were the most militant and the most generous tended towards an interpretation of the 'end of philosophy' as its 'realization' and celebrated the death of philosophy in action, in its political realization and proletarian consummation, unreservedly endorsing the famous Thesis on Feuerbach which, in theoretically ambiguous words, counterposes the transformation of the world to its interpretation. It was, and always will be, only a short step from here to theoretical pragmatism. Others, of more scientific bent, proclaimed the 'end of philosophy' in the manner of certain positivistic formulations in The German Ideology, in which it is no longer the proletariat or revolutionary action which take in charge the realization and thereby the death of philosophy, but science pure and simple: does not Marx call on us to stop philosophizing, that is, stop developing ideological reveries so that we can move on to the study of reality itself? Politically speaking, the former of these two

 
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readings was that of the majority of those philosophical militants who gave themselves completely to politics, making philosophy the religion of their action; the latter on the contrary was that of those critics who hoped that a scientific approach would fill out the empty proclamations of dogmatic philosophy. But if both groups made their peace with politics, both paid for it with a bad philosophical conscience: a practico-religious or positivist death of philosophy is not really a philosophical death of philosophy.

    So we contorted ourselves to give philosophy a death worthy of it: a philosophical death. Here again we sought support from more texts of Marx and from a third reading of the others. We proceeded on the assumption that the end of philosophy could not but be critical, as the sub-title of Capital proclaims that book to be of Political Economy: it is essential to go to the things themselves, to finish with philosophical ideologies and to turn to the study of the real world -- but, and this we hoped would secure us from positivism, in turning against ideology, we saw that it constantly threatened 'the understanding of positive things', besieged science and obscured real characteristics. So we entrusted philosophy with the continual critical reduction of the thread of ideological illusion, and in doing so we made philosophy the conscience of science pure and simple, reduced it completely to the letter and body of science, but merely turned against its negative surroundings as its vigilant conscience, the consciousness of those surroundings that could reduce them to nothing. Thus philosophy was certainly at an end, but it survived none the less as an evanescent critical consciousness for just long enough to project the positive essence of science on to the threatening ideology, and to destroy the enemy's ideological phantasms, before returning to its place amongst its allies. The critical death of philosophy, identified with its evanescent philosophical existence, gave us at last the status and deserts of a really philosophical death, consummated in the ambiguous act of criticism. Now philosophy had no fate other than the consummation of its critical death in the recognition of the real, and in the return to the real, real history, the progenitor of men, of their acts and their thoughts. Philosophy meant retracing on our own account the Young Marx's critical Odyssey, breaking through the layer of illusion that was hiding the real world from us, and arriving at last in our native land: the land of history, to find there

 
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at last the rest afforded by reality and science in concord under the perpetual vigilance of criticism. According to this reading, there could no longer be any question of a history of philosophy; how could there be a history of dissipated phantasms, of shadows traversed? The only history possible is that of reality, which may dimly arouse in the sleeper incoherent dreams, but these dreams, whose only continuity is derived from their anchorage in these depths, can never make up a continent of history in their own right. Marx said so himself in The German Ideology : 'Philosophy has no history'. When you come to read the essay 'On the Young Marx' you will be able to judge if it is not still partly trapped in the mythical hope for a philosophy which will achieve its philosophical end in the living death of a critical consciousness.

 
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the very act of founding his theory of history, has still largely to be constituted, since, as Lenin said, only the corner-stones have been laid down; that the theoretical difficulties we debated in the dogmatist night were not completely artificial -- rather they were largely the result of a meagrely elaborated Marxist philosophy; or better, that in the rigid caricatural forms we suffered or maintained, including the theoretical monstrosity of the two sciences, something of an unsettled problem was really present in grotesque and blind forms -- the writings of theoretical Leftism (the young Lukács and Korsch) which have recently been re-published are a sufficient witness to this; and finally, that our lot and our duty today is quite simply to pose and confront these problems in the light of day, if Marxist philosophy is to acquire some real existence or achieve a little theoretical consistency.

 
II

I should like to give some guidance to the road traversed by the notes you are about to read.

    The piece on the Young Marx is still trapped in the myth of an evanescent critical philosophy. Nevertheless, it does contain the essential question, irresistibly drawn from us even by our trials, failures and impotence: What is Marxist philosophy? Has it any theoretical right to existence? And if it does exist in principle, how can its specificity be defined? This essential question was raised practically by another, apparently historical but really theoretical, question: the question of reading and interpreting Marx's Early Works. It was no accident that it seemed indispensable to submit these famous texts to a serious critical examination, these texts which had been inscribed on every banner, in every field, these openly philosophical texts in which we had hoped to read Marx's personal philosophy more or less spontaneously. The question of Marxist philosophy and of its specificity with respect to Marx's Early Works necessarily implied the question of Marx's relation to the philosophies he had espoused or traversed, those of Hegel and Feuerbach, and therefore the question of where he differed with them.

    It was the study of the works of Marx's youth that first led me to a reading of Feuerbach, and to the publication of the most

 
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important of his theoretical writings in the period from 1839 to 1845 (cf. my remarks on pp. 43-8). The same reasoning quite naturally led me to begin studying the nature of the relation of Hegel's philosophy to Marx's in the detail of their respective concepts. The question of the specific difference of Marxist philosophy thus assumed the form of the question as to whether or no there was an epistemological break in Marx's intellectual development indicating the emergence of a new conception of philosophy -- and the related question of the precise location of this break. Within the field defined by this question the study of Marx's Early Works acquired a decisive theoretical importance (does this break exist?) as well as a historical importance (where is it located'?).

    Of course, the quotation in which Marx himself attests to and locates this break ('we resolved . . . to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience') in 1845 at the level of The German Ideology, can only be treated as a declaration to be examined, and falsified or confirmed, not as a proof of the existence of the break and a definition of its location. The examination of the status of this declaration called for a theory and a method -- the Marxist theoretical concepts in which the reality of theoretical formations in general (philosophical ideologies and science) can be considered must be applied to Marx himself. Without a theory of the history of theoretical formations it would be impossible to grasp and indicate the specific difference that distinguishes two different theoretical formations. I thought it possible to borrow for this purpose the concept of a 'problematic ' from Jacques Martin to designate the particular unity of a theoretical formation and hence the location to be assigned to this specific difference, and the concept of an 'epistemological break ' from Gaston Bachelard to designate the mutation in the theoretical problematic contemporary with the foundation of a scientific discipline. That one of these concepts had to be constructed and the other borrowed does not imply at all that either is arbitrary or foreign to Marx, on the contrary, it can be shown that both are present and active in Marx's scientific thought, even if this presence is most often in the practical state.* These two concepts provided me with the indis-

 
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pensable theoretical minimum authorizing a pertinent analysis of the process of the theoretical transformation of the Young Marx, and leading to some precise conclusions.

    Let me summarize here in extremely abbreviated form some of the results of a study which took several years and to which the pieces I am presenting here bear only partial witness.

    (1) There is an unequivocal 'epistemological break ' in Marx's work which does in fact occur at the point where Marx himself locates it, in the book, unpublished in his lifetime, which is a critique of his erstwhile philosophical (ideological) conscience: The German Ideology. The Theses on Feuerbach, which are only a few sentences long, mark out the earlier limit of this break, the point at which the new theoretical consciousness is already beginning to show through in the erstwhile consciousness and the erstwhile language, that is, as necessarily ambiguous and unbalanced concepts.

    (2) This 'epistemological break' concerns conjointly two distinct theoretical disciplines. By founding the theory of history (historical materialism), Marx simultaneously broke with his erstwhile ideological philosophy and established a new philosophy (dialectical materialism). I am deliberately using the traditionally accepted terminology (historical materialism, dialectical materialism) to designate this double foundation in a single break. And I should point out two important problems implied by this exceptional circumstance. Of course, if the birth of a new philosophy is simultaneous with the foundation of a new science, and this science is the science of history, a crucial theoretical problem arises: by what necessity of principle should the foundation of the scientific theory of history ipso facto imply a theoretical revolution in philosophy? This same circumstance also entails a considerable practical consequence: as the new philosophy was only implicit in the new science it might be tempted to confuse itself with it. The German Ideology sanctions this confusion as it reduces philosophy, as we have noted, to a faint shadow of science, if not to the empty

 
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generality of positivism. This practical consequence is one of the keys to the remarkable history of Marxist philosophy, from its origins to the present day.

    I shall examine these two problems later.

    (3) This 'epistemological break' divides Marx's thought into two long essential periods: the 'ideological' period before, and the scientific period after, the break in 1845. The second period can itself be divided into two moments, the moment of Marx's theoretical transition and that of his theoretical maturity. To simplify the philosophical and historical labours in front of us, I should like to propose the following provisional terminology which registers the above periodization.

    (a ) I propose to designate the works of the earlier period, that is, everything Marx wrote from his Doctoral Dissertation to the 1844 Manuscripts and The Holy Family by the already accepted formula: Marx's Early Works.

    (b ) I propose to designate the writings of the break in 1845, that is, the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology which first introduce Marx's new problematic, though usually still in a partially negative and sharply polemical and critical form, by a new formula: the Works of the Break.

    (c ) I propose to designate the works of the period 1845-57 by a new formula: the Transitional Works. While it is possible to assign the crucial date of the works of 1845 (the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology ) to the break separating the scientific from the ideological, it must be remembered that this mutation could not produce immediately, in positive and consummated form, the new theoretical problematic which it inaugurated, in the theory of history as well as in that of philosophy. In fact, The German Ideology is a commentary, usually a negative and critical one, on the different forms of the ideological problematic Marx had rejected. Long years of positive study and elaboration were necessary before Marx could produce, fashion and establish a conceptual terminology and systematics that were adequate to his revolutionary theoretical project. That is why I propose to designate the works written between 1845 and the first drafts of Capital (around 1845-57), that is, the Manifesto, the Poverty of Philosophy, Wages, Price and Profit, etc., as the Works of Marx's Theoretical Transition.

 
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    (d ) Finally, I propose to designate all the works after 1857 as Marx's Mature Works. This gives us the following classification:

1840-44: the Early Works
1845: the Works of the Break.
1845-57: the Transitional Works.
1857-83: the Mature Works.

    (a ) the liberal-rationalist moment of his articles in Die Rheinische Zeitung (up to 1842).

    (b ) the communalist-rationalist moment of the years 1842-5.

    As my essay on 'Marxism and Humanism' briefly suggests, the presupposition of the works of the first moment is a problematic of Kantian-Fichtean type. Those of the second moment, on the contrary, rest on Feuerbach's anthropological problematic. The Hegelian problematic inspires one absolutely unique text, which is a rigorous attempt to 'invert' Hegelian idealism, in the strict sense, into Feuerbach's pseudo-materialism: this text is the 1844 Manuscripts. Paradoxically, therefore, if we exclude the Doctoral Dissertation, which is still the work of a student, the Young Marx was never strictly speaking a Hegelian, except in the last text of his ideologico-philosophical period; rather, he was first a Kantian Fichtean, then a Feuerbachian. So the thesis that the Young Marx was a Hegelian, though widely believed today, is in general a myth. On the contrary, it seems that Marx's one and only resort to Hegel in his youth, on the eve of his rupture with his 'erstwhile philosophical conscience', produced the prodigious 'abreaction' indispensable to the liquidation of his 'disordered' consciousness. Until then he had always kept his distance from Hegel, and to grasp the movement whereby he passed from his Hegelian university studies to a Kantian-Fichtean problematic and thence to a Feuerbachian problematic, we must realize that, far from being close to Hegel, Marx moved further and further away from him. With Fichte and Kant he had worked his way back to the end of the eighteenth century, and then, with Feuerbach, he regressed to the heart of the theoretical past of that century, for in his own way Feuerbach may be said to represent the 'ideal' eighteenth-century philosopher,

 
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the synthesis of sensualist materialism and ethico-historical idealism, the real union of Diderot and Rousseau. It would be difficult not to speculate that Marx's sudden and total last return to Hegel in that genial synthesis of Feuerbach and Hegel, the 1844 Manuscripts, might not have been an explosive experiment uniting the substances of the two extremes of the theoretical field which he had until then frequented, that this extraordinarily rigorous and conscientious experiment, the most extreme test of the 'inversion' of Hegel ever attempted might not have been the way Marx lived practically and achieved his own transformation, in a text which he never published. Some idea of the logic of this prodigious mutation is given by the extraordinary theoretical tension of the 1844 Manuscripts, for we know in advance the paradox that the text of the last hours of the night is, theoretically speaking, the text the furthest removed from the day that is about to dawn.

