The True Infinite and the Republic of Virtue

What do Marxists talk about when they talk about love?^[1]

For E.B.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

– Karl Marx, ‘Theses On Feuerbach’

theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.

– Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’

Hitherto, Marxists have changed the world in ways that they did not understand, predict or desire. Regardless of how one feels about the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China, the obvious truth is that every Marxist current has failed to realise even its most minimum program. Marxist apologetics for this failure are usually moralistic and evasive, blaming defeats on other Marxists’ failure to accept their specific brand of Marxism. Or perhaps claiming circumstances were to blame and future struggles will vindicate their true, revolutionary theory. Yet however much they change, changed circumstances never seem to demand that Marxism changes – at least not in its essentials. Thus clad in the conviction that theirs is the solution to the riddle of history, Marxists of various stripes stand chest-deep in the sea of current events and decry the rising tide. Such materialists, it seems, speak more from the heart than experience – and less to be heard than to drown out the crashing waves and their own doubts.

What Marxist accounts of the failure of Marxism avoid is introspection: consequently, Marxist rhetoric and analysis becomes predictable and dogmatic. In Hegel’s language, Marxism is the thought of an ethical-political community that represents its purpose as a future both immanent and unrealised (revolution, communism, etcetera), knowledge of which is vouchsafed by ‘lessons’, unchanging and inherited. Their circularity is that of a ‘bad infinity’ that does not recognise its repetition. In Marx’s language,

just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before … they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service.

Which is to say that, unlike Marx and Hegel, Marxists are traditionalists. This is why Marxist organisation and practice, too, like Marxist discourse, is repetitious and nostalgic. But their rhetoric notwithstanding, the Marxist movement is marginal. Perhaps this explains why, when Marxists talk about the organisations they build, they sound jealous. As Marx wrote, it is ‘all the more clear what we have to accomplish at the present: the ruthless criticism of all that exists.’ Marxism exists. It is not exempt. And as Marx also explained, being radical means grasping ‘the root of the matter,’ and ‘the root is man himself.’ It stands to reason, then, that we should start with Marx himself, and seek out his blind-spots and self-contradictions.

This is what lies behind the juxtaposition of the two quotes at the start of this essay, from 1845 and 1843 respectively. As Hannah Arendt observed in ‘Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought,’ when we encounter in a great philosopher’s work a flagrant and obvious self-contradiction – one they fail to notice themselves – it discloses the unthought essence of their idea, indicating both their motivator and their limit.

The first quote above, the famous eleventh thesis, disparages philosophy in the name of world-changing practice. The second quote promises the transubstantiation of sufficiently critical philosophy into a ‘material force,’ provided it can grip the masses by ‘going to the root of the matter.’ For the former, theory is impotent before practice. For the latter, practice grants radical theory potency.

Here, the antinomy between theory and practice is presented in a stark, dichotomised manner. So which is it to be? Or, are both claims true, the truth of each annihilating that of the other? If so, such unity of opposites implies a third, reconciling concept, namely, ‘critical-practical activity’ – more simply, ‘praxis’. For Marxists, that usually means ‘revolution’: after all, critical-practical activity is also involved in cooking, playing guitar or writing poetry – but those aren’t what Marxists usually talk about when they talk about what they love.

Praxis, in the Marxist sense, is the revolutionary reconciliation between theory and practice. But after the sublime zenith of revolution – about which Marxists speak most lovingly – the two poles fall apart again. So, bereft of the material force of the masses, those who hold on to the idea of praxis go forth again to seek the practice that completes their idea. For all their ardour, this search rarely goes well.

‘The point is to change it’, concludes every Marxist propagandist, having explained at length why members of a rival sect are not Marxists. Perhaps, then, the issue is not so much one of doctrine per se – at any rate, such disputes between Marxists typically go nowhere. Perhaps the problem is that disputation is what they regard as politics. It’s not what they are saying, but that they choose to spend so much time saying it: maybe such repetition points to a problem of practice. After all, as Antonio Gramsci pointed out in his Prison Notebooks, ‘the active man-in-the-mass’ is frequently held back by a theoretical consciousness ‘explicit or verbal which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed’. Such consciousness ‘holds together a specific social group … [and] influences moral conduct and the direction of the will’, indeed, often powerfully enough to ‘produce a condition of moral and political passivity’. What better account could there be of the deadening relation between theory and practice that afflicts the various Marxist currents and their most loyal proponents?

To revolutionise practice, then, it behoves us to remove theoretical roadblocks. The problem is that Marxists are only inclined towards theory insofar as it is confirmed by revolutionary practice. Which, although they speak of it lovingly, is something that the vast majority of them know only from books, articles and meetings – that is, theoretically.

The problem, then, is circular. And love forbids that the circle be broken.

So, instead, what if we follow it – what if we Return To Marx? After all, Marxists love returning to Marx. But usually they do so in the name of rediscovering the ‘true’ Marx, perhaps by emphasising one element of his thought (alienation, say, or the steam engine or the value form). Alternatively, they might pursue this by excluding ‘sub-Marxist’ aspects of Marx’s oeuvre (say, pre-Capital or post-Engels Marx). Either way, the Marx to whom they return tends curiously to validate the outlook of their preferred sect or international. Any merits aside, such ‘returns’ are incomplete insofar as they ventriloquise Marx to legitimate contemporary Marxisms.

The obvious alternative is a Complete Return To Marx, one that excludes nothing and adds nothing. But the more seriously Marxists attempt this, the more they begin to resemble characters in a postmodern novel: must we really nod earnestly as a future presenter at Historical Materialism insists on the importance of Herr Vogt? Must we really include the long-lost ‘Shopping List of 10 December 1854’ in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe? Surely, the line must be drawn – but where?

Instead of this endless comedy, what I propose is a Speculative Return to Marx. Although I mean ‘speculative’ in the sense of Hegelian philosophy, I don’t propose to deploy Hegel’s method upside down, as Marx and the Hegelian Marxists have attempted. Rather, a Speculative Return to Marx should read his work as a conceptual whole, in light of its contradictions and their development through history, and in light of our own present vantagepoint. Because if Marx was right, the implication is that he grasped concepts that were true then and remain so now. And/but if Marx was right, then concepts are only true insofar as they change with history, past and present. We must read Marx, then, both conceptually and historically, in light of his time and our own.

Such an approach is part of what Hegel meant by speculation, and it presupposes the standpoint he first outlined in The Phenomenology of Spirit: that of philosophy. And before I am accused of divided affections, let us be clear that this standpoint isn’t an external addition, but is implicit in Marx himself. Hegel was, after all, his first philosophical love.

The standpoint of speculative philosophy does not presume to educate Marx about those topics with which he deals most admirably, such as political economy. Nor does it claim political practice as the ground of its truth. Although acquainted with the fields, Hegel was neither an economist nor a revolutionary. Philosophy, in his sense, does not speak as a politician to the masses, nor does it presume to grant specialist knowledge. Instead, philosophy in the speculative sense is a discourse that cultivates our ability to reflect on the concepts that we use for the most part intuitively and uncritically. Speculative philosophy attempts to think concepts as such, as well as in their relation to the spheres of human experience and knowledge that condition and are reciprocally conditioned by them. It attempts to render explicit the unthought relations implicit in concepts that are presented immediately, and in abstract opposition to each other – for example, as Marx presents theory and practice in his 1840s writings.

The goal here is not to overturn Marxist concepts, but to elevate Marxist discourse to genuinely philosophical self-reflexivity, that its concepts may sustain their truth in contradiction. Marxists have no trouble speaking about what they love. But they do need to learn how to listen: to themselves, and, more importantly, to the reply of their beloved.

 

 

Given its conceptual wealth, Marxism is a magnificent candidate for such a philosophical procedure. For the most part, however, Marxism has rejected philosophy. At worst, it has regarded philosophy as superseded, bourgeois and contemplative; at best, as a propaedeutic to historical materialism, or as a distant, secondary terrain for class struggle. Consequently, having discarded the sphere of knowledge most suited to cultivating conceptual self-reflexivity, Marxists have tended to develop and use their concepts myopically.

Sensing that they are sailing as ships in the night, Marxist theorists have often tried to materially anchor their concepts. But matter is also a concept, and like those it is supposed to anchor, it has a tendency to dissolve and give way to others. Some Marxists have tried other determinate material concepts in its place, including nature, economic statistics or class relations. But the problem is that these concepts only speak through people – that is, through those Marxists who articulate them. Consequently, Marxists purport to speak for reality when they nominate one ‘material’ substratum as essential – and in so doing, they substitute their concept for reality, misrecognising both. Their theory becomes an ideology masking unfree thought and practice.

Philosophy, by contrast, does not promise ultimate grounds or perfect practice. What it does offer is a vantagepoint from which we can re-cognise – that is, re-think – concepts and practices, precisely, in so doing, so as to de-fetishise them. In this way, speculative philosophy is as much a doctrine as it is a practice of knowing. It helps us grasp the concealed logic operating behind theory, to separate the rational kernel of Marxism from irrational chaff. Immanent critique is a cure by love.

When criticising Marx’s dichotomies speculatively, the point isn’t to come down on one side or another: rather, speculative philosophy grasps dichotomies from the point of view of what Hegel called the absolute idea, precisely in order to posit the truth of both sides in light of their opposition and mutual negation. The absolute idea is the totality of truth, both its result and its development. And because the absolute idea is life that knows itself as life, no attempt to articulate it finally can succeed. As Gillian Rose stated in Hegel Contra Sociology, to know the absolute is to fail to know it. As she explained,

The absolute is the comprehensive thinking which transcends the dichotomies between concept and intuition, theoretical and practical reason. It cannot be thought (realised) because these dichotomies and their determination are not realised.

