请将“In a 1976 postscript to his book on William Morris, E. P. Thompson candidly expressed his admiration for the critical acumen of Miguel Abensour, whom he credited for shaking Marxists out of their dogmatic slumber.1 Thompson was here reporting on Abensour’s “remarkable study” on utopian thought in the communist and socialist traditions, and specifically on his break with the self-confirming theses proposed by Marxists in their reception of William Morris’s socialist writings.2 By refusing to explain Morris’s thought through the categories of Marxist theory, by emphasizing instead the deliberately open and anti-authoritarian form of Morris’s utopian writing, Abensour succeeded in taking the increasingly rhetorical question of how Marxists should criticize Morris over to the more acute question of how Marxism should criticize itself.3 At stake, then, was not the local issue of the Marxist domestication of Morris. Writing against the gamut of Marxist positivism that reached a pitch with Althusser, Abensour offered a critical diagnosis of the scientific pretensions of Marxism. As with Althusser, the order of the day was to read Marx anew. But rather than place Marx’s revolutionary “science” in a position of rupture with the humanist and utopian traditions, Abensour detailed Marx’s communism and his critique of utopian socialism from within a multifaceted strain of utopian self-criticism. In Abensour’s view, Marx did not stand over utopian socialism in judgment as its Owl of Minerva. Rather, Marx intervened in a diverse revolutionary movement that at once included and transcended him. From this perspective, Marx’s perspicacious criticisms of utopian socialism helped shape a “new utopian spirit” that sought to resist the conversion of utopia from negativity to positivity - that is, the turn from the indetermination and the multiplication of the fields of revolutionary struggle to the adventitious blueprints of political sectarianism. Far from participating in the genesis of authoritarian regimes, the “new utopian spirit” thus functioned as a salubrious reminder of the dangers involved in rendering emancipation in the terms of a coercively unified knowledge and power. As Abensour later pointed out in an essay on democracy and utopia, the stars of this constellation arguably never ceased to shine in twentieth-century reconfigurations of utopian thought: Pierre Leroux, William Morris, and Gustav Landauer find their vindication in the work of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas.4
An effort to follow the movement of Marx’s thought against the current of political orthodoxy equally structures Democracy Against the State. As the reader may readily ascertain, a fresh look at Marx here again coheres with a broader, if somewhat occulted, tendency of thought. Of course, the object and the finality of criticism here differs, since Abensour considers Marx’s political writings, in particular the 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, as activating a “Machiavellian moment” that reappears in modern theory (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lefort, Hannah Arendt). Nonetheless, a common perspective and cluster of concerns guide Abensour’s writing, so that different objects of inquiry - from Marx’s “true democracy” to Claude Lefort’s “savage democracy” - operate as heuristic devices for bringing a heterodox modality of political questioning back into the fray. Just as Abensour’s formulation of the “new utopian spirit” placed revolutionary utopianism at equal distance from Marxism and the anti-Marxist platitudes of the nouveaux philosophes, a certain conception of democracy is here set against the either/or that would have us choose between Marxist and liberal ideologies. Abensour consistently reveals an excess of politics over political reality, a utopian “more” that makes politics synonymous with permanent critique. It is as though, far from being done with the question of emancipation, as the sycophants of the “end of an illusion” would have it, the debacle of historical Marxism, no less than the contemporary consensus that kneads all thought and practice into the mold of liberal “democracy,” were to have the consequence of pushing the most far-reaching theses of Marx’s political thinking to the fore. The point, as such, is not to engage on the terrain of the history of ideas in order to recover a “true Marx” hitherto misrepresented, misinterpreted, or ignored. While a revaluation of Marx’s political thought is demanded by Democracy Against the State, Abensour’s hypothesis is that we have arrived at a historical and theoretical juncture - as it were, a new figure of the “Machiavellian moment” - that allows us to read Marx as critically addressing our present political predicament.