    (5) The Works of the Break raise delicate problems of interpretation, precisely as a function of their place in the theoretical formation of Marx's thought. Those brief sparks, the Theses on Feuerbach, light up every philosopher who comes near them, but as is well known, a spark dazzles rather than illuminates: nothing is more difficult to locate in the darkness of the night than the point of light which breaks it. One day we will have to show that these eleven deceptively transparent theses are really riddles. As for The German Ideology, it offers us precisely a thought in a state of rupture with its past, playing a pitiless game of deadly criticism with all its erstwhile theoretical presuppositions: primarily with Feuerbach and Hegel and all the forms of a philosophy of consciousness and an anthropological philosophy. But this new thought so firm and precise in its interrogation of ideological error, cannot define itself without difficulties and ambiguities. It is impossible to break with a theoretical past at one blow: in every case, words and concepts are needed to break with words and concepts, and often the old words are charged with the conduct of the rupture throughout the period of the search for new ones. The German Ideology presents the spectacle of a re-enlisted conceptual reserve standing in for new concepts still in training . . . and as we usually judge these old concepts by their bearing, taking them at their word, it is easy to stray into a positivist conception (the end of all philosophy) or an individualist-humanist conception (the subjects

 
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of history are 'real, concrete men'). Or again, it is possible to be taken in by the ambiguous role of the division of labour, which, in this book, plays the principal part taken by alienation in the writings of his youth, and commands the whole theory of ideology and the whole theory of science. This all arises from its proximity to the break, and that is why The German Ideology alone demands a major critical effort to distinguish the suppletory theoretical function of particular concepts from the concepts themselves. I shall return to this.

    (6) Locating the break in 1845 is not without important theoretical consequences as regards not only the relation between Marx and Feuerbach, but also the relation between Marx and Hegel. Indeed, Marx did not first develop a systematic critique of Hegel after 1845; he had been doing so since the beginning of the second moment of his Youthful period, in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843 Manuscript), the Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843), the 1844 Manuscripts and The Holy Family. But the theoretical principles on which this critique of Hegel was based are merely a reprise, a commentary or a development and extension of the admirable critique of Hegel repeatedly formulated by Feuerbach. It is a critique of Hegelian philosophy as speculative and abstract, a critique appealing to the concrete-materialist against the abstract-speculative, i.e. a critique which remains a prisoner of the idealist problematic it hoped to free itself from, and therefore a critique which belongs by right to the theoretical problematic with which Marx broke in 1845.

    In the search for Marxist philosophy and in its definition, it is clear that the Marxist critique of Hegel should not be confused with the Feuerbachian critique of Hegel, even if Marx started it in his name. The decision as to whether or no the critique in Marx's writings of 1843 is Marxist (in fact it is Feuerbachian through and through) makes a major difference to our idea of the nature of Marx's later philosophy. I stress this as a crucial point for contemporary interpretations of Marxist philosophy, by which I mean serious, systematic interpretations, based on real philosophical, epistemological and historical knowledge, and on rigorous reading methods -- not mere opinions (books can be written on this basis too). For example, there are the writings of Colletti and Della Volpe in Italy, which I regard as of the greatest

 
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importance, because in our time they are the only scholars who have made an irreconcilable theoretical distinction between Marx and Hegel and a definition of the specificity of Marxist philosophy the conscious centre of their investigations. Their work certainly presupposes the existence of a break between Marx and Hegel, and between Marx and Feuerbach, but they locate it in 1843, at the level of the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right! Such a simple displacement of the break profoundly affects all the theoretical conclusions drawn from it, and not only their conception of Marxist philosophy, but also, as a later work will show, their reading and interpretation of Capital.

    That this definition cannot be read directly in Marx's writings, that a complete prior critique is indispensable to an identification of the location of the real concepts of Marx's maturity; that the identification of these concepts is the same thing as the identification of their location; that all this critical effort, the absolute precondition of any interpretation, in itself presupposes activating a minimum of provisional Marxist theoretical concepts bearing on the nature of theoretical formations and their history; that the precondition of a reading of Marx is a Marxist theory of the differential nature of theoretical formations and their history, that is, a theory of epistemological history, which is Marxist philosophy itself; that this operation in itself constitutes an indispensable circle in which the application of Marxist theory to Marx himself appears to be the absolute precondition of an understanding of Marx and at the same time as the precondition even of the constitution and development of Marxist philosophy, so much is clear. But the circle implied by this operation is, like all circles of this kind, simply the dialectical circle of the question asked of an object as to its nature, on the basis of a theoretical problematic which in putting its object to the test puts itself to the test of its object. That Marxism can and must itself be the object of the

 
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epistemological question, that this epistemological question can only be asked as a function of the Marxist theoretical problematic, that is necessity itself for a theory which defines itself dialectically, not merely as a science of history (historical materialism) but also and simultaneously as a philosophy, a philosophy that is capable of accounting for the nature of theoretical formations and their history, and therefore capable of accounting for itself, by taking itself as its own object. Marxism is the only philosophy that theoretically faces up to this test.

    All this critical effort is indispensable, not only to a reading of Marx which is not just an immediate reading, deceived either by the false transparency of his youthful ideological conceptions, or by the perhaps still more dangerous false transparency of the apparently familiar concepts of the works of the break. This work which is essential to a reading of Marx is, in the strict sense, simultaneously the work of theoretical elaboration of Marxist philosophy. A theory which enables us to see clearly in Marx, to distinguish science from ideology, to deal with the difference between them within the historical relation between them and to deal with the discontinuity of the epistemological break within the continuity of a historical process, a theory which makes it possible to distinguish a word from a concept, to distinguish the existence or non-existence of a concept behind a word, to discern the existence of a concept by a word's function in the theoretical discourse, to define the nature of a concept by its function in the problematic, and thus by the location it occupies in the system of the 'theory'; this theory which alone makes possible an authentic reading of Marx's writings, a reading which is both epistemological and historical, this theory is in fact simply Marxist philosophy itself.

    We set out in search of it. And here it begins to emerge, along with its own first, most elementary demand: the demand for a simple definition of the preconditions of this search.

March, 1965

 
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La Nouvelle Critique has asked me to situate the writings by Feuerbach published a few months ago in the Collection Epimétheé (P.U.F.). I am glad to be able to do so by giving brief answers to a number of questions.

    Under the title Philosophical Manifestoes, I have gathered together the most important texts and articles published by Feuerbach between 1839 and 1845: A Contribution fo the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy (1839), the Introduction to The Essence of Christianity (1841), the Provisional Theses for the Reform of Philosophy (1842), the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), the preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity (1843) and an article replying to Stirner's attacks (1845). This selection does not include all of Feuerbach's output between 1839 and 1845, but it does represent the essentials of his thought during these historic years.

    Why the title 'Philosophical Manifestoes'?

    The expression is not Feuerbach's own. I hazard it for two reasons, one subjective, the other objective.

    Anyone who reads the texts on the Reform of Philosophy and the Preface to the Principles will realize that they are true proclamations, a passionate annunciation of the theoretical revelation which is to deliver man from his chains. Feuerbach calls out to Humanity. He tears the veils from universal History, destroys myths and lies, uncovers the truth of man and restores it to him. The fullness of time has come. Humanity is pregnant with the imminent revolution which will give it possession of its own being. Let men at last become conscious of this, and they will be in reality what they are in truth: free, equal and fraternal beings.

    Such exhortations are certainly manifestoes as far as their author is concerned.

    So were they for their readers. Particularly for the young radical intellectuals of the 1840s, arguing one another through the contradictions of the 'German misery' and neo-Hegelian philosophy. Why the 1840s? Because they were the testing years of this

 
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philosophy. In 1840, the Young Hegelians, who believed there was a goal to history -- the realm of reason and liberty -- looked to the heir to the throne for the realization of their hopes -- the end of the autocratic and feudal Prussian order, the abolition of censorship, the reduction to reason of the Church, in short, the installation of a regime of political, intellectual and religious liberty. But hardly had he reached the throne than this so-called 'liberal' heir, now Frederick William IV, returned to despotism. This confirmation and reaffirmation of tyranny was a terrible blow to the theory which was the basis and sum of all their hopes. In principle, history should be reason and liberty; in fact, it was merely unreason and slavery. The facts had provided a lesson to be learnt: this very contradiction. But how could it be grasped? At this point The Essence of Christianity appeared, and then the pamphlets on the Reform of Philosophy. These texts may not have liberated humanity, but they did release the Young Hegelians from their theoretical impasse. Precisely at the moment of their greatest disarray, Feuerbach gave them an exact answer to the dramatic question they were asking each other about man and history! The echo of this relief and enthusiasm can be seen forty years later in Engels. Feuerbach was precisely the 'New Philosophy ' that made tabula rasa of Hegel and all speculative philosophy, that put the world which philosophy had made to walk on its head back on to its feet again, that denounced every alienation and every illusion but also gave reasons for them, and made the unreason of history thinkable and criticizable in the name of reason itself, that at last reconciled idea and fact, and made the necessity of a world's contradiction and the necessity of its liberation comprehensible. This is why the neo-Hegelians, as the old Engels had to admit, 'all became at once Feuerbachians'. This is why they received his books as Manifestoes announcing the Paths of the Future.

    I should add that these Manifestoes are philosophical. For, quite obviously, everything was still taking place in philosophy. But philosophical events had become historical events as well.

    What is particularly interesting about these writings?

    First of all, they are of historical interest. I did not choose these works of the 1840s simply because they were the most famous and the most lasting (indeed they have lasted until today, when certain

 
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existentialists and theologians look to them for the origins of a modern tendency), but also and primarily because they belong to a historical moment and had a historical role (among a restricted circle, of course, but one with a great future). Feuerbach was both witness to and actor in the crisis in the theoretical development of the Young Hegelian movement. It is essential to read Feuerbach to understand the writings of the Young Hegelians between 1840 and 1845. In particular, this reveals the extent to which Marx's early works are impregnated with Feuerbach's thought. Not only is Marx's terminology from 1842 and 1845 Feuerbachian (alienation, species being, total being, 'inversion' of subject and predicate, etc.) but, what is probably more important, so is the basic philosophical problematic. Articles like On the Jewish Question or the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State cannot be understood outside the context of the Feuerbachian problematic. Naturally, Marx's themes go beyond Feuerbach's immediate preoccupations, but the theoretical schemata and problematic are the same. To use his own expression, Marx did not really 'settle accounts' with this problematic until 1845. The German Ideology is the first work indicating a conscious and definitive rupture with Feuerbach's philosophy and his influence.

    A comparative study of Feuerbach's writings and Marx's early works makes possible a historical reading of Marx's writings, and a better understanding of his development.

    Does this historical understanding have any theoretical significance?