Once we realise this we can think the absolute by acknowledging the element of Sollen [ought] in such a thinking, by acknowledging the subjective element, the limits on our thinking the absolute.

Absolute knowledge, then, is a kind of thinking that attempts systematically to know its own limit and, in knowing it, to transcend it. It is reason that has grasped its own concept, negativity, in relation to what exists. It is a true infinite; a circle whose completion is self-recognition and whose movement is non-identity. This is what Hegel talked about when he talked about love.

Marxism exhibits the same movement but without the subjective moment of self-recognition. Marxists relate negatively to what is, in the name of an ‘ought’ (revolution, communism, etcetera), but without grasping the determinate connection between what ought to be and what is. To be sure, Marx defined communism as the immanent result of proletarian class struggle. But as he soon added, it could only be realised insofar as the proletariat is organised into a communist party. Consequently, the communist ‘ought,’ depends on something contingent beyond what is; namely, Marxist organisation. The immanent result of proletarian class struggle, then, becomes a prophecy whose realisation depends on the Marxists themselves. After all, communism may be immanent to history and capitalism, but communist organisation is not. It depends on the political will of Marxists who choose to build parties. In this way, the Marxist ‘ought’ thus conceals a secularised political Calvinism: freedom is the immanent telos of hitherto history only insofar as Marxists carry out their predetermined duty.

In short, God is history, heaven is communism, Saint Peter is Marx – and only through his Party can the City of Man gain access to the City of God. In the meantime, the Marxists’ faith leads them on a pilgrimage through this wearisome land. But this in fact begs the question: is it communism that Marxists love, or is it something else?

Listen as they answer. They sound like Christians – or, worse, Enlightenment humanists.

 

 

The contradiction between is and ought, a component of the world that Marx sought to revolutionise, expressed itself in his theory and played itself out historically in the Marxist movement. This is why a full speculative re-reading of Marx would shed light on the genesis of each aporia, lacuna and miasma that has afflicted the Marxist movement, the sum of which may equal its pleroma. But that is well beyond my present ambition. My goal here, rather, is to prove the necessity of such a project, by intervening at the point of flagrant and obvious self-contradiction noted above: namely, the Marxist idea of praxis. That is why the backbone of this essay consists of a speculative rewriting of Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’.

The Theses are the most succinct, famous and dichotomous expression of Marx’s idea of praxis. In rewriting the Theses speculatively, I have preserved the syntactic form of Marx’s ‘Theses’, while transubstantiating their content in order to render their dichotomies rationally. Which is to say, it is an attempt to render neither theory nor practice singly or in priority, but both together and, simultaneously, in opposition.

For related reasons intrinsic to this project, I have replaced Feuerbach, Marx’s polemical foil in the Theses, with Lukács, the preeminent Marxist philosopher of praxis. Because, to paraphrase Marx in The German Ideology, as far as Lukács thinks philosophically, he does not deal with praxis; and as far as he considers praxis, he does not think philosophically. Besides which, Lukács was the philosopher of Leninism. And Lenin is something else that Marxists talk about when they talk about love.

Marx, for his part, was a little more direct – when he talked about love he talked about Jenny.

A synopsis of my argument is as follows. ‘The point is to change it’ – yes, obviously. But from what and into what? Change results from action. Action is the determinate actualisation of will, and will is the activity of abstract negativity. Action intervenes in what is actual to negate what is in favour of what is not yet. The determinate content of action, therefore, does not emerge from the will – which is nothing – but from both the minds of actors, conscious and unconscious, and from the world, known and unknown, that acts through us, while we act on it. Studying concrete realities, actors and practices is something Marxists are good at. But it isn’t enough to know specific actions and their specific circumstances; what is missing is an account of action as such. That is, what Marxist practitioners tend to lack is a rational concept of practical-critical activity. After all, Marxist opinions about what is to be done are abundant. Less so are Marxist reflections on the uncomprehended logic that has seen their action culminate in tragedy or comedy – or both – but never success. For Marxism to achieve such a standpoint, it’s necessary to uncover a secret scandal – the covert relationship between Marxist practical-critical activity and capitalism.

As implied above, my hypothesis is that Marx radicalised bourgeois politics against itself by opposing civil society – the proletariat – to the state – bourgeois right. This he did in the promise of the realm of genuine freedom – communism – over the reign of irrational necessity – the hitherto-existing history of class society. The problem is that he did not negate the negation, but instead posited communism as immanent to history and yet transcendentally beyond it.

While it might be a fine polemical stick with which to beat utopian socialism, communism, rendered as a beyond, becomes a kind ‘thing-in-itself’ of history that must be made ‘for itself’, by a process of infinite approximation – reform – culminating in a messianic leap – revolution. As a result of their faith in this political theology, the Marxist movement has failed to recognise how it reproduces the logic of bourgeois right against the bourgeoisie.

Every reformist betrayal and Stalinist crime was committed in the name of a transcendent ought, the free tomorrow of a liberated humanity. And the main historic achievement of Marxist internationalism in the Twentieth century was to aid in the creation of independent bourgeois nation states, albeit with red flags and capitalists who pay tax. Marxists do not love socialism as it is, but as it ought to be.

The utopian aspiration underpinning the effort at hand is a hope that Marxism, as a political culture, can be reformed enough to begin to recognise the hitherto uncomprehended political logic it has inherited from capitalism. Gillian Rose first proposed this in Hegel Contra Sociology: this essay is intended as a contribution to her ‘Reformation of Marxism’. Consequently, it must also take an ‘inwardising turn’; which is to say, I must give a self-account. My goal is to provoke Marxists to philosophical thought. I address the activists, the cadre, the intellectuals and leaders of the really existing socialist movement. My language is philosophical, and somewhat difficult. But it’s nothing that Marx would have found challenging.

And out of respect for Marx, who did not bullshit, I will speak bluntly. Marxists: you want socialism to wash away the muck of ages, yet your movement is nostalgic. You denounce every injustice – but where do you articulate a concept of the good? What are your ethics? How do they inform a more just law than this, obviously unjust, one? If your idea of a good life is a society yet to be achieved, then what ‘material’ basis does it have in this society with its bad life? You affirm ‘real’ democracy but recognise no other legitimate politics than your own. You claim to represent the memory of the class – but at what point will its members remember their memory? And why does the putative memory of the proletariat so closely resemble the culture and thought of a movement that has been isolated from that proletariat for decades? You would propose a better social relation, and yet you resurrect twentieth-century political programs that either failed or produced tyrannies. More often than not, these days, your organisations fail: and less commonly now due to defeat or repression than thanks to sordid scandals and/or internecine sectarian conflict.

Marxists: you must change your lives.

The problem with Marxists is that their theory and practice are subjectively overdetermined by love for the small, sub-political ethical communities they build – communities that Marx disdained as sects – which sustain closed cultures and traditionalist hierarchies that are, in turn, sustained by closed and traditionalist Marxisms. If Marxists want to talk about their love for each other, they should just talk about love. Because mixing love and politics tends to make you a bad politician and a worse lover. Hannah Arendt understood how this goes, as she showed in a 1964 interview with Günter Gaus:

The direct personal relationship in which one can speak of love, it exists, of course, first and foremost in actual love, and it exists in a sense in friendship too. Here a person is directly addressed, independent of their relation to the world. So we can say that people from quite different organisations can still be personal friends. But if one confuses these things, if one brings love to the negotiating table, to put it rather bluntly, I find that absolutely fatal. I find it apolitical. I find it world-less. And I genuinely find it to be an absolute disaster.

Still, consistency demands that I turn my criticism on myself. I, too, would rather talk about love. So why am I instead talking about Marxism?

Isn’t it obvious?

Victory in the lead, with wings outspread – O Goddess

Hear me, and grant that my love prevail!

 

 

Thesis One

The chief defect of all hitherto existing Marxism – that of Lukács included – is that spiritually self-certain, substantial, universal ethical life – that is, communism – is conceived only in the form of an ought, as abstract negativity, posited as the immanent yet indeterminate telos of history. Absolute ethical life is not posited from the standpoint of the true infinite – that is, from the standpoint of the absolute idea. Hence, in contradistinction with absolute idealism, Marxist materialism posited historical progress beyond capitalism either as a revolutionary advent, as reformist gradualism, or, at best, as the representative thought of the unity of theory and practice – that is, as a theory of praxis. This is because materialism, of course, does not know real, reflexive conceptual actuality as such.

Lukács wants sensuous objects, really distinct from thought objects. However, because he does not grasp the concept of action, he does not conceive of human activity itself as objective activity, only as such subjectively; theoretically. Hence, in History and Class Consciousness, he regards the theoretical attitude as ultimately that which actualises praxis, although it achieves this by submerging itself in practice. Thus, praxis is conceived in its totalising, historical, mythical manifestation, as an event, and thought is conceived in absolute abstraction from itself: that is, as absolute practice. The precludes grasping the significance of ‘revolutionary’ ‘practical-critical’, activity.

This is why Lukács’s revolutionary theory has enjoyed no practical success, and his revolutionary practice led him to reconcile with state capitalist socialism.

Addition – The heart of the matter

Speculative philosophy is the standpoint of spirit that knows itself as spirit, which has won self-certainty by grasping its self-knowledge in light of both its content and logical form. ‘Truth’, as Hegel explains at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit, supplies for this spirit ‘the content, which in religion is still not identical with its certainty’. The materialism of revolutionary practice, by contrast, possesses the content of self-knowledge – absolute negativity – but not its logical form. Therefore, materialist hyperbole conceals uncertainty; its truth is not reconciled with its own shape, and its standpoint is that of secular political theology. The Marxist philosophy of praxis is a materialism that has its spiritual content in-itself, but not for-itself. Its thinking is a dream of ‘matter’.

