请将“If one granted these implications, if this inter-expressive reciprocity between true democracy and the essence of politics is granted, it will also be granted that - at least at this moment in the evolution of his thought, and regardless of whether this is to be blamed or praised - Marx cannot be said to deny politics.
One may then also grant that it is certainly legitimate to read the 1843 Critique - with the help of the Feuerbachian categories and the parallel between democracy and Christianity - as a work guided by Marx’s strong will to effect through Hegel (but this passage is not just any kind of passage) and against him a transition from the dogmatic essence of politics to its ethical or anthropological essence.
In this sense Marx, like Hess, can take the side of political atheism - but with this single but weighty difference: whereas Hess has a uniquely negative relation to politics, Marx is able to elaborate a critical relation such that he distinguishes the true from the false and thinks through the disappearance of the State qua advent of true democracy.
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Second characteristic: The relationship between the activity of the subject, the whole demos, and the objectification of the constitution is different in democracy than in other forms of State. This remains true even if, without knowing it, the sovereignty of these forms is also democratic in its essence.
In democracy this relationship expresses itself in an alternative articulation of the whole and the parts, and its result is also the basic distinctive criterion of democracy. In other words, the objectification of the constitution - the objectification of the demos in the form of a constitution - is in democracy the object of a reduction. This is one of the meanings of the proposition: “Man does not exist because of the law but rather the law exists for the good of man. Democracy is human existence, while in the other political forms man has only a legal existence. That is the fundamental difference of democracy.”16 In other words, it is in view of maintaining an adequate relation with its specific essence - law is the existence of man - that the constitution is subjected to a process of the reduction. We would be mistaken to confuse this reduction with an effacement or diminishing of the constitution. It seems, rather, that the reduction has two interrelated meanings: first, it is a reduction/resolution, in the Feuerbachian sense of the term. By responding to the question, “What is the essence of the subject that recognizes itself in the activity that, in this case, gives rise to the political object?”, and by its anti-dogmatic interpretative aim, the reduction has a liberating effect. But by reduction is also meant that once the objectification is brought back to the instituting subject and this recognition has occurred, it is necessary to reduce this objectification to what it is - a mere moment of a more global process - and to determine quite exactly the limits of the objectification in order better to control the theoretical and practical energy dispensed in the political realm. It is therefore because Marx has a high standard for what is at stake and for what takes place in the democratic constitution that he comes to see the reduction as necessary, since it alone assures the unfettered development of the actual operation. But what is this actual operation? Let us return to the formula stated above: democracy as a particular form of State (and not only as the truth of all forms of State) reveals the essence of every political constitution: “socialized man.” This proposition is all the more worth interpreting as it can easily be misunderstood as expressing a typically modern error. In Hannah Arendt’s terms, the Aristotelian definition of man as zoon politikon is nowadays understood in the sense of animal socialis, so that the political realm is mistakenly thought (and thus glossed over) in terms of the oikos instead of the polis.17
Yet the significance of the 1843 Critique, to the very extent that this text is indeed Machiavellian, is that it stays away from this modern tendency. We are not before a problematic of social right of the “society against the State” type, such that, with the advent of “socialized man,” the political constitution would disappear because it had become null and void. The problematic proposed by Marx is on the contrary specifically political, in that he offers a political theory of sovereignty as well as a philosophical thinking through of subjectivity. Against Hegel who, careful to fulfill the modern principle of subjectivity, makes man (in the figure of the prince) the State subjectivized, Marx argues that in democracy man as species-being, as the people, or as demos (the use of the Greek term is not superfluous) attains, in and through the State, his objectification. The proposition according to which democracy “makes the State man objectified” signifies that in this political form the State is the stage on which the figures of human social existence become objective. Man knows himself and recognizes himself as universal being - man is man only among men, to recall Fichte’s formula - only to the extent that he attains the political realm, only insofar as he participates fully in the political element. It is sub specie rei publicae and only as such that man reaches his destination as social being. The constitution acts simultaneously as a purifying and a disclosing element. Therefore the advent of societas^ far from rendering the civitas useless or obsolete, is itself the result of the civitas - it is by having attained the civitas that the emergence of the societas occurs. In other words, it is not because man is an “animal socialis” that he gives himself a constitu-tion; rather, it is by giving himself a constitution - because he is a zoon politikon - that he reveals himself actually to be “socialized man.” We should take matters further still. Upon close analysis, the political essence, socialized man, turns out in reality to be the essence of man. It can manifest itself to the extent that it frees itself, to the extent that it liberates itself quite specifically from the limits of family, civil society, and the determinations engendered by them. It is thus not through relations developed in civil society that man succeeds in fulfilling his social destination; rather, it is by struggling against these relations - by rejecting them politically in the name of citizenship in a political State - that he can regain his essence as species-being. The political mode of being leads, consequently, to the experience of the true universal existence, the essential experience of community, the unity of man with man. Subordinated to the principle of possession, bourgeois civil-society certainly produces links, but they remain marked by an irremediable contingency. Only the “unlinking” at the level of bourgeois civil-society, and the concomitant entrance into the political realm, allow for the experience of a species link. In his political role, Marx writes, “the member of civil society rids himself of his class, of his actual private position.”18 It is only in the political realm that the member of society “acquires significance as man. In other words, his character as a member of the State, as a social being, appears to be his human character.”19 The gap between the political realm and the social determinations grows even wider once the question of representation is examined. Distinguishing representation by estates from political representation - the modern principle - Marx emphasizes that it is not starting with the facticity and the social texture of civil society that there can be representation in the modern sense but, to the contrary, through their negation and through the negation of their determinations. Marx even goes so far as to conceive this accession to political existence, this political act, in the form of a decomposition of civil society, as a sort of de-socialization, one would be tempted to say, doubled by a veritable self-transcendence of bourgeois civil society - an ecstasy. “Its political act... is an ecstasy, an act of political society which causes a stir.”20 Thus, it is quite evidently in a context of discontinuity that Marx thinks the relations between the political and what presents itself as the social. The constitution, the political State, does not come to crown or to bring to a conclusion an imperfect sociability that would be in gestation in the family and civil society; rather, it places itself in a position of rupture with this inessential sociability. “Class in civil society has neither need - and therefore a natural impulse - nor politics for its principle. It is a division of the masses whose development is unstable and whose very structure is arbitrary and in no sense an organization.”21 Two moments are isolated in this political act which he defines as a total transubstantiation. In a first instance, civil society is put in brackets: “in this political act civil society must completely renounce itself as such, as unofficial class.”22 Second, there is the advent of “socialized man” in and through the political element: from within it society must “assert a part of its essence which not only has nothing in common with the actual civil existence of its essence, but directly opposes it.”23
The political site is thus constituted as a site of human mediation between man and man, and as the site of catharsis in relation to all the inessential links that keep man at a distance from man. We thereby arrive at the paradox that man experiences his species-being inasmuch as he turns from the contingency of his social existence to take on the being of citizenship, or rather, the necessary becoming of citizenship. In this sense, we may paraphrase a later declaration of Marx’s and say: the demos is political or is nothing. We should not forget that Marx suspected a German Aristotle incapable of distinguishing between man as social animal and man as a political animal. Only once the paradoxical character of the political act is properly emphasized is it possible to grasp the no less paradoxical operation of the reduction.”翻译为中文