    Certainly. Once Feuerbach's writings in the years from 1839 to 1845 have been read it is impossible to make any mistakes as to the derivation of the majority of the concepts traditionally used to justify 'ethical ' interpretations of Marx. Such famous expressions as 'philosophy's world-to-be', 'the inversion of subject and predicate', 'for man the root is man himself', 'the political State is the species-life of man', the 'suppression and realization of philosophy', 'philosophy is the head of human emancipation and the proletariat is its heart', etc., etc., are expressions directly borrowed from Feuerbach, or directly inspired by him. All the expressions of Marx's idealist 'humanism' are Feuerbachian. Admittedly, Marx did not merely quote or repeat Feuerbach, who, as these Manifestoes show, was always thinking about politics,

 
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but hardly ever talked about it. His whole concern was with the criticism of religion, of theology, and with that secular disguise for theology known as speculative philosophy. The Young Marx, on the contrary, was haunted first by politics and then by that for which politics is merely the 'heaven': the concrete life of alienated men. But in On the Jewish Question, Hegel's Philosophy of the State, etc., and even usually in The Holy Family, he is no more than an avant-garde Feuerbachian applying an ethical problematic to the understanding of human history. In other words, we can say that at this time Marx was merely applying the theory of alienation, that is, Feuerbach's theory of 'human nature', to politics and the concrete activity of man, before extending it (in large part) to political economy in the Manuscripts. It is important that the real origin of these Feuerbachian concepts should be recognized, not so as to assess everything according to a standard of attribution (this is Marx's, that Feuerbach's, etc.), but so as to avoid attributing to Marx the invention of concepts and a problematic he had only borrowed. It is even more important that it be recognized that these borrowed concepts were not borrowed one by one, in isolation, but en bloc, as a set : this set being precisely Feuerbach's problematic. This is the essential point. For borrowing a concept in isolation may only be of accidental and secondary significance. Borrowing a concept in isolation (from its context) does not bind the borrower vis-à-vis the context from which he extracted it (for example, the borrowings from Smith, Ricardo and Hegel in Capital ). But borrowing a systematically interrelated set of concepts, borrowing a real problematic, cannot be accidental, it binds the borrower. I believe that a comparison of the Manifestoes and of Marx's early works shows quite clearly that for two or three years Marx literally espoused Feuerbach's problematic, that he profoundly identified himself with it, and that to understand the meaning of most of his statements during this period, even where these bear on the material of later studies (for example, politics, social life, the proletariat, revolution, etc.) and might therefore seem fully Marxist, it is essential to situate oneself at the very heart of this identification, and to explore all its theoretical consequences and inferences.

    I feel that this requirement is a crucial one, for if it is true that Marx espoused a whole problematic, then his rupture with

 
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Feuerbach, his famous 'settling of accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience', implied the adoption of a new problematic which even if it did integrate a certain number of the old concepts, did so into a whole which confers on them a radically new significance. I am pleased to be able to express this in an image from Greek history which Marx himself used: after serious set-backs in the War against the Persians, Themistocles advised the Athenians to leave the land and base the future of their city on another element -- the sea. Marx's theoretical revolution was precisely to base his theory on a new element after liberating it from its old element : the element of Hegelian and Feuerbachian philosophy.

    But this new problematic can be looked at in two ways:

    Firstly, in Marx's mature writings -- The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, Capital, etc. But these works do not contain any systematic exposition of Marx's theoretical position comparable to the exposition of Hegel's philosophy in The Phenomenology of Mind, the Encyclopaedia, and the Larger Logic, or the exposition of Feuerbach's philosophy in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Marx's writings are either polemics (The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy ) or positive studies (Capital ). Marx's theoretical position, what can be called, ambiguously, his 'philosophy', is certainly active in these works, but it is buried in them, and confused with his own critical or heuristic concerns, and rarely, if ever, explicitly discussed for its own sake in a systematic and extensive form. Naturally, this situation does not simplify the interpreter's task.

    At this point a knowledge of Feuerbach's problematic and of why Marx broke with Feuerbach can come to our aid. For through Feuerbach we have an indirect access to Marx's new problematic. We can find out what was the problematic that Marx broke with, and we can discover the theoretical horizons 'opened up' by this rupture. If it is true that we can learn as much about a man by what he rejects as by what he adheres to, then a thinker as exacting as Marx should be illuminated by his break with Feuerbach as much as by his own later statements. As this rupture with Feuerbach occurred at the decisive point in the constitution of Marx's definitive theoretical position, a knowledge of Feuerbach thereby becomes an irreplaceable means of access to Marx's philosophical position, rich in theoretical implications.

 
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    In the same way, I feel that it makes possible a better understanding of the relation between Marx and Hegel. If there was this rupture between Marx and Feuerbach, the critique of Hegel to be found in most of the former's early works must, at least as far as its ultimate philosophical presuppositions are concerned, be regarded as inadequate, or even incorrect, to the extent that it was a critique from a Feuerbachian viewpoint, that is, a viewpoint that Marx later rejected. Now, usually for reasons of convenience, there is a constant and innocent tendency to believe that, even though Marx later modified his viewpoint, the critique of Hegel to be found in the early works is none the less justifiable and can therefore be 'retained'. But to do so is to neglect the basic fact that Marx set himself apart from Feuerbach when he realized that the Feuerbachian critique of Hegel was a critique 'from within Hegelian philosophy itself ', that Feuerbach was still a 'philosopher', who had, indeed, 'inverted' the body of the Hegelian edifice, but had retained its ultimate structure and bases, that is, its theoretical presuppositions. In Marx's eyes, Feuerbach had stopped within Hegelian territory, he was as much a prisoner of it as its critic since he had merely turned Hegel's own principles against Hegel himself. He had not changed 'elements '. The truly Marxist critique of Hegel depends precisely on this change of elements, that is, on the abandonment of the philosophical problematic whose recalcitrant prisoner Feuerbach remained.

    To summarize the theoretical interest of this privileged confrontation between Marx and Feuerbach's thought in a manner which is not without its bearing on contemporary polemic, I should say that what is at stake in this double rupture, first with Hegel, then with Feuerbach, is the very meaning of the word philosophy. What can Marxist 'philosophy ' be in contrast to the classical models of philosophy? Or, what can be the theoretical position which has broken with the traditional philosophical problematic whose last theoretician was Hegel and from which Feuerbach tried desperately but in vain to free himself? The answer to this question can largely be drawn negatively from Feuerbach himself, from this last witness of Marx's early 'philosophical conscience', the last mirror in which Marx contemplated himself before rejecting the borrowed image to put on his own true features.

October, 1960

 
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    This is the location of the discussion: the Young Marx. Really at stake in it: Marxism. The terms of the discussion : whether the Young Marx was already and wholly Marx.

 
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is not studied, criticized and dominated, this reaction could lead Marxist philosophy into a 'catastrophic ' parrying movement, a global response which in fact suppresses the problem in its attempt to deal with it.

 
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of a particular ideology depends not on the relation of this development to its origins or its end, considered as its truth, but to the relation found within this development between the mutations of the particular ideology and the mutations in the ideological field and the social problems and relations that sustain it.

    (3) Therefore, the developmental motor principle of a particular ideology cannot be found within ideology itself but outside it, in what underlies (l'en-deça de) the particular ideology: its author as a concrete individual and the actual history reflected in this individual development according to the complex ties between the individual and this history.

    I should add that these principles, unlike the previous ones, are not in the strict sense ideological principles, but scientific ones : in other words, they are not the truth of the process to be studied (as are all the principles of a history in the 'future anterior'). They are not the truth of, they are the truth for, they are true as a precondition to legitimately posing a problem, and thus through this problem, to the production of a true solution. So these principles too presuppose 'fully developed Marxism', but not as the truth of its own genesis, rather, as the theory which makes possible an understanding of its own genesis as of any other historical process. Anyway, this is the absolute precondition if Marxism is to explain other things than itself : not only its own genesis as something different from itself, but also all the other transformations produced in history including those marked by the practical consequences of the intervention of Marxism in history. If it is not the truth of in the Hegelian and Feuerbachian sense, but a discipline of scientific investigation, Marxism need be no more embarrassed by its own genesis than by the historical movement it has marked by its intervention: where Marx came from, as well as what comes from Marx must, if they are to be understood, both suffer the application of Marxist principles of investigation.[27]

    If the problem of Marx's Early Works is really to be posed, the first condition to fulfil is to admit that even philosophers are young

 
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men for a time. They must be born somewhere, some time, and begin to think and write. The scholar who insisted that his early works should never be published, or even written (for there is bound to be at least some doctoral candidate to publish them!) was certainly no Hegelian . . . for from the Hegelian viewpoint, Early Works are as inevitable and as impossible as the singular object displayed by Jarry: 'the skull of the child Voltaire '. They are as inevitable as all beginnings. They are impossible because it is impossible to choose one's beginnings. Marx did not choose to be born to the thought German history had concentrated in its university education, nor to think its ideological world. He grew up in this world, in it he learned to live and move, with it he 'settled accounts', from it he liberated himself. I shall return to the necessity and contingency of this beginning later. The fact is that there was a beginning, and that to work out the history of Marx's particular thoughts their movement must be grasped at the precise instant when that concrete individual the Young Marx emerged into the thought world of his own time, to think in it in his turn, and to enter into the exchange and debate with the thoughts of his time which was to be his whole life as an ideologue. At this level of the exchanges and conflicts that are the very substance of the texts in which his living thoughts have come down to us, it is as if the authors of these thoughts were themselves absent. The concrete individual who expresses himself in his thoughts and his writings is absent, so is the actual history expressed in the existing ideological field. As the author effaces himself in the presence of his published thoughts, reducing himself to their rigour, so concrete history effaces itself in the presence of its ideological themes, reducing itself to their system. This double absence will also have to be put to the test. But for the moment, everything is in play between the rigour of a single thought and the thematic system of an ideological field. Their relation is this beginning and this beginning has no end. This is the relationship that has to be thought: the relation between the (internal) unity of a single thought (at each moment of its development) and the existing ideological field (at each moment of its development). But if this relationship is to be thought, so, in the same movement, must its terms.

    This methodological demand immediately implies an effective knowledge of the substance and structure of this basic ideological

 
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field, and not just an allusive knowledge. It implies that as neutral a representation of the ideological world as that of a stage, on which characters as famous as they are non-existent make chance encounters, will not do. Marx's fate in the years from 1840 to 1845 was not decided by an ideal debate between characters called Hegel, Feuerbach, Stirner, Hess, etc. Nor was it decided by the same Hegel, Feuerbach, Stirner and Hess as they appeared in Marx's own works at the time. Even less by later evocations of great generality by Engels and Lenin. It was decided by concrete ideological characters on whom the ideological context imposed determinate features which do not necessarily coincide with their literal historical identities (e.g. Hegel), which are much more extensive than the explicit representations Marx gave them of in these same writings, quoting, invoking and criticizing them (e.g. Feuerbach), and, of course, the general characteristics outlined by Engels forty years later. As a concrete illustration of these remarks, the Hegel who was the opponent of the Young Marx from the time of his doctoral dissertation was not the library Hegel we can meditate on in the solitude of 1960; it was the Hegel of the neo-Hegelian movement, a Hegel already summoned to provide German intellectuals of the 1840s with the means to think their own history and their own hopes; a Hegel already made to contradict himself, invoked against himself, in despite of himself. The idea of a philosophy transforming itself into a will, emerging from the world of reflection to transform the political world, in which we can see Marx's first rebellion against his master, is perfectly in accord with the interpretation dominant among the neo-Hegelians.[28] I do not dispute the claim that in his thesis Marx already showed that acute sense of concepts, that implacably rigorous grasp and that genius of conception which were the admiration of his friends. But this idea was not his invention. In the same way, it would be very rash to reduce Feuerbach's presence in Marx's writings between 1841 and 1844 to explicit references alone. For many passages directly

 
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reproduce or paraphrase Feuerbachian arguments without his name ever being mentioned. The passage Togliatti extracted from the 1844 Manuscripts comes straight from Feuerbach; many others could be invoked which have been too hastily attributed to Marx. Why should Marx have referred to Feuerbach when everyone knew his work, and above all, when he had appreciated Feuerbach's thought and was thinking in his thoughts as if they were his own? But as we shall see in a moment, we must go further than the unmentioned presence of the thoughts of a living author to the presence of his potential thoughts, to his problematic, that is, to the constitutive unity of the effective thoughts that make up the domain of the existing ideological field with which a particular author must settle accounts in his own thought. It is immediately obvious that if it is impossible to think the unity of an individual's thought while ignoring its ideological field, if this field is itself to be thought it requires the thought of this unity.