Matter is pure substance without determination; logically, it is the immediate idea of being posited with no relation to its boundary and limit. Matter is therefore equally pure form, which is nothing but the operation of abstract negativity: that is, thought. To posit matter in relation to its boundary, to what it is not, is to admit that matter is constituted by the idea: the result is either transcendental or absolute idealism. To the materialist, however, matter is just as material as the mind limited by it. ‘Matter, matter everywhere’, the materialist says – and blinks.

‘The self-knowing Spirit’, Hegel says, ‘knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit: to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice one’s self.’ From the point of view of matter, there is no limit, no determinate negativity. Consequently, without knowing themselves as spirit, the materialist cannot appreciate what they sacrifice by subsuming their thought under matter. ‘Matter is in motion’, claims the materialist. From where does it move, to where? When a materialist changes matter, from what does it change, and into what else? A lover’s touch is as practical and material as their parting letter. Both confirm the ‘this-sidedness of practice’. Material practice is also confirmed, when, in Catullus’ words, ‘the passing plough-blade slashes the flower at the field’s edge’.

Matter is an idea, regardless of the adjectives that qualify it. Whether material is ultimately natural, economic or historic, because these materialisms derive their concepts from an external being – objective, in the case of nature, social in the case of economic and history – and not thought, they are pre-critical. Of course, if matter is an idea, then ideas are material. But if the mind of the materialist does not recognise its idea as idea, and instead names matter its master, it makes itself servant to a world (and a body) which speaks and acts through a mind that has little regard for itself.

What is more, when a materialist identifies their idea with the world, they represent the abstract universal substance of capitalist property relations – which reduces quality to quantity and content to form – as a secular metaphysics of matter. In theory and practice, their viewpoint is determined by the un-recognised content of its self-certainty, that is, absolute freedom; universal abstract negativity; pure thought in pure self-estrangement.

In the chapter of The Phenomenology on absolute freedom, Hegel warned of the consequences should such a materialism become legislator:

This undivided Substance of absolute freedom ascends to the throne of the world without any power being able to resist it … negativity has permeated all its moments … In this absolute freedom, therefore, all social groups or classes which are the spiritual spheres into which the whole is articulated are abolished; the individual consciousness that belonged to any such sphere, and willed and fulfilled itself in it, has put aside its limitation; its purpose is the general purpose, its language universal law, its work the universal work.

The abstract universal freedom of materialism is the emptiness of the absolutely free self. As Hegel said in The Science of Logic, ‘Spirit that were not idea, not the unity of the concept with itself, not the concept that has the concept itself as its reality, would be dead, spiritless spirit, a material object.’ Materialism is a philosophy of death, not life. On a crisp, clear morning, the materialist steps out to light a cigarette after having informed against her lover to a party sub-committee.

 

 

Thesis Two

The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human practice is not a practical question, but a philosophical one. For practice to become reflexive and free, the subject of action must be able to give a rational – and therefore aporetic – account of their practice. Because practice must think the elements of abstraction and powerlessness, that is, of un-re-cognised illusion and contingency, both external and internal. Thus, the dispute over the reality or non-reality of practice that is isolated from philosophy is a purely pragmatic question, at once tragic, unfree and at risk of perpetuating domination.

Addition – Practice is a bad infinity

Practice achieves its self-certainty in successfully altering its object: that is, by negating it and demonstrating that object’s finitude. The result is always not nothing: something. So, the more practice negates, the more practice posits other finite things to be overcome, again and again. The result is an endless succession of finite things. Practice itself is not exempt: every action has an end, at which point it ceases, making way for new practice. Practice consists in an endless succession of finite practices.

In Hegel’s account in the Logic, the ‘bad or negative infinity … is nothing but the negation of the finite, which, however, re-emerges afresh and thus is just as much not sublated.’ Insofar as thought establishes practice as the principle of truth, it posits the negation of finitude as an ought. The immediate thought of practice – assuredly ‘this-sided’ – is a bad infinity. A philosophy of practice is a philosophy of finitude. Although the practitioner may lose themselves in the empty joy of negation – consumption or critique, practical or verbal – when they pause, the ‘sadness of finitude’ creeps darkly into the corners of their vision.

Thinking that has not grasped the ideality of finitude may seek to delay or deny this by re-presenting its estranged concept – thought; the true infinite – as a thing-in-itself, or a transcendent beyond. Perhaps thought represents its own absolute negativity as some ancient arch-essence, or a universal a priori law of reason – or perhaps, as communism. These, however, are fetishisms, because they represent the form of self-consciousness – the negative idea – as an external limit that can be approximated, but not known or overcome.

Only thanks to self-consciousness does a living being maintain being-for-self: we desire our own form, our ideality; our self-identity in difference. Thus, our desire is also directed towards what we are not, which determines what we are. But when self-consciousness represents its limit as a transcendent beyond, it estranges its form and disavows its own ideality and negativity. Self-consciousness continues to desire, but now it does so only insofar as its desire is disavowed, and identified with an external object it takes to be infinite and its negative. One-sided and incapable of self-recognition, for the self-consciousness that lacks the self-certainty of the idea, desire itself becomes a bad infinity.

This shape of self-consciousness takes infinite flight from its other, the self-certain negativity of thought that knows itself as idea – and consequently, it regards such self-certain thought as sophistry. The price is unthinking practice: the will grasps whatever is first at hand, and changes it. (Even as such ‘unthinkingness’ is, of course, often accompanied by the species of external, dogmatic rationalisation that regards itself as thought.) The motion is thus doubled: the object and the thinking subject are rendered only as negative, and are void of determinate being. The immediate thought of practice is itself as empty and abstract as it imagines the idea to be.

Until this logic is grasped in and for itself, that is, in light of the absolute idea, the true infinite cannot be posed positively, either in theory or in practice. This would require that the ought be posited as a moment of what is. Instead, philosophy of praxis posits the ought as the abstract negation of what is, as the yet-to-be-actualised negation of capitalism: communism. ‘In other words, this infinity expresses only that the finite ought to be sublated’, Hegel writes in the Logic, adding that

the progression to infinity stops short at expressing the contradiction that is contained in the finite, namely that it is something as well as its other and that it is the perpetual continuance of the alternation of these determinations each of which brings about the other.

The rhetoric of Marxist philosophy of praxis, that of Lukács especially, stops short at just this point – and so reveals itself as dogmatic. Its reasoning is sophistic, and conceals nothingness.

And yet, they think. Parmenides’ words are good counsel for practitioners – today, Marxists, among others – who assert an estranged temporal locus and/or reified logic as grounds for their purpose:

Look upon things which, though far off, are yet firmly present to the mind;

For you shall not cut off what-is from holding fast to what-is

For it neither disperses itself in every way everywhere in order,

Nor gathers itself together.

Thesis Three

The speculative doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and the upbringing of future generations recalls that actions change people, often for the worse, and that only via education can we attempt next time to change both circumstances and people for the better. Whoever changes the world is both educator and educated. For clarity in its concomitant purpose, then, this doctrine must, therefore, distinguish what is not known, what should be learned, who should teach and who would learn.

The oscillation, indeed, superposition of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as the practical idea.

Addition – What is not to be done?

Marxism poses the question ‘what is to be done?’, certain it possesses the only correct answer: the negation of the present state of affairs. Marxists declare that the educators must themselves be educated, but rarely count themselves among the former.

The proletariat does not teach anyone who will not learn. And learning means reflecting on practice by attempting to know and change determinate things. By grasping the determinacy – the finitude – of practices and objects, the practical consciousness learns to let them go and then to re-invest in new objects and practices, this time having learned. By reflecting on such a process, the immediate thought of practice itself may attain determination and, if so, having mediated the false infinity of practice, it may even grasp its concept. This requires not only uncertainty, but a capacity to apologise, to forgive, to mourn, and to re-cognise the unconscious subjective and objective determinants of our action.

All action is negation, and it all involves a temporary madness: to act is to give oneself over to an absolute moment in which will actualises intention, producing a deed which negates its object. In so doing, practice exposes itself to the contingency of an infinite totality of determinate past circumstances of which only a fraction can ever be known. To prepare for action, knowledge can, of course, be gathered – but at some point, we must act. The deed is a temporal cut opening a void. To approach it with certainty about its outcome – including when accompanied by rhetorical caveats – is to act blindly and madly.

When we act, we aim at a different future. Futures, however, are the projection of the present – for every facet of which, there is a future. All those facets of the present we know contain an unknown element, an element of non-being – and there are infinitely more facets that we don’t know at all. So, for all the futures we suppose we know, there are infinitely more we do not. At best, the futures we intend are like prophecies: when they come to pass, we are astonished.

A decision hones the darkness of non-being – of the act and the present – into an edge whose razor-sharpness cuts infinite contingency into singular necessity. The act, then, is a violence that demands we sever those futures and pasts we thought we knew, as well as a thousand never-to-be-born futures and a million never-to-ripen pasts that we did not. From this contraction of uncountable contingencies, the vanishing finitude of a moment becomes a past necessity: a changed present emerges, and with it, a new infinity of possible futures.

And so on. There’s no getting past this collision of time and being. But what we can do is think it. After all, the negativity of the act as such – the cut – is a precondition for the determinate act: the incision, the self-conscious act.

The madness of decision precedes ethics. Ethical action, therefore, is action that moves from madness to sanity – via recollection.

