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The Philosophy of Marx
New and Updated Edition
ÉTIENNE BALIBAR
Translated by
Chris Turner
New material translated by
Gregory Elliott
This book has been published with financial support from the FrenchMinistry of Foreign Affairs – Sous-Direction de la Politique du Livre
This edition published by Verso 2017
Translation © Chris Turner 1995, 2007, 2014, 2017
Translations of the Preface, Introduction to the New Edition,
Afterword and Appendix © Gregory Elliot 2017
First published as La philosophie de Marx © Editions La Découverte 1993
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-603-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-604-5 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-605-2 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Printed in the US by Maple Press
For François Gèze and in memory
of Jean-Paul Piriou
Contents
Preface
Introduction to the New Edition: From Althusserian Marxism to the Philosophies of Marx? Twenty Years After
1Marxist Philosophy or Marx’s Philosophy?
2Changing the World: From Praxis to Production
3Ideology or Fetishism: Power and Subjection
4Time and Progress: Another Philosophy of History?
5Science and Revolution
Afterword: Philosophical Anthropology or Ontology of Relations? Exploring the Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach
Appendix: The End of Politics or Politics without End? Marx and the Aporia of ‘Communist Politics’
Notes
Bibliographical Guide
When Hugues Jallon, François Geze’s successor as managing director of Éditions La Découverte, suggested reissuing my 1993 opuscule, The Philosophy of Marx, in a different format, I wondered whether this might be an appropriate occasion to revise or alter the original text. For the reasons indicated below, this did not seem to me to be either possible or, in truth, desirable. On the other hand, I did think that in current circumstances the book might benefit from two additions, which in their own way serve to bring it up to date.
The first is the Introduction: ‘From Althusserian Marxism to the Philosophies of Marx? Twenty Years After’. This is a version of the text I had just written as an afterword to the German translation of La Philosophie de Marx by my friend Frieder Otto Wolf, himself a Marxist activist and philosopher, who had asked me to situate the 1993 text in relation to my present views for German readers. It seemed to me that my response might equally be addressed to French or English readers. I am all the more grateful to him for his prompting, in that we thereby found ourselves after a fashion reconstructing the trans-linguistic and cross-border space in which Marx’s oeuvre was elaborated.1
Given this, readers will readily understand why I wished to supplement this reprint with an essay on ‘Philosophical Anthropology or Ontology of Relations? Exploring the Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach’, derived from a study day at Albany University in 2011. As will be apparent, the style is that not of an ‘introduction’, but of a semi-philological, semi-philosophical discussion focused on a specific point of interpretation of the Marxian corpus (connected with the ‘humanist controversy’ and new debates on social ontology). I hope that, in the light of the exposition furnished in the body of the book, it will prove accessible to all my readers – or most of them. But (in addition to the celebrity of the text under discussion) I have another reason for wishing to provide this supplement. The passages in The Philosophy of Marx where I refer to the presence in Marx – specifically the Sixth Thesis – of a philosophy of ‘trans-individuality’ (in some respects comparable to those of Spinoza and Freud) and an ‘ontology of relations’ which (logically and politically) inverts the primacy of individuals over their ‘relations’, have elicited interest and prompted questions. What better opportunity than this new edition to attempt an answer or, at least, clarify the meaning of the hypothesis?2
Finally, I should signal that, by agreement with the publisher, the present edition reproduces the Bibliographical Guide from the 2001 reprint, which was a revised and expanded version of the 1993 version. For strictly pedagogical purposes, a complete overhaul (and expansion) would be required today, for which I lack the competence. There are many excellent introductions to Marx and sites devoted to the study of his work and Marxism which will, I hope, compensate for this absence.3 Accordingly, the Guide simply provides full details of the texts to which I have referred. I have also retained the system of ‘insets’ characteristic of the ‘Repères’ collection, which offers historical and biographical summaries or textual extracts that are useful for understanding the main argument.
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