    So what is this unity? Let us return to Feuerbach for an illustration whereby we can answer this question, but this time to pose the problem of the internal unity of Marx's thought when the two were related. Most of the commentators in our collection are manifestly troubled by the nature of this relation, and it gives rise to many conflicting interpretations. This embarrassment is not merely the result of a lack of familiarity with Feuerbach's writings (they can be read). It arises because they do not succeed in conceiving what it is that constitutes the basic unity of a text, the internal essence of an ideological thought, that is, its problematic. I put this term forward -- Marx never directly used it, but it constantly animates the ideological analyses of his maturity (particularly The German Ideology )[29] -- because it is the concept that gives the best grasp on the facts without falling into the Hegelian ambiguities of 'to-

 
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tality '. Indeed, to say that an ideology constitutes an (organic) totality is only valid descriptively -- not theoretically, for this description converted into a theory exposes us to the danger of thinking nothing but the empty unity of the described whole, not a determinate unitary structure. On the contrary, to think the unity of a determinate ideological unity (which presents itself explicitly as a whole, and which is explicitly or implicitly 'lived' as a whole or as an intention of 'totalization') by means of the concept of its problematic is to allow the typical systematic structure unifying all the elements of the thought to be brought to light, and therefore to discover in this unity a determinate content which makes it possible both to conceive the meaning of the 'elements' of the ideology concerned -- and to relate this ideology to the problems left or posed to every thinker by the historical period in which he lives.[30]

 
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of itself, and even in its historical works -- which, after all, is its due, and, if I may say so, its duty.

    Let me summarize these reflections. Understanding an ideological argument implies, at the level of the ideology itself, simultaneous, conjoint knowledge of the ideological field in which a thought emerges and grows; and the exposure of the internal unity of this thought: its problematic. Knowledge of the ideological field itself presupposes knowledge of the problematics compounded or opposed in it. This interrelation of the particular problematic of the thought of the individual under consideration with the particular problematics of the thoughts belonging to the ideological field allows of a decision as to its author's specific difference, i.e, whether a new meaning has emerged. Of course, this complex process is all haunted by real history. But everything cannot be said at once.

 
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joy than to be able to witness in an emerging life, once the Gods of Origins and Goals have been dethroned, the birth of necessity.

The Historical Problem

But all this seems to leave the third presupposition of the eclectic method in the air; the presupposition that the whole of ideological history occurs within ideology. Let us take up this point.

 
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Hegelians. Mehring and Cornu have carried out the substance of this study and it is worth completing so that we may be able to understand how it was that the son of a Rhenish bourgeois became the theoretician and leader of the workers' movement in the Europe of the railway epoch.

    But as well as giving us Marx's psychology this study would lead us to real history, and the direct apprehension of it by Marx himself. I must stop here for a moment to pose the problem of the meaning of Marx's evolution and of its 'motor'.

    When eclectic criticism is faced with the question, 'how were Marx's growth to maturity and change possible', it is apt to give an answer which remains within ideological history itself. For example, it is said that Marx knew how to distinguish Hegel's method from his content, and that he proceeded to apply the former to history. Or else, that he set the Hegelian system back on to its feet (a statement not without a certain humour if we recall that the Hegelian system was 'a sphere of spheres'). Or, that Marx extended Feuerbach's materialism to history, as if a localized materialism was not rather suspect as a materialism; that Marx applied the (Hegelian or Feuerbachian) theory of alienation to the world of social relations, as if this 'application' could change the theory's basic meaning. Or finally, and this is the crucial point, that the old materialists were 'inconsistent ' whereas Marx, on the contrary, was consistent. This inconsistency-consistency theory which haunts many a Marxist in ideological history is a little wonder of ideology, constructed for their personal use by the Philosophers of the Enlightenment. Feuerbach inherited and, alas, made good use of it! It deserves a short treatise all to itself, for it is the quintessence of historical idealism: it is indeed obvious that if ideas were self-reproducing, then any historical (or theoretical) aberration could only be a logical error.

    Even when they do contain a certain degree of truth,[36] taken

 
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literally these formulations remain prisoner to the illusion that the Young Marx's evolution was fought out and decided in the sphere of ideas, and that it was achieved by virtue of a reflection on ideas put forward by Hegel, Feuerbach, etc. It is as if there was agreement that the ideas inherited from Hegel by the young German intellectuals of 1840 contained in themselves, contrary to appearances, a certain tacit, veiled, masked, refracted truth which Marx's critical abilities finally succeeded in tearing from them, and forcing them to admit and recognize, after years of intellectual effort. This is the basic logic implied by the famous theme of the 'inversion', the 'setting back on to its feet' of the Hegelian philosophy (dialectic), for if it were really a matter merely of an inversion, a restoration of what had been upside down, it is clear that to turn an object right round changes neither its nature nor its content by virtue merely of a rotation! A man on his head is the same man when he is finally walking on his feet. And a philosophy inverted in this way cannot be regarded as anything more than the philosophy reversed except in theoretical metaphor: in fact, its structure, its problems and the meaning of these problems are still haunted by the same problematic.[37] This is the logic that most often seems to be at work in the Young Marx's writings and which is most apt to be attributed to him.

 
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difference between green and dead wood in his article on the Theft of Wood, or the ideas of the freedom of the press, of private property, of alienation, etc. The reader cannot resist the transparency of this reflective rigour and logical strength in Marx's early writings. And this transparency quite naturally inclines him to believe that the logic of Marx's intelligence coincides with the logic of his reflection, and that he did draw from the ideological world he was working on a truth it really contained. And this conviction is further reinforced by Marx's own conviction, the conviction that shines through all his efforts and even through his enthusiasms, in short, by his consciousness.

    So I will go so far as to say that it is not only essential to avoid the spontaneous illusions of the idealist conception of ideological history, but also, and perhaps even more, it is essential to avoid any concession to the impression made on us by the Young Marx's writings and any acceptance of his own consciousness of himself. But to understand this it is necessary to go on to speak of real history, that is, to question 'Marx's path ' itself.

    With this I have returned to the beginning. Yes, we all have to be born some day, somewhere, and begin thinking and writing in a given world. For a thinker, this world is immediately the world of the living thoughts of his time, the ideological world where he is born into thought. For Marx, this world was the world of the German ideology of the 1830s and 1840s, dominated by the problems of German idealism, and by what has been given the abstract name of the 'decomposition of Hegel'. It was not any world, of course, but this general truth is not enough. For the world of the German ideology was then without any possible comparison the world that was worst crushed beneath its ideology (in the strict sense), that is, the world farthest from the actual realities of history, the most mystified, the most alienated world that then existed in a Europe of ideologies. This was the world into which Marx was born and took up thought. The contingency of Marx's beginnings was this enormous layer of ideology beneath which he was born, this crushing layer which he succeeded in breaking through. Precisely because he did deliver himself, we tend too easily to believe that the freedom he achieved at the cost of such prodigious efforts and decisive encounters was already inscribed in this

 
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world, and that the only problem was to reflect. We tend too easily to project Marx's later consciousness on to this epoch and, as has been said, to write this history in the 'future anterior', when it is not a matter of projecting a consciousness of self on to another consciousness of self, but of applying to the content of an enslaved consciousness the scientific principles of historical intelligibility (not the content of another consciousness of self) later acquired by a liberated consciousness.

    In his later works, Marx showed why this prodigious layer of ideology was characteristic of Germany rather than of France or England: for the two reasons of the historical backwardness of Germany (in economics and politics) and the state of the social classes corresponding to this backwardness. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Germany emerged from the gigantic upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars deeply marked by its historical inability either to realize national unity or bourgeois revolution. And this 'fatality' was to dominate the history of Germany throughout the nineteenth century and even to be felt distantly much later. This situation whose origins can be traced back to the period of the Peasants' War, made Germany both object and spectator of the real history which was going on around it. It was this German inability that constituted and deeply marked the German ideology which was formed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was this inability which obliged German intellectuals to 'think what the others had done ' and to think it in precisely the conditions implied by their inability: in the hopeful, nostalgic, idealized forms characteristic of the aspirations of their social circle: the petty bourgeoisie of functionaries, teachers, writers, etc. -- and with the immediate objects of their own servitude as starting-point: in particular, religion. The result of this set of historical conditions and demands was precisely a prodigious development of the 'German idealist philosophy ' whereby German intellectuals thought their conditions, their hopes and even their 'activity '.

    It was not the attraction of a witty turn of phrase that led Marx to declare that the French have political minds, the English economic minds, while the Germans have theoretical minds. The counterpart to Germany's historical underdevelopment was an ideological and theoretical 'over-development ' incomparable with

 
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anything offered by other European nations. But the crucial point is that this theoretical development was an alienated ideological development, without concrete relation to the real problems and the real objects which were reflected in it. From the viewpoint we have adopted, that is Hegel's tragedy. His philosophy was truly the encyclopedia of the eighteenth century, the sum of all knowledge then acquired, and even of history. But all the objects of its reflection have been 'assimilated' in their reflection, that is, by the particular form of ideological reflection which was the tyrant of all Germany's intelligence. So it is easy to imagine what could be and what had to be the basic precondition for the liberation of a German youth who started to think between 1830 and 1840 in Germany itself. This precondition was the rediscovery of real history, of real objects, beyond the enormous layer of ideology which had hemmed them in and deformed them, not being content with reducing them to their shades. Hence the paradoxical conclusion: to free himself from this ideology, Marx was inevitably obliged to realize that Germany's ideological overdevelopment was at the same time in fact an expression of her historical underdevelopment, and that therefore it was necessary to retreat from this ideological flight forwards in order to reach the things themselves, to touch real history and at last come face to face with the beings that haunted the mists of German consciousness.[38] Without this retreat, the story of the Young Marx's liberation is incomprehensible; without this retreat, Marx's relation to the German ideology, and in particular to Hegel, is incomprehensible; without this return to real history (which was also to a certain extent a retreat) the Young Marx's relation to the labour movement remains a mystery.

    I have deliberately stressed this 'retreat '. The too frequent use of formulae such as the 'supersession' of Hegel, Feuerbach, etc., tends to suggest some continuous pattern of development, or at

 
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least a development whose discontinuities themselves should be thought (precisely along the lines of a Hegelian dialectic of 'Aufhebung ') within the same element of continuity sustained by the temporality of history itself (the story of Marx and his time); whereas the critique of this ideological element implies largely a return to the authentic objects which are (logically and historically) prior to the ideology which has reflected them and hemmed them in.

    Let me illustrate this formula of the retreat by two examples.