To return from madness to re-cognition, however, requires the work of mourning. Whoever acts must bid farewell to the infinite contingency of the present and future that their action negates. More importantly, after the act, we must mourn for the lost wholeness experienced in its moment of singularity, which is, no less, emptiness. This is why many refuse to act: they cannot bear to be absolutely whole, and thus empty and alone. This is also why some act compulsively: they cannot bear to be less than everything, so they sever whatever threatens their own empty wholeness.

The speculative unity of theory and practice requires re-cognition of the brokenness of all action. A view that denies action’s aporetic character in the name of total knowledge of the past, present or future – mythology, dogma and eschatology – discloses an anxious will to mastery. The finite mediators between past and future – actors and their knowledge – are re-presented as a false infinite, which conceals the void with an image.

As Rose explained in ‘Shadow of Spirit,’ ‘holy middles corrupt because they collude in the elimination of the broken middle by drawing attention away from the reconfiguration of singular, individual and universal that is at stake.’ Having committed an unjust, unjustifiable action, the guilty practitioner preserves their holy wholeness – the vanity of their estranged negativity – by refusing to remember. Consequently, they cannot apologise: fearing their own absolute emptiness, they cannot face the absolute emptiness of their deed.

Yet a being that is absolutely whole is also incapable of acting – what is to be done by one who is all? The Olympian gods made decisions because they were plural; each was not whole. The God of the Old Testament was the God of his chosen people; he was not whole, but acted and was known in negative relation to other peoples and their gods. When the Christian God sacrificed his son, he became complete – and ceased to act. An absolutely whole being is absolutely empty, and voids do not make decisions.

To act – or to not act – is a decision made by a living being, between emptiness and wholeness, between is and ought. If we are to act rationally, we can only do so insofar as we re-cognise the moment of absolute emptiness, the abstract freedom of action, and return from it, to determination and concrete freedom.

If, as Nietzsche says, action requires forgetting, then learning requires memory. To mourn over an action we regret is the labour of the infinite: it proceeds through the re-cognition of what we represented as known, allowing us to realise what we have done. But such speculative reflection on an unjust action is not abject confession; it is a self-reflexive apology. It is not mediated by priests or party committees, but by interlocutors. And the half-light of the decision can only be illuminated by the light of speech and analysis shining back from the present. This makes the absolute negativity of the decision determinate, and reveals a little more of the world and ourselves in the hope that next time, we will act better – even if not, of course, perfectly.

This is why, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, absolute knowing occurs after the recollection of the passed shapes of consciousness. It’s also why absolute knowing should be understood as an intellectual practice sustained by a culture that is implicitly speculative. ‘Absolute knowledge’, as Rose explains in Hegel Contra Sociology, ‘is a path which must be continually traversed, re-collecting the forms of consciousness and the forms of science.’ This returns consciousness to the present, the domain of absolute knowing. And from there, if it is your vocation, you may act again – but this time, having learned.

Marxism has yet to achieve any of this. What is to be done? Mourning what has been done.

 

 

Thesis Four

Lukács starts out from the fact of his own religious self-alienation, but re-presents it universally: his own reification as that of the proletariat; his own abstraction as the reduction of the proletariat to the status of an identical subject-object; his own estrangement from the present as the flattening of time during the work day. His theology of praxis consisted of resolving this secular sociological diagnosis via messianic advent, presented as a theory of revolution.

The fact that this political theology detached itself from real politics and established itself as a purely intellectual breakthrough, with no practical dimension, can only be explained by the internal cleavages in its own concept. Which latter, therefore, must be understood in its contradiction, and reconciled philosophically. For example, after we discover the secret of Lukács’s messianic image of praxis within the concrete, law-giving praxis of October 1917, the former must be de-fetishised theoretically, if it is to have practical import.

Addition – Fichtean Marxism

In the 1928 essay ‘Moses Hess and the Problem of Idealist Dialectics’, Lukács argued that Left Hegelianism generally reverted to a Fichtean position, gaining superficial radicalism at the cost of utopianism. Insofar as this constituted a self-criticism, he was correct. In History and Class Consciousness, when Lukács was at his best, he even developed a kind of Fichtean Marxism, naturally, despite his best intentions and efforts.

But Lukács was different from Fichte insofar as he represented the identical subject-object as a historic social class, rather than as an originary ego. On such a basis he established the ought of proletarian praxis as a transcendent principle, opposed to what is.

Lukács wanted to see Bolshevik revolution win in Europe. ‘What ought to be is’, wrote Hegel in the Logic, ‘and at the same time is not. If it were, we could not say that it ought merely to be.’ By saying that Bolshevism ought to be, Lukács conceded that it was not. At the same time, by disavowing the ideality of this ought, he made it impossible to re-cognise the element within it of what is.

Because of this, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis conceals a political theology ultimately grounded in the law of bourgeois property relations. As Gillian Rose explains in Hegel Contra Sociology, ‘exchange and contract depend on making things which are particular and different formally comparable or abstract, turning them into value or price.’ Consequently, ‘exchange and contract depend on the recognition of formal equalities which presuppose lack of identity or inequality.’ Commodity production and exchange underpins the formal universality of bourgeois law which recognises each individual as a bearer of identical rights, as formally equal. Lukács diagnosed the same condition as reification. The same formalism, however, underpins the indifference of the will, and is a real abstraction, vested in being itself, as much as in thinking, acting subjects. In the latter, it powers all action and thought, with no regard for their determinate content, and when absolutised, by its own logic unleashed, this indifference reduces subject and object to self-sameness, negating their determinacy. Lukács understood this well enough sociologically, and even to some extent philosophically. But he did not recognise the determinant actualisation of this logic within politics, the very sphere in which he hoped concrete freedom would emerge.

Rose explains the manner in which Fichte built a finite idealism of the deed on the basis of the abstract ego:

For Fichte, the ego must posit a boundary because it is finite, but it is not limited by this boundary because the boundary is posited absolutely. The positing is dependent on the ego alone. Thus the boundary, which makes the ego finite, lies wherever in the infinite the ego posits it to be: it depends entirely on the spontaneity of the ego.

The boundary that Lukács posited was different, in that he identified it with revolutionary praxis. But if anything, this placed it even further beyond scrutiny. Like Fichte’s ego, Lukács’s subject-object of history posits its boundary absolutely: the realm of freedom lies on the other side of the revolution, where the proletariat is not.

To be more precise, what mattered for Lukács were the moment and the decision, which form the boundary between a reified, bourgeois society and one moving towards communism. According to the culmination of a dialectic between party and class, Lukács argued in Defence of History and Class Consciousness that the proletariat must make the decision to seize power in a revolutionary crisis: ‘in such moments everything depends on class consciousness, on the conscious will of the proletariat. This is where the moment of decision lies.’ Of course, he explained that this could only occur after a self-educative process of class struggle in which the proletariat grasps its role as subject-object of history, mediated by a Bolshevik party as an interlocutor. The problem is, it was Lenin who decided Russia needed an insurrection, and who convinced his party to lead the proletariat to make it. To be very precise, the Second All-Russian Congress of the Soviets enthusiastically ratified the October Revolution after it had succeeded. The ‘ought’ was before a vote decided that it ought to be.

As Rose explains, ‘Fichte’s absolute ego “demands the conformity of the object with the ego precisely in the name of its absolute being.”’ So too did Lukács’s absolute subject-object – in reality, the party, representing itself as the proletariat – demand the conformity of the object – Russia – in the name of its universal purpose – communism. ‘Essence’, Rose continues, ‘is the unity of absolute negativity (Fichte’s absolute ego which bounds itself) and immediacy (Fichte’s boundary). But neither essence nor immediacy have any determination’. The essence of Lukács’s concept of praxis also lacked determination: an entire social class cannot make a decision. In its immediacy, too, his concept lacked determination: Lukács’s philosophy of praxis had no practical impact.

To be fair, Lukács’s account of the development of class consciousness was complex, concrete and mediated, as Merleau-Ponty was among the first to notice in the chapter on Western Marxism in Adventures of the Dialectic. However, lacking a speculative account of politics, Lukács’s political theory was drawn almost entirely from the practice of Bolshevism. Lacking a standpoint from which he could re-cognise Bolshevik practice, he was unable to give a determinate account of the decision to seize power. Consequently, he represented past praxis as an infinite goal, and in so doing he masked its dichotomies – those of Leninism – dogmatically. As Rose wrote in Hegel Contra Sociology,

[e]xternal reflection knows that it has posited determination, such as the distinction between finite and infinite, but leaves the determination as external. It does not claim to have determined the infinite, and contents itself with taking the finite ‘as the first, as the real; as the foundation, the abiding foundation’; and not as the starting point of a negating reflection.

Lukács did not claim to have determined the infinite; he did not posit a new social law that could structure communism. Instead, he took the work of the Russian proletariat and the Bolshevik Party as the expression of the truth of history, and the foundation for a new communist law – but all without rendering these abstractions determinate through further ‘negating reflection’. To have progressed further, he would have needed to de-mythologise the proletariat and party: that is, to posit their finitude. This would have required him to re-cognise Lenin’s decision as the practical will of a revolutionary sovereign. Instead, he insisted that the proletariat decided, and did so in a way that was knowable and transparent in the moment of decision.

From there, on the basis of a misrecognised event, Lukács further misrepresents class consciousness as absolute knowledge, and as true beyond that event. Class consciousness, he argued in the eponymous chapter of History and Class Consciousness, corresponds to the ‘economic and social position of the class as a totality’, and therefore Marxist theory, as the intellectual expression of this consciousness, is ‘not only able to refute a false one, but is also in a position to point to those moments of existence that spawn the incorrect theory.’