    The first concerns those authors whose substance Hegel 'assimilated', among them the English economists and the French philosophers and politicians, and the historical events whose meaning they interpreted: above all, the French Revolution. When, in 1843, Marx sat down and read the English economists, when he took up the study of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, etc., when he studied concretely the history of the French Revolution,[39] it was not just a return to Hegel's sources to verify Hegel by his sources: on the contrary, it was to discover the reality of the objects Hegel had stolen by imposing on them the meaning of his own ideology. To a very great extent, Marx's return to the theoretical products of the English and French eighteenth century was a real return to the pre-Hegelian, to the objects themselves in their reality. The 'supersession' of Hegel was not at all an 'Aufhebung ' in the Hegelian sense, that is, an exposition of the truth of what is contained in Hegel; it was not a supersession of error towards its truth, on the contrary, it was a supersession of illusion towards its truth, or better, rather than a 'supersession' of illusion towards truth it was a dissipation of illusion and a retreat from the dissipated illusion back towards reality : the term 'supersession'

 
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union of French political sense and German theory.[44] Thus they were haunted by realities which they could only perceive through their own ideological schema, their own problematic, in the deformations produced by this medium.[45]

 
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know only too well, still a history. The whole theoretical and practical experience I have been discussing was in fact bound up with the progressive experimental discovery of German reality itself. The disappointment of 1840 which broke down the whole theoretical system behind the neo-Hegelians' hopes, when Frederick William IV, the pseudo-'liberal', changed into a despot -- the failure of the Revolution of Reason attempted by the Rheinische Zeitung, persecution, Marx's exile, abandoned by the German bourgeois elements who had supported him at first, taught him with facts what was concealed by the famous 'German misery', the 'philistinism' denounced with such moral indignation, and this moral indignation itself : a concrete historical situation which was no misunderstanding, rigid and brutal class relations, reflex exploitation and fear, stronger in the German bourgeoisie than any proof by Reason. This swept everything aside, and Marx at last discovered the reality of the ideological opacity which had blinded him; he realized that he could no longer project German myths on to foreign realities and had to recognize that these myths were meaningless not only abroad but even in Germany itself which was cradling in them its own bondage to dreams: and that on the contrary, he had to project on to Germany the light of experience acquired abroad to see it in the light of day.

    I hope it is now clear that if we are truly to be able to think this dramatic genesis of Marx's thought, it is essential to reject the term 'supersede ' and turn to that of discoveries, to renounce the spirit of Hegelian logic implied in the innocent but sly concept of 'supersession' (Aufhebung ) which is merely the empty anticipation of its end in the illusion of an immanence of truth, and to adopt instead a logic of actual experience and real emergence, one that would put an end to the illusions of ideological immanence ; in short, to adopt a logic of the irruption of real history in ideology itself, and thereby -- as is absolutely indispensable to the Marxist perspective, and, moreover, demanded by it -- give at last some real meaning to the personal style of Marx's experience, to the extraordinary sensitivity to the concrete which gave such force of conviction and revelation to each of his encounters with reality.[48]

 
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    I do not propose to give a chronology or a dialectic of the actual experience of history which united in that remarkable individual the Young Marx one man's particular psychology and world history so as to produce in him the discoveries which are still our nourishment today. The details should be sought in 'Père ' Cornu's works, for, with the exception of Mehring who did not have the same erudition or source material, he is the only man to have made this indispensable effort. I confidently predict that he will be read for a long time, for there is no access to the Young Marx except by way of his real history.

    I merely hope that I have been able to give some idea of the extraordinary relation between the enslaved thought of the Young Marx and the free thought of Marx by pointing out some thing which is generally neglected, that is, the contingent beginnings (in respect to his birth) that he had to start from and the gigantic layer of illusions he had to break through before he could even see it. We should realize that in a certain sense, if these beginnings are kept in mind, we cannot say absolutely that 'Marx's youth is part of Marxism ' unless we mean by this that, like all historical phenomena, the evolution of this young bourgeois intellectual

 
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can be illuminated by the application of the principles of historical materialism. Of course Marx's youth did lead to Marxism, but only at the price of a prodigious break with his origins, a heroic struggle against the illusions he had inherited from the Germany in which he was born, and an acute attention to the realities concealed by these illusions. If 'Marx's path' is an example to us, it is not because of his origins and circumstances but because of his ferocious insistence on freeing himself from the myths which presented themselves to him as the truth, and because of the role of the experience of real history which elbowed these myths aside.

    Allow me to touch on one last point. If this interpretation does make possible a better reading of the Early Works, if the deeper unity of the thought (its problematic) casts light on their theoretical elements, and the acquisitions of Marx's actual experience (his history; his discoveries) illuminate the development of this problematic, and this makes it possible to settle those endlessly discussed problems of whether Marx was already Marx, whether he was still Feuerbachian or had gone beyond Feuerbach, that is, of the establishment at each moment of his youthful development of the internal and external meaning of the immediate elements of his thought, there is still another question that it leaves unanswered, or rather introduces: the question of the necessity of Marx's beginnings, from the vantage point of his destination.

    It is as if Marx's necessity to escape from his beginnings, that is to traverse and dissipate the extraordinarily dense ideological world beneath which he was buried, had, as well as a negative significance (escape from illusions), a significance in some sense formative, despite these very illusions. We might even feel that the discovery of historical materialism was 'in the air' and that in many respects Marx expended a prodigious theoretical effort to arrive at a reality and attain certain truths which had already in part been recognized and accepted. So there ought to have been a 'short-cut' to the discovery (e.g., Engels's route via his 1844 article, or the one Marx admired in Dietzgen) as well as the 'roundabout' route that Marx took himself. What did he gain by this theoretical 'Long March ' that his beginnings had forced on him? What profit was there in starting so far from the end, in sojourning so long in philosophical abstraction and in crossing such spaces on his way to reality? Probably the sharpening it gave to his critical intelli-

 
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gence as an individual, the acquisition of that historically incomparable 'clinical sense', ever vigilant for the struggles between classes and ideologies; but also, and in his contact with Hegel par excellence, the feeling for and practice in abstraction that is indispensable to the constitution of any scientific theory, the feeling for and practice in theoretical synthesis and the logic of a process for which the Hegelian dialectic gave him a 'pure', abstract model. I have not provided these reference points because I think I can answer this question; but because they may perhaps make possible, subject to certain scientific studies in progress, a definition of what might have been the role of the German Ideology and even of German 'speculative philosophy' in Marx's formation. I am inclined to see this role less as a theoretical formation than as a formation for theory, a sort of education of the theoretical intelligence via the theoretical formations of ideology itself. As if for once, in a form foreign to its pretensions, the ideological over-development of the German intellect had served as a propaedeutic for the Young Marx, in two ways: both through the necessity it imposed on him to criticize his whole ideology in order to reach that point beneath (en-deça ) his myths; and through the training it gave him in the manipulation of the abstract structure of its systems, independently of their validity. And if we are prepared to stand back a little from Marx's discovery so that we can see that he founded a new scientific discipline and that this emergence itself was analogous to all the great scientific discoveries of history, we must also agree that no great discovery has ever been made with out bringing to light a new object or a new domain, without a new horizon of meaning appearing, a new land in which the old images and myths have been abolished -- but at the same time the inventor of this new world must of absolute necessity have prepared his intelligence in the old forms themselves, he must have learnt and practised them, and by criticizing them formed a taste for and learnt the art of manipulating abstract forms in general, without which familiarity he could never have conceived new ones with which to think the new object. In the general context of the human development which may be said to make urgent, if not inevitable, all great historical discoveries, the individual who makes himself the author of one of them is of necessity in the paradoxical situation of having to learn the way of saying what he is going to

 
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discover in the very way he must forget. Perhaps, too, it is this situation which gives Marx's Early Works that tragic imminence and permanence, that extreme tension between a beginning and an end, between a language and a meaning, out of which no philosophy could come without forgetting that the destiny they are committed to is irreversible.

December, 1960

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In an article devoted to the Young Marx,[1] I have already stressed the ambiguity of the idea of 'inverting Hegel'. It seemed to me that strictly speaking this expression suited Feuerbach perfectly; the latter did, indeed, 'turn speculative philosophy back on to its feet', but the only result was to arrive with implacable logic at an idealist anthropology. But the expression cannot be applied to Marx, at least not to the Marx who had grown out of this 'anthropological' phase.

    I could go further, and suggest that in the well-known passage: 'With (Hegel, the dialectic ) is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell '[2], this 'turning right side up again' is

 
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ered at Hegel's hands ', of its 'mystificatory side ', its 'mystified form ', and he opposes precisely to this mystified form (mystifizierten Form ) of the Hegelian dialectic the rational figure (rationelle Gestalt ) of his own dialectic. It would be difficult to indicate more clearly that the mystical shell is nothing but the mystified form of the dialectic itself: that is, not a relatively external element of the dialectic (e.g. the 'system') but an internal element, consubstantial with the Hegelian dialectic. It is not enough, therefore, to disengage it from its first wrapping (the system) to free it. It must also be freed from a second, almost inseparable skin, which is itself Hegelian in principle (Grundlage ). We must admit that this extraction cannot be painless; in appearance an unpeeling, it is really a demystification, an operation which transforms what it extracts.

    So I think that, in its approximation, this metaphorical expression -- the 'inversion' of the dialectic -- does not pose the problem of the nature of the objects to which a single method should be applied (the world of the Idea for Hegel -- the real world for Marx), but rather the problem of the nature of the dialectic considered itself; that is, the problem of its specific structures ; not the problem of the inversion of the 'sense' of the dialectic, but that of the transformation of its structures. It is hardly worth pointing out that, in the first case, the application of a method, the exteriority of the dialectic to its possible objects poses a pre-dialectical question, a question without any strict meaning for Marx. The second problem on the other hand, raises a real question to which it is hardly likely that Marx and his disciples should not have given a concrete answer in theory and practice, in theory or in practice.

    Let us say, to end this over-extended textual exposition, that if the Marxist dialectic is 'in principle' the opposite of the Hegelian dialectic, if it is rational and not mystical-mystified-mystificatory, this radical distinction must be manifest in its essence, that is, in its characteristic determinations and structures. To be clear, this means that basic structures of the Hegelian dialectic such as negation, the negation of the negation, the identity of opposites, 'supersession', the transformation of quantity into quality, contradiction, etc., have for Marx (in so far as he takes them over, and he takes over by no means all of them ) a structure different from the structure they

 
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ness and these latent worlds (corresponding to the images) never affect present consciousness as effective determinations different from itself : these images and worlds concern it only as echoes (memories, phantoms of its historicity) of what it has become, that is, as anticipations of or allusions to itself. Because the past is never more than the internal essence (in-itself) of the future it encloses, this presence of the past is the presence to consciousness of consciousness itself, and no true external determination. A circle of circles, consciousness has only one centre, which solely determines it; it would need, circles with another centre than itself -- decentred circles -- for it to be affected at its centre by their effectivity, in short for its essence to be over-determined by them. But this is not the case.

    This truth emerges even more clearly from the Philosophy of History. Here again we encounter an apparent overdetermination: are not all historical societies constituted of an infinity of concrete determinations, from political laws to religion via customs, habits, financial, commercial and economic regimes, the educational system, the arts, philosophy, and so on? However, none of these determinations is essentially outside the others, not only because together they constitute an original, organic totality, but also and above all because this totality is reflected in a unique internal principle, which is the truth of all those concrete determinations. Thus Rome: its mighty history, its institutions, its crises and ventures, are nothing but the temporal manifestation of the internal principle of the abstract legal personality, and then its destruction. Of course, this internal principle contains as echoes the principle of each of the historical formations it has superseded, but as echoes of itself -- that is why, too, it only has one centre, the centre of all the past worlds conserved in its memory; that is why it is simple. And its own contradiction appears in this very simplicity: in Rome, the Stoic consciousness, as consciousness of the contradiction inherent in the concept of the abstract legal personality, which aims for the concrete world of subjectivity, but misses it. This is the contradiction which will bring down Rome and produce its future: the image of subjectivity in medieval Christianity. So all Rome's complexity fails to overdetermine the contradiction in the simple Roman principle, which is merely the internal essence of this infinite historical wealth.