In the name of ideal class consciousness, Lukács thus collapsed the tension between the acting and judging consciousnesses, eradicating the broken middle between action and judgement, and, therefore, the possibility of their mutual recognition in otherness. In place of debate, there is the identity of the individual will, the ‘I = I.’ When a sovereign does this, it’s dictatorial. When a theorist does this, it’s dogmatic and solipsistic. Just as Bolshevism became incapable of recognising political difference, Lukács became incapable of recognising non-Marxist philosophy.

Lukács was always nostalgic – just consider his taste in literature, not to mention Soul and Form. After having invested his nostalgia in 1917, he became like a gambler trying to reproduce a winning bet; his was a tragic faith convinced it could beat the odds with a system.

‘If ethical life is abstract’, Rose wrote – and surely it was in 1923 – ‘then it can only be recognised by recognising its abstractions, the cobwebs, and their determination. In this way actuality is recognised and another indeterminate, non-actuality is not posited.’

‘Transformative activity,’ she also said, ‘acknowledges actuality in the act and does not oppose act to non-act.’ Only the re-cognition of a law-creating decision as finite can produce a law that can leave space to recognise the other: that is, a law whose logic is truly infinite.

 

 

Thesis Five

Lukács, not satisfied with abstract practice, wanted self-reflexive praxis. But he did not conceive of speculation – the activity of thought – in light of its concept, as the spiritual, rational idea.

Addition – The life of the mind

The speculative idea is higher than practice. Yes, actions are infinite; decisions sever an infinite kaleidoscope of futures in favour of a new, indeterminate, boundless unfolding. Once the deed is done, however, it becomes immutable and self-identical. Other deeds may echo or follow it, and they may even negate the initial deed in a thousand ways, each mediated by that vast web of interactions and understandings. But the deed doesn’t change.

Thought unceasingly changes. Not all thought is universal; not all thought recognises its ideality and participates in absolute knowing. Not all thought is free. But unlike deeds, some thought can remain identical while generating non-identity. Which is to say, speculative thoughts can live beyond their finite origins – and their authors often know it. Sometimes, they let on as much, with a wink or smile aimed at readers who also know.

Because Plato lent him a body of writing, when we read the Phaedrus, Socrates and the shining boy to whom he spoke of love come to life again in our minds – and, sometimes, in the vocation they inspire. They are reborn as us – as new minds rediscovering a forgotten truth – because we gratefully lend them a fraction of our lives, including when we disagree. And we receive much more in return: our souls recall themselves. This is both a secular critique of Plato’s idea of resurrection, and its vindication. Socrates was correct to assert that philosophical lovers can be reborn to love again after a cycle of one thousand years: the mind of a philosopher can grow wings, he claimed, and Plato proved it.

To put it another way, the realisation that one has shared – or authored – a universal thought is, in Adorno’s words, ‘the happiness that dawns in the eye of the thinking person.’ It ‘is the happiness of humanity.’

Actions only live in this manner insofar as they are thought – and even then, few remember the decisions of sovereigns and statesmen from Plato’s time. Few, one day, will think about Lenin’s decision. Yet, Socrates will live because, as he explained to his beloved, and as his beloved wrote, death is not the end, provided our knowledge is shared and resonates justly, beautifully and truly.

A soul scatters upon death: so too may a decision, for better or worse or both. But true thoughts are different. They recollect the fragments of their author’s soul. They tread lightly: if thought births new action or thought, it is reborn, because of a truth and resonance that the living feel and know, for which they must take responsibility. Thoughts thus live with the living – and so long as the living learn, thoughts that are absolutely true flourish, both self-same and different. Like life itself.

 

 

Thesis Six

Lukács resolves the ideal essence into a material, universal essence. But the idea is no abstraction arising from material being. In its actuality, it is spiritual self-knowledge; the logic of being that has been grasped in its essentialities in accordance with its immanent conceptual development through opposition.

Lukács, not entering upon a criticism of this genuinely speculative idealism, is consequently compelled:

1) To abstract from absolute knowing and to fix its ‘material substratum’ or essence as something that can be known in and for itself, by a practice that is also abstractly universal.

2) To see logic, therefore, as only being comprehensible as ‘form’, a self-referential schematic with an apparent separation from history that conceals Lukács’s uncritical endorsement of irrationality.

Addition A – The identity of the theoretical and practical idea

Hegel begins the final chapter of the Science of Logic as follows: ‘The absolute Idea has shown itself to be the identity of the theoretical and the practical Idea.’ The practice of speculative thinking cannot resolve or end the aporia within the deed, but it does establish a rational vantagepoint beyond the dichotomies of theoretical and practical reason that allows thought to re-cognise this aporia that powers thought itself. This allows reason to think the decision after the fact. This won’t change the Russian Revolution or re-write Lukács. But it can help to develop a speculative concept of praxis.

‘Transformative activity’, Rose wrote in Hegel Contra Sociology, ‘acknowledges actuality in the act and does not oppose act to non-act.’ To rise to this possibility, the representative thought of praxis must grasp the true infinite as the unity of the ought and the is, of the relation between finite being and its non-being, its limit, which equally determines its essence. This requires us to grasp the ideality of the finite and the conceptuality of our thinking and doing: this is the true infinite.

The absolute appears to consciousness dichotomised. Consciousness itself participates in this process of division, and indeed, divides itself into abstract moments: to re-cognise this is to grasp consciousness as self-consciousness. This is, in Rose’s terms, a

knowing which knows consciousness and its oppositions and is therefore comprehensive. This comprehension is not the concept which is opposed to nature or intuition, but the concept or Idea which includes the opposition between formal concept and its determinations.

The absolute idea does not replace life; it is life that has re-cognised itself rationally. It is life understood conceptually and is therefore the element in which concrete freedom can be thought. With the idea, we create the new. With the rational idea, we create the new freely.

When thought works through a past event, it must overcome the immediacy of that event in the present by mourning for that event’s non-being; its finitude. This allows us to criticise the immanent limits of that event and to decide which aspects thereof we will preserve as lessons – which is also a negation. Thus we may reject, re-enact or simply discuss elements of the event, but whatever the case, there is no repetition of the event, and its afterlife, be it in thought or further action, is always different. The power of an event to generate the new – of finitude to give way to new finitude; the true infinite – is only foreclosed once and for all when we no longer think about it.

Death in general, is, for Rose, unthinkable. When we work through the death of the Russian Revolution, we in fact recover it for us. This is the only rational way in which an event can live again: it does so because we have negated its non-being through recollection, making it for us, investing it with our living thought and action. But this is to negate the event! Which is a cause for celebration: the re-cognition of death is always the cognition of life. Without the re-cognition of death and the recollection of what we have lost, now transformed and made our own, at the service of our lives, we walk among the antique ghosts of our own melancholy.

This is how we might gain our freedom with respect to history, to learn, and to knowingly create the new. It is the condition for free, self-given laws, because laws are the fixing in time of finite social relationships. And this is a labour that requires a living culture; self-knowing spirit is a social relation.

Addition B – The polyrhythmic polyphony of history

History is universal nostalgic imagery; the intellectual representation of objectively encoded memories, traditions, texts, artefacts, institutions and so on. A historian cannot make do without reason, and a rational work of history must undertake its labour of re-collection with reference to the genuine objectifications of past spirit, be they artefacts, texts or other mute sources. These are innumerable not only because of their multiplicity, but because there are so many which are unknown to historical thought. Such passed shapes of objective spirit possess innumerable meanings, some of which we articulate now, though always in ways shaped by our present.

To pretend the past speaks a simple truth is to host a séance. To declare the past has only one meaning is to drown out its cryptic traces and echoes with our own knowledge. Effectively, such an approach insists that our knowledge is perfect. And because our knowledge of the past is different from the self-knowledge of those who made the past, the idea of a single meaning to history inadvertently implies the absolute incommensurability of the past with present. This is to transform history into a soliloquy.

Instead, we must think the non-identity of the meaning of the past as we do the non-identity of the meaning of the present.

A good work of history accounts for its finitude, while a poor one presents its finite knowledge as infinite. This is the dogmatic secret of the ‘materialist understanding of history’, which uncritically projects this or that contemporary material essence – statistics, classes, social relations, etcetera – onto the past, and announces that it has resolved the polyphony of history once and for all into a single, correct narrative. In the case of dogmatic Marxism, this ‘material essence’ is almost always born of a lack that is experienced in the present; it’s a variety of what Nietzsche termed ‘monumental history’ in his second untimely meditation. More sophisticated historical materialisms are superior insofar as they grasp the constitutive incompleteness of any historical account and seek to discover the covert links between the present from which they are articulated and the past they articulate. Nevertheless, without grasping the absolute present and the absolute idea as their temporal and logical vantagepoints respectively, they are only implicitly rational.

In his review of History and Class Consciousness, Bloch issued a friendly criticism of Lukács’s attempt to contract the multiplicity of history into one moment of praxis.

History is much more, quite apart from all the demands of the omnia ubique, a polyrhythmic structure, and not only the social extraction of a still hidden social humanity, but also the artistic, religious, metaphysical production of the secret transcendental human being is a thinking of being, of a new deep relationship of being. Certainly these new deep relationships and their objects are not sharply delineated from one another, but rather stand in a dialectical exchange, almost ceaselessly intersecting, mixing, merging, establishing the precision of the lower stage of being again and again in the higher one.

The light emanating from what Bloch so expressively termed the ‘darkness of the lived moment’ illuminates the polyvalent structure of the present and the past. He is right, then, to refer to the polyrhythmic structure of history.

The metaphor also suggests, correctly, that history composes in many keys at once, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in dissonance. This is to say that world spirit is not a single musician, or a conductor, but every player in every band – and their audience – all at once. The only way this might come to a final resolution or single meaning is in the silence of our self-annihilation – the cessation of the music of self-conscious life.

The gap that always exists between history as it was and history as we know it is a productive tension. A gap exists also in theology, between the representative image of the absolute, and its finite contents. Behind Christian dogma stands a dogmatic Church. Behind the dogmatic Marxist account of history stands a dogmatic Marxist sect or party. What they share is their insistence that there is no void between what they say and what was. Philosophy, by contrast, seeks to think this void and find a home in it. To fetishise a univalent historical narrative is to deny the void within the present, and to be unreconciled with it. It is to be buffeted by the polyvalence of the present and past while seeking assurance in a mythology. This estranges the present from itself by re-presenting it in mythic costume. Such a way of thinking cannot prevent the new from emerging, but forms a barrier to attempts to freely and rationally know the past or present, or to create the future.

If life, known conceptually, is the absolute idea, then Hegel’s absolute must necessarily live within the absolute present. Consequently, absolute knowing is practice of spiritual knowledge that has endured the absolute temporal estrangement of historical thinking, and has returned to the present, having regathered within itself the shapes of past spirit. Its prize is the self-certainty of its own, living spirit. This knowledge is not an infinitised finite, as in historical mythologies: its movement of knowing is illuminated by the true infinite, which is present.

Every revenant emanates from a present diremption. To be free of nightmares, one should face them, and listen to what our unconscious says through them. To free our brain of the nightmarish weight of the tradition of all dead generations, we ought not flee from the past, presume to speak for it or deny it – which all amount to the same thing – but to converse with it as an interlocutor, listening and speaking in turn. This would be, in fact, a dialogue of the present with its own memory, with our objective universal unconscious. It is the condition for the free creation of a new, better future.

 

 

Thesis Seven

Lukács, consequent to all the above, does not grasp the concrete manner in which Marxism – which, as he acknowledges, represents the ‘self-consciousness of capitalism’ – is itself a moment of the present, one whose truth is not merely a negation, but also an affirmation, of a particular spiritual content within the social relations of capitalism.

Addition – The political theology of fanaticism

As we have seen, Lukács re-presented the infinite as praxis, and did so by mythologising an event, hoping it would recur. The deeper problem with this, as Hegel explained in the Logic, is that ‘the affirmation of determinate being is lacking in it; the spurious infinite, held fast as only negative is even supposed to be not there, is supposed to be unattainable.’

Lukács committed his life to communism. But because he held fast to it as the immanent negation of capitalism, he deferred any concrete knowledge of its positive content indefinitely, rendering it unobtainable to the living. ‘However, to be thus unattainable’, Hegel continues, referring to the spurious infinite, ‘is not its grandeur but its defect, which is at bottom the result of holding fast to the finite as such as a merely affirmative being.’ Thus, Lukács’s abstract commitment to communism concealed a faith in the finite affirmative being of really existing state capitalist socialism.

As the great twentieth-century socialist realist author, Henry Miller wrote, ‘to be able to give oneself whole and completely is the greatest luxury that life affords. Real love only begins at this point of dissolution.’ Lukács gave himself to an unknowable, infinitely distant future that he could only posit as the immanent negation of capitalism. In similar fashion, as Rose explained in Hegel Contra Sociology, because he elevated practical reason over the understanding, which he took to be finite, Fichte located the moral law of freedom not in nature or the ethical life of this world, but in an infinite will that postulates a supersensuous world. Consequently, the will to actualise the moral law of freedom depended, for Fichte, on conviction, faith, intuition, a decision and duty.

The quote with which Lukács announced his conversion to communism was telling on this axis: ‘Even if God had placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me – who am I to be able to escape it?’ Indeed, his leap was exemplary of the still largely unacknowledged and unthought leitmotifs of revelation, faith and duty within the Marxist movement. So, too, were his confessions and self-denunciations. Lukács was the Marxist Saint Augustine.

Faith and duty motivate communists to give themselves to an unknowable, transcendent ought. Whether faith and duty masquerade as sentimental humanism or scientific rationalism is beside the point: the ought is the negative determination of what is. Under capitalism, a transcendent ought thus betrays an uncritical affirmation of bourgeois right, and of the egotistical individuality upon which it is premised.

Communist faithfulness and dutifulness conceal the desire to be boundless and limitless; to dissolve into a perfect, absolute other. This apparent selflessness conceals an ego that wants to encompass the world, and that represents this desire as a universal moral law. It is a desire to submerge the self in the being of an absolute other whose determination as infinite affirms the self as infinite. Because this desired unity is infinitely distant – life within a future communist society – it is abstract in time and space, and conceals its finitude. It’s a fantasy of absolute meaning and infinite pleasure without sin; the dream of a lover who will never fail the beloved.

Such a communist approaches the infinite by way of infinite duty. They ask themselves ‘Am I good enough to be a revolutionary?’, without pausing to consider what the question presupposes. To be redeemed, they sacrifice what is finite and this-worldly – they give time, labour, comfort, ambition, and sometimes even those they love. By giving themselves to a movement, communist fanatics flee their finitude, their particularity, and ascetically attempt to wholly identify themselves with their infinite lover – the party, which supposedly mediates between finitude and the transcendent infinite. Thus, the communist finds imaginary wholeness by submitting to a collective with a universal mission.

Insofar as they still enjoy what is finite and particular, it is concealed, discreet and shame-faced. In return, the party agrees to not love its members for their particularity, but for their abstract universality: that is, identically and equally, as comrades indistinct from each other. And this is what the ascetic communist desires: the abstract ego has found a way to love itself behind its own back. Asceticism is the debauchery of self-infatuation that can’t face itself.

This love for a party – an earthly political community – is sanctified by revolutionary theory. The communist’s desire to submit is echoed by the party’s demand that the individual submit to its true theory: the full identification of one with the other is mirrored. Here, the unity of abstract individuals is guaranteed by a universal dogma: Marxism is the riddle of history solved – and the solution must be carefully monopolised. Witness this at Marxist meetings: the repetition of the same discussions, over and over. The point is not to learn, but to offer sermons and psalms affirming the community.

Parties and their knowledge, however, are finite. So, in truth, submission to a party usually amounts to submission to a charismatic leader or clique. This is a fleeting, decrepit joy, one that suspends the burden of separateness and offers a communism of disciplinary affect. This results in a suppression of difference: sometimes, members of a sect even take on the mannerisms or verbal tics of its leaders. In turn, such uniformity heightens the pernicious distance between the group and the world. The resulting rigid hierarchies breed subservience, resentment, spite, cruelty and intellectual mediocrity.

Occasionally the particular desire and pleasure that has been disavowed returns pathologically. Watch the communist moralists closely: they are often the most corrupt and abusive.

In the USSR, this was tragic in the true sense. Today, it is mostly comic, and insofar as it is tragic, it is so usually only for individuals whose self-sacrifice amounts to self-harm, if also, occasionally, the mistreatment of others. The freedom and love they seek become their opposites. This is because whoever desires absolute identity with their lover attempts to eradicate the difference between two which creates space for a third, shared imaginary – that is, for Eros. As Anne Carson observes in Eros the Bittersweet, Eros only exists

because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. … [I]t is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realise I never can.

To demand the eradication of boundaries, as the duty-drunk communist does, is fatal to love: the dream of perfect identity is realised in the solipsism of the self. It’s the tragedy of self-loathing narcissism that keeps loneliness at bay by controlling the lover.

The most valuable – and dangerous – element in this standpoint is the longing for infinity. When the desire for salvation via submission – the desire to be the object of the master’s desire – becomes a political vocation that disavows concrete, extant, finite institutions, it can manifest as a desire for revolutionary terror. Disavowed enjoyment reappears as cruelty; the fanatic’s pleasure is betrayed by their lop-sided smirk.

 

 

Thesis Eight

All social life is essentially ideal. All practices which lead representative thought to mysticism find their rational solution in the absolute idea as the identity of the theoretical and practical ideas.

Addition – Total control over you

‘Utopian consciousness’, Bloch writes in his review of History and Class Consciousness, ‘wants to look far into the distance, but ultimately only in order to penetrate the darkness so near it of the just lived moment, in which everything that is both drives and is hidden from itself.’

Insofar as the abstract, utopian consciousness declares that freedom is to be realised in a distant negation of the present, it re-presents its own disavowed, positive determinacy as an avowed, estranged image. What is positive and present is represented as a negative, that ‘ought’. In addition to religious, such a stance has aesthetic dimensions. Insofar as the utopian consciousness flees its inner darkness via political activism, it subjects the world to its symptom. In so doing, it betrays that it seeks an infallible law that it may serve – and master.

Like all laws, this one is less infinite and absolute than initially supposed. That is to say, the utopian consciousness hides a self-given moral vocation behind a moralistic mask. The result is bad theatre and worse morality.

This goes some way to explaining the vanity of small differences prevalent within the Marxist movement – which relates to the world via a political aesthetic in order to mask its divided self. The result is capriciousness and hypocrisy: when the rhetoric of universal truth and justice mask psychological lacunae, because these lacunae are always idiosyncratic, the result is an idiosyncratic, intuitive and self-serving misrepresentation of truth and justice. In short, the utopian consciousness declares truth and justice to be what they feel like in the moment – claims dignified, of course, by various texts and rituals. If disagreement threatens the mask, the utopian narcissist re-casts the one who insists on dissent as a betrayer, enemy or monster.