    We have only to ask why Hegel thought the phenomena of his-

 
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torical mutation in terms of this simple concept of contradiction, to pose what is precisely the essential question. The simplicity of the Hegelian contradiction is made possible only by the simplicity of the internal principle that constitutes the essence of any historical period. If it is possible, in principle, to reduce the totality, the infinite diversity, of a historically given society (Greece, Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, England, and so on) to a simple internal principle, this very simplicity can be reflected in the contradiction to which it thereby acquires a right. Must we be even plainer? This reduction itself (Hegel derived the idea from Montesquieu), the reduction of all the elements that make up the concrete life of a historical epoch (economic, social, political and legal institutions, customs, ethics, art, religion, philosophy, and even historical events : wars, battles, defeats, and so on) to one principle of internal unity, is itself only possible on the absolute condition of taking the whole concrete life of a people for the externalization-alienation (Entäusserung-Entfremdung ) of an internal spiritual principle, which can never definitely be anything but the most abstract form of that epoch's consciousness of itself : its religious or philosophical consciousness, that is, its own ideology. I think we can now see how the 'mystical shell' affects and contaminates the 'kernel' -- for the simplicity of Hegelian contradiction is never more than a reflection of the simplicity of this internal principle of a people, that is, not its material reality but its most abstract ideology. It is also why Hegel could represent Universal History from the Ancient Orient to the present day as 'dialectical', that is, moved by the simple play of a principle of simple contradiction. It is why there is never for him any basic rupture, no actual end to any real history -- nor any radical beginning. It is why his philosophy of history is garnished with uniformly 'dialectical' mutations. This stupefying conception is only defensible from the Spirit's topmost peak. From that vantage point what does it matter if a people die once it has embodied the determinate principle of a moment of the Idea (which has plenty more to come), once, having embodied it, it has cast it off to add it to that Self-Memory which is History, thereby delivering it to such and such another people (even if their historical relation is very tenuous!), who, reflecting it in their substance, will find in it the promise of their own internal principle, that is, as if by chance the logically consecutive moment of the Idea, etc. etc.? It must be

 
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clear that all these arbitrary decisions (shot through though they are with insights of genius) are not just miraculously confined to Hegel's 'world outlook', to his 'system', but are reflected in the structure, in the very structures of his dialectic, particularly in the 'contradiction ' whose task is the magical movement of the concrete contents of a historical epoch towards their ideological Goal.

    Thus the Marxist 'inversion' of the Hegelian dialectic is something quite different from an extraction pure and simple. If we clearly perceive the intimate and close relation that the Hegelian structure of the dialectic has with Hegel's 'world outlook', that is, with his speculative philosophy, this 'world outlook' cannot really be cast aside without our being obliged to transform profoundly the structures of that dialectic. If not, whether we will or no, we shall drag along with us, one hundred and fifty years after Hegel's death and one hundred years after Marx, the shreds of the famous 'mystical wrapping'.

    Let us return to Lenin and thence to Marx. If it is true, as Leninist practice and reflection prove, that the revolutionary situation in Russia was precisely a result of the intense overdetermination of the basic class contradiction, we should perhaps ask what is exceptional about this 'exceptional situation ', and whether, like all exceptions, this one does not clarify its rule -- is not, unbeknown to the rule, the rule itself. For, after all, are we not always in exceptional situations ? The failure of the 1849 Revolution in Germany was an exception, the failure in Paris in 1871 was an exception, the German Social-Democratic failure at the beginning of the twentieth century pending the chauvinist betrayal of 1914 was an exception . . . exceptions, but with respect to what ? To nothing but the abstract, but comfortable and reassuring idea of a pure, simple 'dialectical' schema, which in its very simplicity seems to have retained a memory (or rediscovered the style) of the Hegelian model and its faith in the resolving 'power' of the abstract contradiction as such: in particular, the 'beautiful' contradiction between Capital and Labour. I do not deny that the 'simplicity ' of this purified schema has answered to certain subjective necessities of the mobilization of the masses; after all, we know perfectly well that the utopian forms of socialism also played a historical part, and played it well because they took the masses at the word of their

 
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consciousness, because if they are to be led forward, even (and above all) this is how they must be taken. One day it will be necessary to do what Marx and Engels did for utopian socialism, but this time for those still schematic utopian forms of mass consciousness influenced by Marxism (even the consciousness of certain of its theoreticians) in the first stage of its history: a true historical study of the conditions and forms of that consciousness.[23] In fact we

 
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    But these terms have only to be mentioned to evoke the memory of the theoretical and practical struggles of Marx and his disciples against these 'deviations'. And how many peremptory attacks on economism there are to counterbalance that well-thumbed piece on the steam engine! Let us abandon this caricature, not so as to oppose the official condemnations to economism, but to examine what authentic principles are active in these condemnations and in Marx's actual thought.

    For all its apparent rigour, the fiction of the 'inversion ' is now clearly untenable. We know that Marx did not retain the terms of the Hegelian model of society and 'invert ' them. He substituted other, only distantly related terms for them. Furthermore, he overhauled the connexion which had previously ruled over the terms. For Marx, both terms and relation changed in nature and sense.

    Firstly, the terms are no longer the same.

    Of course, Marx still talks of 'civil society ' (especially in The German Ideology : the term is often mistranslated as 'bourgeois society') but as an allusion to the past, to denote the site of his discoveries, not to re-utilize the concept. The formation of this concept requires closer examination. Beneath the abstract forms of the political philosophy of the eighteenth century and the more concrete forms of its political economy, we discover, not a true theory of economic history, nor even a true economic theory, but a description and foundation of economic behaviour, in short, a sort of philosophico-economic Phenomenology. What is remarkable in this undertaking, as much in its philosophers (Locke, Helvetius, etc.) as in its economists (Turgot, Smith, etc.), is that this description of civil society acts as if it were the description (and foundation) of what Hegel, aptly summarizing its spirit, called 'the world of needs '; a world related immediately, as if to its internal essence, to the relations of individuals defined by their particular wishes, personal interests, in short, their 'needs'. We know that Marx's whole conception of political economy is based on a critique of this presupposition (the homo economicus and its ethical and legal abstraction, the 'Man ' of philosophy); how then could he take over a concept which is its direct product ? Neither this (abstract) description of economic behaviour nor its supposed foundation in the mythical homo economicus interested Marx -- his

 
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concern was rather the 'anatomy ' of this world, and the dialectic of the mutations of this 'anatomy'. Therefore the concept of 'civil society ' -- the world of individual economic behaviour and its ideological origin -- disappears from Marx's work. He understands abstract economic reality (which Smith, for example, rediscovers in the laws of the market as a result of his work of foundation) as the effect of a deeper, more concrete reality: the mode of production of a determinate social formation. Thus for the first time individual economic behaviour (which was the pretext for this economico-philosophical Phenomenology) is measured according to its conditions of existence. The degree of development of the forces of production, the state of the relations of production : these are from now on the basic Marxist concepts. 'Civil society' may well have gestured towards the site of the new concepts ('dig here'), but we must admit that it did not even contribute to their material. But where in Hegel would you find all that?

    As for the State, it is only too easy to show that it no longer has the same content for Marx as it had for Hegel. Not just because the State can no longer be the 'reality of the Idea', but also and primarily because it is systematically thought as an instrument of coercion in the service of the ruling, exploiting class. Beneath the 'description' and sublimation of the attributes of the State, Marx finds here also a new concept, foreshadowed in the eighteenth century (Linguet, Rousseau, etc.), taken up even by Hegel in his Philosophy of Right (making it into a 'phenomenon' of the Ruse of Reason which triumphs in the State: the opposition of wealth and poverty), and abundantly used by the historians of the 1830s: the concept of social class, in direct relation with the relations of production. The intervention of this new concept and its interconnexion with one of the basic concepts of the economic structure transforms the essence of the State from top to toe, for the latter is no longer above human groups, but at the service of the ruling class; it is no longer its mission to consummate itself in art, religion and philosophy, but to set them to serve the interests of the ruling class, or rather to force them to base themselves on ideas and themes which it renders ruling ; it therefore ceases to be the 'truth of' civil society, to become, not the 'truth of' something else, not even of the economy, but the means of action and domination of a social class, etc.

 
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    But it is not just the terms which change, it is also their relations themselves.

    We should not think that this means a new technical distribution of roles imposed by the multiplication of new terms. How are these new terms arranged? On the one hand, the structure (the economic base: the forces of production and the relations of production); on the other, the superstructure (the State and all the legal, political and ideological forms). We have seen that one could nevertheless attempt to maintain a Hegelian relation (the relation Hegel imposed between civil society and the State) between these two groups of categories: the relation between an essence and its phenomena, sublimated in the concept of the 'truth of. . . . '. For Hegel, the State is the 'truth of ' civil society, which, thanks to the action of the Ruse of Reason, is merely its own phenomenon consummated in it. For a Marx thus relegated to the rank of a Hobbes or a Locke, civil society would be nothing but the 'truth of ' its phenomenon, the State, nothing but a Ruse which Economic Reason would then put at the service of a class: the ruling class. Unfortunately for this neat schema, this is not Marx. For him, this tacit identity (phenomenon-essence-truth-of . . .) of the economic and the political disappears in favour of a new conception of the relation between determinant instances in the structure-superstructure complex which constitutes the essence of any social formation. Of course, these specific relations between structure and superstructure still deserve theoretical elaboration and investigation. However, Marx has at least given us the 'two ends of the chain', and has told us to find out what goes on between them: on the one hand, determination in the last instance by the (economic ) mode of production ; on the other, the relative autonomy of the superstructures and their specific effectivity. This clearly breaks with the Hegelian principle of explanation by consciousness of self (ideology), but also with the Hegelian theme of phenomenon-essence-truth-of. We really are dealing with a new relationship between new terms.

    Listen to the old Engels in 1890, taking the young 'economists' to task for not having understood that this was a new relationship.[26] Production is the determinant factor, but only 'in the last instance ':

 
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'More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted .' Anyone who 'twists this ' so that it says that the economic factor is the only determinant factor, 'transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, empty phrase '. And as explanation: 'The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure the political forms of the class struggle and its results: to wit constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas -- also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles, and in many cases preponderate in determining their form . . .' The word 'form ' should be understood in its strongest sense, designating something quite different from the formal. As Engels also says: 'The Prussian State also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenberg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by the entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power )'.[27]

    Here, then, are the two ends of the chain: the economy is determinant, but in the last instance, Engels is prepared to say, in the long run, the run of History. But History 'asserts itself' through the multiform world of the superstructures, from local tradition[28] to international circumstance. Leaving aside the theoretical solution Engels proposes for the problem of the relation between determination in the last instance -- the economic -- and those determinations imposed by the superstructures -- national traditions

 
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its name (it has one!), but in its concept. The concept it deserves (and has fairly won) must be more than a vague Hegelianism such as 'supersession ' -- the maintenance-of-what-has-been-negated-in-its-very-negation (that is, the negation of the negation). If we return to Hegel for a second we see that the survival of the past as the 'superseded ' (aufgehoben ) is simply reduced to the modality of a memory, which, furthermore, is merely the inverse of (that is, the same thing as) an anticipation. Just as at the dawn of Human History the first stammerings of the Oriental Spirit -- joyous captive of the giants of the sky, the sea and the desert, and then of its own stone bestiary -- already betrayed the unconscious presage of the future achievements of the Absolute Spirit, so in each instant of Time the past survives in the form of a memory of what it has been; that is, as the whispered promise of its present. That is why the past is never opaque on an obstacle. It must always be digestible as it has been pre-digested. Rome lived happily in a world impregnated by Greece: Greece 'superseded' survived as objective memories: its reproduced temples, its assimilated religion, its rethought philosophy. Without knowing it, as at last it died to bring forth its Roman future, it was already Rome, so it never shackled Rome in Rome. That is why the present can feed on the shades of its past, or even project them before it, just as the great effigies of Roman Virtue opened up the road to Revolution and Terror for the Jacobins. Its past is never anything more than itself and only recalls to it that law of interiority which is the destiny of the whole Future of Humanity.