This law demands submission – total boundlessness – of the other. It represents its particular lack as a universal law, and outrageously demands the other submit and abolish all boundaries, disavowing the petty authoritarianism of the command in the name of an idea as infallible as it is non-actual. What this lover really wants is to subordinate their beloved, and, as master, to be subordinated in turn. Should the beloved protest, the utopian consciousness threatens to punish them for disturbing their lonely enjoyment, by offering undivided company one day, and unbearable absence the next. It’s a little game of fort-da characteristic of those who disguise emptiness with political masks.

When the beloved sees through the mask, the utopian consciousness is forced to choose between facing their finitude, or keeping the act going with those who confirm and conform to their self-image. Extras pass frequently through this lonely theatre.

Although art is not a cure – that’s where psychoanalysis comes in – at least, when one expresses one’s symptoms via art, as Julia Kristeva argued in Black Sun, there is less danger of direct violence and some possibility of meaning and renewal. Better – and more moral – to re-present the desire for boundlessness aesthetically: in, for example, a song.

This, however, requires the kind of mask that can be removed: in place of sanctimony, vulnerability shows its tear-streaked face. Afterwards, maybe recognition.

 

 

Thesis Nine

The highest point reached by practical materialism – that is, materialism which does not comprehend the ideality of practical activity – is the subsumption of the abstractly free individuals who comprise civil society under the standpoint of the state, represented as a negative utopia.

Addition – Fanaticism and love

When the unwept-for and unmourned past overwhelms the future, the result is despair writ large: joyful fanaticism. As absolute freedom, fanaticism is the indifferent will that immediately identifies itself with the world, and, owing to its inner emptiness and negativity, finds enjoyment in negating all. So it is that nihilism is at the core of messianism: abstraction annihilates the present in flight from an unconfronted past, in the name of a fetishistic future.

The antinomies of fanaticism – the present as abject and the future as perfect – survive only insofar as they’re kept apart. But the commitment to redemption can only be realised insofar as the logic of despair is followed to the end. This reunites fanaticism’s estranged dichotomies. When despair despairs of itself – which was Nietzsche’s main injunction –  the fanatic becomes bored. When dreaming of future enjoyment is no longer enjoyable, the present enjoyment that was disavowed or the cause of shame might be recovered instead. The result is concrete, particular self-knowledge and determinate regret. Where once there was metaphysical tragedy, now there is this-worldly comedy.

Faith – the bridge between despair and redemption – demands total self-emptying in preparation for grace. Rigorously applied, this movement of self-abnegation must also purge faith itself of egotism. But all faith is subjective; all faith is the worship of a graven idol. Faith is idolatry. After the renunciation of vain faith, there may occur a much more human dialogue between conviction and doubt.

Genuine love for a new future, which is always more than the present and past, spurs the realisation that faith in a negative utopia conceals a hubristic and vain projection of a present lack and unfreedom. But lack is equally the awareness of non-presence, and only one who is present and determinate can be aware of their non-being. It is with the recognition of particularity that satisfaction, however partial, becomes possible. Love for heaven – or even the abyss – is always rooted in the earth. Faith can thus only be united with its concept in the unfinished present: the coming of an incomplete messiah; the institutions, places, cultures and people we love.

Grace is the miraculous transubstantiation of despair into redemption. Descent, sin and self-abasement are grace’s opposite motions. Yet, in grace, desire and sin are present as the positive absolute: sin reappears absolutely negated. Just look at Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa or the depiction of heaven and hell in the Cathedral of Bologna. And with the realisation that grace is libidinally charged, we are led to the domain of psychoanalysis proper: the unconscious. The love of self-abnegation and the desire for redemption must be discovered in a determinate, particular past: perhaps a childhood in which one became desolate with abandonment, to the point of resignation, after which the advent of the other appeared as a miracle. The desublimation of these moments opens a path to concrete relationships and human satisfaction.

This inner, psychological re-cognition is difficult, however, because it seems to risk corrupting the loved object: after all, in the salvific consciousness, the loved object is determined both as an absolute purpose and as radically distinct and distant. The desire for unity with God is the religious representation of the unity of these opposites; the desire for endless life is equally the desire for death.

If this limit can be thought and experienced conceptually, shy of actual death, it can motivate a return to life. The penitent fanatic may come to see that both they and their world are imperfectly redeemed. Suspended between heaven and hell, we are climbing Mount Purgatory – and at the pinnacle, we might find a garden of jagged stems, leaves and blossoms in all colours.

When the abstract alternation between nihilism and salvation becomes less interesting, through repetition, the rational self-consciousness may sublate despair, regaining its power of negativity in critique. Faith in heaven rediscovers its estranged love in a concrete, determinate life that flourishes freed of resentment. Surprised delight at the new replaces the impoverished ecstasy of salvation. Concrete sadness – which can be shared – replaces the solipsism and devastation of metaphysical tragedy. This sublation of grace allows one to comport oneself gracefully, and to receive and express the happiness and sadness of everyday life.

Instead of the loneliness of the false infinite, the fanatic becomes human again by loving finite beings in the knowledge that they will pass, and, when they do, by shedding tears of pain. Not alone, but with another who recognises that pain, and whose recognition facilitates self-recognition. Shared is the first smile that breaks through tears, and the first laugh to come after.

It is to walk with elated footfall to a lover’s house, and to take deeper pleasure in every finite minute spent in their room, where time is, for a moment, infinite. It is to feel cold together before the heater has warmed space, to enjoy their cooking even when it hasn’t lived up to their standards, to wake up together with the same hangover.

More fiercely do we fight for those finite beings we love knowing that they will be lost. More heaven do we find in finitude, knowing that in those glittering moments when two affirm their love for each other, going beyond their limits, they touch the infinite in the other’s being. From this dance comes a fleeting third: Eros. And, now past, it is preserved as recollection, which is already negation. And perhaps also in literary representation:

It was a hand resting on a lover’s calf, feeling her fine hair stand on end as time slowed for the first – but not the last – time.

It was when two lovers kissed under a humming orange streetlight; the stars held time still while a rift opened in the road and the earth freely gave its wealth as two incompletely divine beings joined the gods for a moment.

Once no longer a fanatic, one may learn to become a lover.

 

 

Thesis Ten

The standpoint of Marxist materialism was that of the state; the standpoint of absolute idealism is absolute spirit, or, the spiritual self-knowledge of a culture that has grasped its concept.

Addition – Towards a reformation of Marxism

When Lukács intellectually reified the decision of the sovereign, he revealed a deeper truth encoded within Marx’s failed critique of Hegel. This deeper truth – both crucial to Marx’s breakthrough, and his limit – is that Marx articulated the political theology of the abstractly free state founded in bourgeois property relations. To grasp this insight, Marxism must reconcile the content of its truth with the form of its self-consciousness. That is, it must become speculative Marxism.

This reformed Marxism will re-cognise the historic and social determinants of its estranged truth insofar as it overcomes mythology, dogma and fanaticism. This will liberate us from the Marxist tradition, which presently hangs over the heads of Marxists not so much like a nightmare, but like a bored East German censor listlessly and inconsistently dictating what is or isn’t permitted. In return for giving itself over to the absolute negativity of the speculative method, Marxism will re-collect its tradition, but in rational form, rather than as leaden inheritance.

The tradition will cease to be dead; it will become a self-certain culture that relates freely and critically to its patrimony. Reformed Marxism will contribute to a political philosophy of a concretely free state.

To speculatively affirm Marxism requires us to express its truth in light of its opposition. This, as Hegel explained in the Logic, is the nature of speculative thought,

which consists solely in grasping the opposed moments in their unity. Each moment actually shows that it contains its opposite within itself and that in this opposite it is united with itself; thus the affirmative truth is this immanently active unity, the taking together of both thoughts, their infinity – the relation to self which is not immediate but finite.

So, what opposites are revealed by the speculative critique of Marxism? The Marxist critique of bourgeois politics asserts that the state is the false idealism of bourgeois civil society. This simultaneously posits civil society as substantial, and the state as insubstantial, thus implying the possibility of an ideal politics following the destruction of the state and the liberation of civil society. In this vision, communist civil society becomes absolutely positive as politics is diffused everywhere, no longer monopolised by a state that represents the domination of the bourgeoisie as a universal law of freedom. That is, in the Marxist vision, communism is the absolute immediacy of civil society, liberated from bourgeois rule by a state which is not a state; a state that has withered away.

This is why, ultimately, Marxism is anti-political: in communist civil society, the political sphere is supposed to be everywhere – and is therefore nowhere. This is indeed a liberation from every problem of politics: what need is there, in a society where politics is reduced to administration, for opposed parties?

Bourgeois politics also aims at the immediacy of civil society, but a civil society of commodity-producing and -exchanging property owners, which it realises via practical reason: bourgeois realpolitik. Marxism differs from bourgeois pragmatism in that it opposes the bourgeoisie, in the name of proletarian practice and realpolitik. To attain their desired civil society, the bourgeoisie needs to capture and run the state, or at least to outsource the job to suitable stand-ins. The Marxists understand that to abolish bourgeois civil society, their state must be abolished.

Yet because Marxists represent their vocation as that of the proletariat, and disavow any connection between their project and the bourgeois state and civil society they oppose, they neglect to think about how they could write a better constitution and laws. Instead, the major contributions to Marxist political theory have all centred around winning power, for the proletariat, of course – and its party. When Marx turned Hegel’s Philosophy of Right on its head, he opened the way for a proletarian Machiavelli: Gramsci was to Lenin as Niccolò was to Piero Soderini.