    I think this is enough to show that, though the word is still meaningful (in fact, not rigorously meaningful), Marx's conception of 'supersession' has nothing to do with this dialectic of historical comfort; his past was no shade, not even an 'objective' shade -- it is a terribly positive and active structured reality, just as cold, hunger and the night are for his poor worker. How, then, are we to think these survivals ? Surely, with a number of realities, which are precisely realities for Marx, whether superstructures, ideologies 'national traditions' or the customs and 'spirit' of a people, etc? Surely, with the overdetermination of any contradiction and of any constitutive element of a society, which means : (1) that a revolution in the structure does not ipso facto modify the existing superstructures and particularly the ideologies at one blow (as it would if the

 
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economic was the sole determinant factor ), for they have sufficient of their own consistency to survive beyond their immediate life context, even to recreate, to 'secrete' substitute conditions of existence temporarily; (2) that the new society produced by the Revolution may itself ensure the survival, that is, the reactivation, of older elements through both the forms of its new superstructures and specific (national and international) 'circumstances'. Such a reactivition would be totally inconceivable for a dialectic deprived of overdetermination. I shall not evade the most burning issue: it seems to me that either the whole logic of 'supersession' must be rejected, or we must give up any attempt to explain how the proud and generous Russian people bore Stalin's crimes and repression with such resignation; how the Bolshevik Party could tolerate them; not to speak of the final question -- how a Communist leader could have ordered them. But there is obviously much theoretical work needed here as well. By this I mean more than the historical work which has priority -- precisely because of this priority, priority is given to one essential of any Marxist historical study: rigour ; a rigorous conception of Marxist concepts, their implications and their development ; a rigorous conception and investigation of what appertains to them in particular, that is, what distinguishes them once and for all from their phantoms.

    One phantom is more especially crucial than any other today: the shade of Hegel. To drive this phantom back into the night we need a little more light on Marx, or what is the same thing, a little more Marxist light on Hegel himself. We can then escape from the ambiguities and confusions of the 'inversion'.

June-July, 1962

 
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whose inner connexion is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible ) the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary '. So the explanatory model goes like this: 'the various elements of the superstructure ' act and react on one another to produce an infinity of effects. These effects can be assimilated to an infinity of accidents (infinite in number and with an inner connexion so remote and therefore so difficult to discover that it is negligible ), amid which 'the economic movement ' asserts itself. These effects are accidents, the economic movement is necessity, their necessity. For the moment I shall ignore the accidents-necessity model and its presuppositions. What is remarkable in this text is the role it attributes to the different elements of the superstructure. It is just as if, once the action-reaction system was set in motion between them, they were charged with finding a basis for the infinite diversity of effects (things and events, as Engels puts it) between which, as if between so many accidents, the economy picks its sovereign way. In other words, the elements of the superstructure do have an effectivity, but this effectivity is in some way dispersed into an infinity, into the infinity of effects, of accidents, whose inner connexion may, once this extremity in the infinitesimal has been reached, be regarded as non-existent. So the effect of this infinitesimal dispersion is to dissipate the effectivity granted the superstructures in their macroscopic existence into a microscopic non-existence. Of course, this non-existence is epistemological ('we can regard ' the microscopic connexion 'as non existent ' -- it is not said to be non-existent, but it is non-existent for knowledge ). But whatever the case, within this infinitesimal microscopic diversity the macroscopic necessity 'finally asserts itself ', that is, finally prevails.

    Two comments should be made here.

    First comment : This schema does not give us a true solution, but an elaboration of one part of the solution. We learn that in their mutual action-reaction the superstructures cash their effectivity as infinitesimal 'things and events ' that is, as so many 'accidents'. We see that the solution must be based at the level of these accidents, since their object is to introduce the counter-concept of the (economic) necessity which is determinant in the last instance. But this is only a half-solution since the relation between these accidents and this necessity is neither established nor made explicit;

 
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since (in what is really a denial of the relation and the problem posed by it) Engels presents even this necessity as completely external to these accidents (as a movement which finally asserts itself amid an infinity of accidents). But if this is so then we do not know whether this necessity is really the necessity of these accidents, and, if it is, why it is. This question is left unanswered.

    Second comment : It is astonishing to find Engels in this text presenting the forms of the superstructure as the source of a microscopic infinity of events whose inner connexion is unintelligible (and therefore negligible). For, on the one hand, we could say exactly the same of the forms of the infrastructure (and it is quite true that the detail of microscopic economic events might be said to be unintelligible and negligible!). But, more important, these forms as such are certainly forms as principles of reality, but they are also forms as principles of the intelligibility of their effects. For their part they are perfectly knowable, and in this respect they are the transparent reason of the events that derive from them. How could Engels pass so rapidly over these forms, their essence and their role, and only consider the negligible and unintelligible microscopic dust of their effects? More precisely, is this reduction to a dust of accidents not absolutely opposed to the real and epistemological function of these forms? And since Engels invokes it, what else did Marx do in the Eighteenth Brumaire than give an analysis of the action and reaction of these 'different factors'? a perfectly intelligible analysis of their effects ? But Marx was only able to perform this 'proof' because he did not confuse the historical effects of these factors with their microscopic effects. The forms of the superstructures are indeed the cause of an infinity of events, but not all these events are historical (cf. Voltaire's remark that all children have fathers, but not all 'fathers' have children), only those of them that the said 'factors' retain, select from among the others, in short, produce as such (to take just one case: every politician in government makes a choice among events according to his policies and also his means, and promotes the chosen ones to the rank of historical events, even if it is only, for example, by sup pressing a demonstration!). So, to sum up, on this first level : (1) we have not yet been given a true solution; (2) 'cashing' the effectivity of the forms of the superstructure (which is all that is in question here) as an infinity of microscopic effects (unintelligible

 
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accidents) does not correspond to the Marxist conception of the -- nature of the superstructures.

 
Second Level

And, in fact, at the second level of his analysis we find Engels abandoning the case of the superstructures and applying his model to another object which does this time correspond to it: the combination of individual wills. We also find that he answers the question by giving us the relation between the accidents and the necessity, that is by finding a basis for it. 'History is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each again has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant -- the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole, unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus past history proceeds in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that individual wills -- of which each desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general ) -- do not attain what they want, but are merged into a collective mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that their value is equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this degree involved in it. '

    I apologize for this long quotation, but I had to give it in full as it provides the answer to our question. Here indeed, the necessity is established at the level of the accidents themselves, on the accidents themselves, as their global resultant: so it really is their necessity. The answer missing from the first analysis we really are given here. But on what condition do we get it? On condition that we change objects, that our starting-point is no longer the superstructures, their interaction and ultimately their microscopic effects -- but individual wills, confronted and combined in relations of forces. So it is as if the model applied to the effectivity of the superstructures had really been borrowed from its true object, the

 
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object we are now dealing with: the play of individual wills. It is now clear why it failed with its first object, for that was not its real object, and why it should go on to a second, which is its real object.

    How, then, does this proof work? It relies on the model of a parallelogram of forces derived from physics: the wills are so many forces; if they confront one another by twos in a simple situation their resultant is a third force, different from either but none the less common to both, and such that though neither can recognize itself in the third, each is none the less a party to it, that is, its co-author. So one basic phenomenon appears straightaway, the transcendence of the resultant with respect to the component forces: a double transcendence, in relation to the respective size of the component forces -- and in relation to the reflection of these forces on themselves (that is, to their consciousness, since we are dealing with wills ). Which implies: (1) that the resultant is quite different in size from each force by itself (higher if they add together, lower if they oppose each other); (2) that the resultant is, in essence, unconscious (it does not correspond to the consciousness of each will -- and at the same time, it is a force without a subject, an objective force, but, from the outset nobody's force ). That is why it immediately becomes the global resultant that may be 'viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole, unconsciously and without volition '. It is clear that we have now found a basis and an origin for this force that triumphs in the last instance: determination by the economy is no longer external to the accidents amid which it asserts itself, it is the internal essence of these accidents.

    I hope to be able to show: (1) that we are now dealing with the true object of Engels's model ; (2) that thanks to this readjustment, Engels has really provided the solution to the problem he raised; (3) that problem and solution only exist as a function of the adequacy of the model to its object ; (4) that, as this object does not exist, neither the problem nor the solution exist; (5) that we must find some reason for this whole futile construction.

    I am quite prepared to ignore Engels's reference to nature. As the model he has used is itself physical (the earliest example of the type can be found in Hobbes and then in innumerable later versions, of which Holbach's is noteworthy as a particularly pure

 
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case), there is nothing surprising in the fact that it refers us from history to nature. This is not a proof, it is a tautology. (Note that this is merely a matter of the model used and that the dialectic of nature is obviously not at stake in this exposition, for the very good reason that it arises in a quite different context.) Epistemologically, a tautology is null and void; but it may nevertheless have a heuristic role. It is reassuring to be able to refer directly to nature, to be sure. (Hobbes said it long ago: men tear out their hair or their lives over politics, but they are as thick as thieves over the hypotenuse or falling bodies.)

    It is Engels's argument itself that I should like to examine very closely, the argument which seems at first sight to achieve such a perfect harmony between the model and its object. But what do we find? A harmony between model and object at the immediate level. But beneath (en deça) this level and beyond (au dela ), this harmony is postulated, not proved, and in its place we find an indeterminancy, that is, from the point of view of knowledge, a void.

    Beneath the level of individual wills. The transparency of content which strikes us when we imagine the parallelogram of forces (of individual wills) disappears once we ask (as Engels does himself!) about the origin (and therefore about the cause) of the determinations of these individual wills. For we are referred to infinity. 'Each . . . has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. ' Each individual will may be simple when it is considered as an absolute beginning, but it becomes the product of an infinity of microscopic circumstances arising from its 'physical constitution ' and 'external circumstances ', its 'own personal circumstances ' 'or ' 'those of society in general ', the external circumstances which are 'in the last resort economic ', and all these thrown together so that side by side with purely contingent and peculiar determinations we also find general determinations (in particular, the one we are discussing : the economic circumstances which are determinant in the last resort). It is clear that here Engels is mixing up two types of explanation.

    The First Type : a non-Marxist type, but one adapted to its present object and to its hypotheses, viz., explanation by the infinity of circumstances or accidents (this form can be found in Helvetius and Holbach); such explanation may have a critical value (to the extent that it is destined, as was already the case in the eighteenth

 
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century, to refute divine intervention, among other things), but from the point of view of knowledge it is empty. It puts forward an infinity without content, an abstract and hardly even programmatic generalization.

    The Second Type : However, at the same time, Engels introduces a Marxist type of explanation, when he ranks among the infinite circumstances (which are in essence microscopic) those determinations which are at once both general and concrete, viz., social circumstances and economic circumstances (which are determinant in the last resort). But this type of explanation does not answer to its object, since it represents at the beginning the very solution which it is supposed to be producing and establishing (the generation of this determination in the last resort). To sum up: either we stay with the object and the problem which Engels has posed, in which case we come face to face with the infinite, the indeterminate (and therefore with an epistemological void); or from this moment we take as the beginning itself the (content-ful) solution which is precisely what is in question. But then we are no longer either in the object or in the problem.