If, however, we refuse to render communism as a transcendent and unknowable telos, then we can begin to articulate the positive content of communism. In fact, Marx already gestured to this in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, when he suggested that ‘crude and thoughtless communism’ immediately negates capitalist private property relations by universalising them. By abolishing private ownership of capital and transforming the state into the universal capitalist, crude socialism both realises bourgeois civil society absolutely, and posits its other, the state, as immediately and absolutely negative. State capitalism, quite simply, is crude socialism. Capitalism was also crude in its early stages, and like it, crude socialism is something to be overcome. The genuine overcoming of crude communism – sophisticated communism, if you will – is republican communism. Crude, state-capitalist communism immediately negates bourgeois right by transforming the state into the universal capitalist. Insofar as it reasserts the right of the state over civil society, it is superior to the bourgeois configuration of law, which subordinates politics to a particular class, under the guise of universalism. But because crude communism does not permit a state capable of incorporating difference and mediation, it is incompatible with freedom, reason and democracy.

Crude communism is the immediate domination of a particular, national state bureaucracy, which is why it has always been politically inferior to bourgeois democracy. Republican communism, by contrast, re-cognises the elements of bourgeois right within socialism and communism, and thus, can reconcile with its own political logic. To win, Marxists must know and practice politics better than the bourgeoisie – and we must establish a freer state, that knows how to limit itself by instituting mediation and difference within its constitution and law.

Obviously, we’ll still need to do away with the private ownership of capital. This will not be peaceful. However, these insights make possible a Marxist Philosophy of Right, without which the socialist movement has no grounds upon which to claim that it will establish a freer constitution, more rational institutions, or a more democratic, post-capitalist relation between civil society and the state. Without understanding the concept of right, Marxism has no right to articulate the law that can replace the law born of bourgeois property relations. In place of the primacy of practical reason, speculative Marxism will elevate the political experience of the Left to the status of spiritual self-knowledge. Armed with a concept of justice, speculative Marxism will contribute to drafting a constitution for the Republic of Virtue.

 

 

Thesis Eleven

The revolutionary Marxists have changed the world unfreely; the point is to change it freely.

Addition – Marxism and the ought

Marxists uniformly praise the eleventh thesis. Hegelians are not so thrilled. I mean, just read the original. It’s patently obvious that Marx stops short at the ‘standpoint of the ought’. This is precisely where Fichte went wrong, according to Hegel. When the Marxists go out to change the world, to borrow Hegel’s words from the Encyclopedia Logic, a ‘limit is posited, it is surpassed, then again a limit, and so on endlessly.’ Marxist practice is repetitious, and the change they make is no change at all.

Instead of wasting our time with such ‘empty and merely transcendent things’, as Hegel describes the movement of finite beings, what philosophy should deal with ‘is always something concrete and absolutely present’: namely, the idea, which is infinite; and the true, as that which is in-itself infinite. That is to say, philosophy must grasp the ideality of the finite. As Hegel explains,

[t]he ideality of the finite is the chief proposition of philosophy, and every true philosophy is for that reason idealism. The only thing that matters is not to take as the infinite what is at once made into something particular and finite in the determination of it.

What bearing could this have on Marx’s famous eleventh thesis? It’s simple. Hitherto, Marxists have changed the world, yes. But they have not done so rationally, freely or consciously. This is why, in the end, the way of the world won. And in turn, it changed Marxism, transforming it from a genuinely revolutionary mass movement into a vaguely ridiculous rump.

The problem isn’t that Marx’s criticism of Hegel was inept, although it obviously was. Rather, Marxism failed because it attempted something new. Marx believed capitalism had made it possible to achieve the historic telos of concrete, substantial, universal freedom. As did Hegel, for that matter. Only, Marx set about actualising this telos in practice, while Hegel quite consciously limited himself to philosophy. Well and good; nothing in speculative philosophy commands that a philosopher must make politics their vocation, but nothing in speculative philosophy recommends against it either. And in fairness to Marx, when all is said and done, the Hegelians can’t claim to have penned the program of a movement that won labour rights, the welfare state and universal suffrage – not to mention the national liberation of millions.

To return to the point, after 180 years (if we mark 1844 as the birthday of Marxism), despite their dearly-held past triumphs, the Marxists have obviously and spectacularly failed. They have also failed to develop the intellectual tools – concepts – with which to discuss their failure. Most Marxist discourse is obscure, academic, pedantic and antiquarian. Some of them still genuinely believe mid-century British Trotskyism has the answers.

They need philosophy. They need it in order to understand the promise they offer the world in mythological form. They need it to elevate their political theology to self-consciousness: that is, to philosophy. They need it so they can critically sift through their legacy, taking responsibility for what they reject and preserve. They need it to make better decisions about actions they will take in the future. They need it to free themselves from the dead weight of their own traditions. In short, if Marxists want to change the world, they need to stop bullshitting and start thinking. They will soon find that theory and practice are not so sharply opposed as Marx and Lukács once presumed.

 

 

Thesis Twelve

When he limited himself to eleven theses on Feuerbach, Marx stopped short at the ‘ought’ of praxis, and represented the practical idea as a universal anti-philosophy, instead of speculatively, in its connection with the theoretical idea. This led to two mistakes.

1. Marx announced that the role of philosophy had come to an end. Philosophers have disproven this by continuing to ply their trade. History has disproven it by making possible philosophical thinking. The end of philosophy is also disproven by Marx’s own life work, which is implicitly philosophical. Had Marx announced that the role of philosophy had come to an end for him, he would have been on safer ground. And besides, when this or that Marxist argues that the historical rôle of philosophy has ended, one gets the feeling that they want to ban philosophy they disagree with.

2. By stopping short at the ‘ought’, Marx’s theses concluded with abstract negativity. They did not rise to determinate negativity, which is equally the articulation of a new, positive content.

As the saying goes, hic Rhodus, hic Salta.

Addition – An allegory of good government

This positive content of communism can only be known rationally by traversing the abstract oppositions of the representative thought of bourgeois society and its critics. In this essay, however, I have not attempted to do this. Rather, this essay is intended as a polemical prolegomena to such a task; as a Purgatorio. Consequently, it concludes with a vision of earthly paradise. This is apt because, shy of the actualisation of reason, knowledge of absolute ethical life – communism – must contain an element of the ought; of utopian representation. And because a speculative image ought to know itself as an image, it is allegorical.

The speculative utopia defends the best of this world, and even when fighting bitterly, it is restrained because it accepts its knowledge is aporetic, the result of having faced the negativity of its self-knowledge. None of this precludes action. However, whoever acts must be willing to hear judgement, to apologise, and to promise otherwise when they have been wrong.

The principle of a republic formed in the sunlight of recognition and concrete freedom should be the true infinite, in the shape of a substantial, self-certain spirit. Its telos is flourishing life, and it will sustain a many-sided, cultivated and active polity, in the Greek sense, only with the privilege of citizenship universalised. The true infinite, as a self-certain shape of spirit, is a world peopled by individuals cultivated towards self-reflexive thought, combined in communities, governed by freely self-given laws that may be tested, re-made and improved. It is a world of patiently built institutions that mediate the constitutive antinomies of our society and our soul, while refusing to conceal their aporias. It is a culture of philosophical knowing, of aesthetic experience and creation and of deliberative, restorative justice. It is life that knows itself as life. It is a dinner party shared with friends in which each contributes freely and gladly.

The point is to develop an economic law that abolishes the private ownership of capital and the exploitation of labour power by democratising ownership, production and exchange, granting us material security without ecological ruin, so we can lie on the grass, looking up at a leaf in a tree while it fractures into a thousand geometric facets, marvelling that such beauty can exist while realising that the universe sees itself through our eyes. The point is to cultivate people who will be generous and thoughtful as strangers, friends, lovers and family members; people who won’t flee from the ‘plagues of trouble’ that, as Plato suggested in the Phaedrus, we inherit as children. The point is to build a society, political and economic, that grants us positive freedom: kindness and patience should govern our time, and generosity should govern our space. The point is to create structures that can bear our extremes, help us learn to mediate them, and, when we fail, deal with us respectfully and with care. The point is to build a polity whose constitution recognises the other in light of our own otherness, that upholds rights, not abstractly, but concretely, by recognising difference, while establishing customs, laws and democratic fora that can educate us as self-respecting, self-governing political actors. The point is to build a culture that will create architecture, music, poetry, literature, film – and every other art – that reaches for harmony, rhythm, composition, images and language with which we might share with each other our experiences in both their darkest and most resplendent forms, so we may recognise each other. And so that our creations, images, echoes and imprints live beyond us, conversing with new generations who will wonder what life meant to us, that we would create works that live anew in their different-yet-similar hearts. The point is to create life that can value itself as life: culture.

A republic of virtue should eschew political perfection bought by resentful redemption, and instead together author laws, institutions and traditions that allow us to face negativity, subjective and objective, without denying brokenness; without abstract grounds and estranged ends. To consider our own voids, to cultivate the voices with which our unconsciouses might speak, in rhymes, dreams, images or analysis. To become better, not perfect. To step lightly when causing unavoidable pain – as when ending a relationship well – and to at all costs take responsibility for mistakes we have made. The Greek virtues of cultivation and flourishing, the Christian spirit of forgiveness and universal love, the Enlightened notions of reason and freedom, the socialist commitment to solidarity and equality, the avant-garde delight in subversion and free desire – united, extended to all and made concrete.

How better could we fill our time and space than by the light of our incomplete divinity, admiring the soft, wispy hairs on the back of a lover’s neck as they lie in the mid-morning sun; and to wake them gently and see their first smile. Amidst the void, a garden.

Hitherto, Marxists have only dreamed of a republic of virtue.

The point is to awake and create one.

Daniel Andrés López lives in Melbourne, Australia and is the author of Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute. He is a Commissioning Editor for Jacobin, lectures in political philosophy at La Trobe University and is working on a second book concerned with Gillian Rose and philosophy of love.