    Beyond the level of individual wills. We find ourselves confronted by the same alternatives. For, once the first parallelogram is given, we only have a formal resultant, which is not equivalent to the definitive resultant. The definitive resultant will be the resultant of an infinity of resultants, that is, the product of an infinite proliferation of parallelograms. Once again, either we trust to the infinite (that is, the indeterminate, epistemological void) for the production in the final resultant of the resultant we are hoping to deduce : the one that will coincide with economic determination in the last instance, etc., that is, we trust a void to produce a fullness (for example, within the limits of the purely formal model of the composition of forces, it does not escape Engels that the said forces present might cancel one another out, or oppose one another . . . under such conditions, what is there to prove that the global resultant might not be nothing, for example, or at any rate, what is there to prove that it will be what we want, the economic, and not something else, politics, or religion? At this formal level there is no assurance of any kind as to the content of the resultant, of any resultant ). Or we surreptitiously substitute the result we expect for the final resultant, and duly rediscover in it, along with other,

 
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microscopic determinations, the macroscopic determinations which were secreted in the conditioning of the individual at the outset; this expected result, these macroscopic determinations will be the economy. I am obliged to repeat what I have just said of what was beneath the immediate level: either we stay within the problem Engels poses for his object (individual wills), in which case we fall into the epistemological void of the infinity of parallelograms and their resultants; or else, quite simply, we accept the Marxist solution, but then we have found no basis for it, and it was not worth the trouble of looking for it.

    So the problem we face now is this: why is everything so clear and harmonious at the level of individual wills, whereas beneath this level or beyond it, it all becomes either empty or tautological? How is it that this problem, so well posed, corresponding so well to the object in which it is posed, should become incapable of solution as soon as we move away from its initial object? A question which must remain the riddle of riddles until we realize that it is this initial object which commands both the transparency of the problem and the impossibility of its solution.

    Indeed, Engels's whole proof hangs by that very particular object, individual wills interrelated according to the physical model of the parallelogram of forces. This is his real presupposition, both in method and in theory. In this respect the model does have meaning: it can be given a content, it can be manipulated. It 'describes' apparently 'elementary' bilateral human relations of rivalry, competition or co-operation. At this level what was previously the infinite diversity of microscopic causes might seem to be organized in real, and discrete, and visible unities. At this level accident becomes man, what was movement above becomes conscious will. This is where everything really begins, and it is from this point that deduction must begin. But unfortunately this so secure basis establishes nothing at all, this so clear principle merely leads to darkness -- unless it withdraws into itself, reiterating its own transparency as a fixed proof of all that is expected of it. Precisely what is this transparency ? We must recognize that this transparency is nothing but the transparency of the presuppositions of classical bourgeois ideology and bourgeois political economy. What is the starting-point for this classical ideology, whether it is Hobbes on the composition of the conatus, Locke and Rous-

 
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seau on the generation of the general will, Helvetius and Holbach on the production of the general interest, Smith and Ricardo (the texts abound) on atomistic behaviour, what is the starting-point if not precisely the confrontation of these famous individual wills which are by no means the starting-point for reality, but for a representation of reality, for a myth intended to provide a basis (for all eternity) in nature (that is, for all eternity) for the objectives of the bourgeoisie? When Marx had so thoroughly criticized the myth of the homo economicus in this explicit presupposition, how could Engels return to it so naïvely on his own account? How, if not by a fiction quite as optimistic as the fiction of bourgeois economics, a fiction closer to Locke and Rousseau than to Marx, could he suggest to us that the resultant of all the individual wills, and the resultant of these resultants, actually has a general content, really embodies determination by the economy in the last instance (I am thinking of Rousseau, whose dearest wish was that the particular wills, cut off from one another, might come together in a fair vote, producing that miraculous Minerva, the general will!). The ideologues of the eighteenth century (with the exception of Rousseau) did not demand that their presupposition should produce anything but itself. They just asked that it should provide a basis for the values already embodied in the presupposition, and that is why the tautology did have a meaning for them, but one obviously denied Engels, who, for his part, hoped to discover the exact opposite of the presupposition.

    This is why, in his own text, Engels ultimately reduces his own claims almost to nothing. What is there left of his schema, his 'proof'? Just the one expression, that given the whole system of resultants, the final resultant does contain something of the original individual wills: 'each contributes to the resultant and is to this degree involved in it '. This is a thought which in a quite different context might reassure minds uncertain of their grasp on history, or, given that God is dead, uncertain of the recognition of their historical personality. I would go so far as to say that it is a desperate, honest thought which nourishes despair, that is, hopes. (It is no accident that Sartre, basing himself on Engels's 'question', on the question of the 'basis' for and genesis of the necessity of history, should pursue the same object, with arguments which are equally philosophical, while of quite different inspiration. )

 
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    What have we left now? One sentence in which the final resultant is no longer long-term economic determination, but 'the historical event '. So individual wills produce historical events ! But a closer look shows that strictly speaking we can only admit that the schema gives us the possibility of an event (some men confront one another: something must happen, or nothing, which is also an event waiting for Godot), but absolutely not the possibility of a historical event, absolutely not the reason that will distinguish a historical event as such from the infinity of things which happen to men day and night, things which are as anonymous as they are unique. The problem must be put the other way round (for once!), or rather, in a different way. It is never possible to explain a historical event -- not even by invoking the law which makes quantity pass over into quality -- if one proposes to derive it from the (indefinite ) possibility of non-historical events. What makes such and such an event historical is not the fact that it is an event, but precisely its insertion into forms which are themselves historical, into forms which have nothing to do with the bad infinity which Engels retains even when he has left the vicinity of his original model, forms which, on the contrary, are perfectly definable and knowable (knowable, Marx insisted, and Lenin after him, through empirical, that is, non-philosophical, scientific disciplines). An event falling within one of these forms, which has the wherewithal to fall within one of these forms, which is a possible content for one of these forms, which affects them, concerns them, reinforces or disturbs them, which provokes them or which they provoke, or even choose or select, that is a historical event. So it is these forms which command the whole, which already contained the answer to Engels's false problem -- whose solution, it must be admitted, he could never have reached, since there was never any other problem than the one he posed on the basis of purely ideological presuppositions -- since it never was a problem !

    Of course, once again, there had certainly been the semblance of a problem for bourgeois ideology : to rediscover the world of history on the basis of principles (the homo economicus and his political and philosophical avatars) which, far from being principles of scientific explanation, were, on the contrary, merely a projection of its own image of the world, its own aspirations, its own ideal programme (a world which would be reducible to its essence: the

 
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conscious will of individuals, their actions and their private undertakings . . .). But once this ideology, without which this particular problem could rot have been posed, had been swept aside by Marx, how could this problem still remain the problem posed by this ideology, that is, how could it still remain a problem ?

    To close this too lengthy commentary, allow me two more remarks: one epistemological; the other historical.

    It should be noted, vis-à-vis Engels's model, that every scientific discipline is based at a certain level, precisely that level at which its concepts find a content (without which they are the concepts of nothing, that is, they are not concepts). Such is the level of Marx's historical theory : the level of the concepts of structure, superstructure and all their specifications. But if the same scientific discipline should set out from another level than its own, from a level which is not the object of any scientific knowledge (such as, in our case, the genesis of individual wills from the infinity of circumstances and the genesis of the final resultant from the infinity of parallelograms . . .), to produce the possibility of its own object and of the concepts corresponding to it, then it will fall into an epistemological void, or, and this is what gives it its vertigo, into a philosophical fullness. This is the fate of the search for a basis Engels undertook in his letter to Bloch: and we find it impossible to distinguish in it between the epistemological void and the philosophical vertigo, since they are nothing but one and the same thing. Precisely this passage, with its arguments borrowed from the kinds of model used in the natural sciences (and ultimately this is their only precaution, a purely moral one), Engels is merely a philosopher. His use of a reference 'model' is philosophical. I insist on this point deliberately, for there is a more recent example of the same kind, that of Sartre, who also tries to find a philosophical basis for the epistemological concepts of historical materialism (he has one advantage over Engels in this respect, he knows it and says so ). It is enough to refer to certain pages from the Critique de la raison dialectique (for example, pp. 68-9) to see that if Sartre rejects Engels's answer and his arguments, he basically approves of the attempt itself. All that separates them is a quarrel over the means employed, but on this point they are united in the same philosophical task. It is only possible to bar Sartre from his path by closing the one Engels opened for him.

 
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    But this makes it necessary to pose the problem of the philosophical leanings which can be detected in certain of Engels's writings. Why beside genial theoretical intuitions do we find in Engels examples of this step backwards from the Marxist critique of all 'philosophy'? This question could only be answered by a history of the relations between Marxist thought and 'philosophy ', and of the new philosophical theory (in the non-ideological sense) which Marx's discovery brought with it. Obviously, I cannot enter into this problem here. But perhaps we have to be convinced of the existence of the problem before we will find either the will or the way to pose it correctly and then resolve it.

 
A Letter to the Translator

Thank you for your glossary; what you have done in it is extremely important from a political, educational and theoretical point of view. I offer you my warmest thanks.

    I return your text with a whole series of corrections and interpolations (some of which are fairly long and important, you will see why).

    A minor point: you refer twice to Foucault and once to Canguilhem vis-à-vis my use of 'break' and, I think, of 'problematic'. I should like to point out that Canguilhem has lived and thought in close contact with the work of Bachelard for many years, so it is not surprising if he refers somewhere to the term 'epistemological break', although this term is rarely to be found as such in Bachelard's texts (on the other hand, if the term is uncommon, the thing is there all the time from a certain point on in Bachelard's work). But Canguilhem has not used this concept systematically, as I have tried to do. As for Foucault, the uses he explicitly or implicitly makes of the concepts 'break' and 'problematic' are echoes either of Bachelard, or of my own systematic 'use' of Bachelard (as far as 'break' is concerned) and of what I owe to my unfortunate friend Martin (for 'problematic'). I am not telling you this out of 'author's pride' (it means nothing to me), but out of respect both for the authors referred to and for the readers.

    As for these authors: Canguilhem 's use of the concept 'break' differs from mine, although his interpretation does tend in the same direction. In fact, this should be put the other way round: my debt to Canguilhem is incalculable, and it is my interpretation that tends in the direction of his, as it is a continuation of his, going beyond the point where his has (for the time being) stopped. Foucault : his case is quite different. He was a pupil of mine, and 'something' from my writings has passed into his, including certain of my formulations. But (and it must be said, concerning as it does his own philosophical personality) under his pen and in his thought even the meanings he gives to formulations he has borrowed from me are transformed into another quite different meaning than my own. Please take these corrections into account; I entrust them to you in so far as they may enlighten the English reader

 
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(who has access in particular to that great work, Madness and Civilization ), and guide him in his references.

    Much more important are the corrections I have suggested for some of your rubrics. In most cases they are merely corrections (precisions) which do not affect the state of the theoretical concepts that figure in the book (For Marx ). They cast a little more light on what you yourself have very judiciously clarified. But in other cases they are corrections of a different kind: bearing on a certain point in Lenin's thought, for example (my interpolation on the question of spontaneity). And finally, in other cases (see my last interpolation), I have tried to give some hints to guide the English reader in the road I have travelled since the (now quite distant) publication of the articles that make up For Marx. You will understand why I am so insistent on all these corrections and interpolations. I urge you to give them a place in your glossary, and add that (1) I have myself gone over the text of the glossary line by line, and (2) I have made changes in matters of detail (which need not be indicated) and a few important interpolations.

    As a result, everything should be perfectly dear. And we shall have removed the otherwise inevitable snare into which readers of 1969 would certainly have 'fallen', if they were allowed to believe that the author of texts that appeared one by one between 1960 and 1965 has remained in the position of these old articles whereas time has not ceased to pass. . . . You can easily imagine the theoretical, ideological and political misunderstandings that could not but have arisen from this 'fiction', and how much time and effort would have had to be deployed to 'remove' these misunderstandings. The procedure I suggest has the advantage that it removes any misunderstanding of this kind in advance, since, on the one hand, I leave the system of concepts of 1960 to 1965 as it was, while on the other, I indicate the essential point in which I have developed in the intervening years -- since, finally, I give references to the new writings that contain the new definition of philosophy that I now hold, and I summarize the new conception which I have arrived at (provisionally -- but what is not provisional?).

 
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