Can we really think the Machiavellian and the utopian together? This may be judged an at best paradoxical endeavor. We need only recall The Prince, Chapter XV: “anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall.” But neither should we lose sight of the “constitutive principle” that upheld Abensour’s new utopian spirit: “the critical resumption of and the recourse to heresy against the legacy and the structure of an orthodoxy.”5 Killing two birds with one stone, Abensour’s reference to Machiavelli signals “recourse to heresy against the legacy “of both democracy and Marx. A normative critique of the State - for Marx, the State’s disappearance is the fulfillment of democracy - is brought face-to-face with a permanent struggle that defines the specificity of the political realm in its finitude. The anti-politics of the “democratic State” (consensual liberalism) and the meta-politics of “fulfilled sociality” (the Communist and totalitarian mystification that fashions society beyond division) are in this way equally unsettled. The tensions implicit in this double-edged approach to political institution build the inner logic and fuel the movement of Democracy Against the State. The contentious wedlock of Abensour’s “Marx-Machiavelli device” is meant to bring us to the heart of the question of politics proper, right to the sphinx-like enigma called “true democracy.”6
At bottom, the “Machiavellian moment” in Marx represents a twofold movement: it has the positive function of designating a return to an Aristotelian conception of the human being as zoon politikon, and it has the negative function of criticizing the practical and theoretical alienation of this political nature. Starting from the humanist rehabilitation of civic life, from the revaluing of the human being as a self-determining political actor and historical subject, Abensour reveals a dialectical relationship between Marx’s early radical liberalism and the more revolutionary position attained in 1843 through the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. In Marx’s 1842 writings for the Rheinische Zeitung , the center of gravity of the State is found within itself, in that the concept of the political State is secularized in its independence from both the theological realm and the ideological encroachments of private property. Yet the logic of secularization and the autonomy of political affairs compel Marx to relocate the center of the State’s gravitation outside itself, insofar as the political self-consciousness of the demos signals the self-consciousness of an instituting power that is already overcoming the sham mediations of the State. Marx’s political thinking thus winds up radicalizing the republican model of the zoon politikorv. emancipating political reason from the vestigial metaphysics of bourgeois reason also means freeing the citizen of politics from the mystification of the State. The problem, then, is to think the conditions of this new political temporality, that is, to think the very indetermination of the democratic institution of society as a self-conscious focal-point for politics.
It is common coin that Marx himself made very little explicit use of Machiavelli. At the risk of stating the obvious, Abensour’s reference to a “Machiavellian moment” has more to do with Marx’s attempt to rediscover, or to reconstruct, a politics derived from classical and republican sources than with a historical account of the role of Machiavelli in Marx’s thought. The Machiavellian moment in fact functions as a test for Marx’s thought in a very straightforward sense: at issue is defining the respects in which Marx’s political writings constitute a legitimate figure of civic humanism, in roughly J. G. A. Pocock’s determination of the term.7 That is, at issue is the extent to which Marx thinks political affairs against theology, without then making the logic of a secular, public realm subordinate to some other meta-historical norm. In this way, Abensour reveals in Marx a thinking of politics distinct from any metaphysics of history, whether it take the cover of the antagonism of productive forces and the mode of production which leads ineluctably to the emancipation of the proletariat, or whether it be a neo-Hegelian “end of history” in the “sufficiently” rational actuality of laws and institutions in “democratic capitalism.” By contrast, the wager of Marx’s civic humanism would have the advantage of bringing politics back to the temporal^ ity proper of the public realm, to the demands that the institution of political equality in a res publica make here and now on human freedom.
Yet Abensour pushes the civic paradigm of political temporality by applying it to Marx, and notably to the worry that political “representation” itself betrays a tendency of political power to withdraw from its finitude - from the contingency of public accountability - and to claim for itself a legitimacy it in reality lacks. Or more exactly, Marx himself tests the classical republican paradigm as he gains a more thoroughgoing comprehension of its inner logic and requirements. In Abensour’s lights, this inflection of the Machiavellian moment represents the great accomplishment of the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The passage from the criticism of religion to the criticism of politics culminates in a theory of political institution that makes the self-criticism of emancipation an indelible principle of politics. The Machiavellian problem of a “real humanism” that takes its bearings from actual relations of force here resounds by anticipation with the question raised by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “Does all power tend to ‘autonomize itself,’ and is this tendency an inevitable destiny in all human society?”8
This dual character of the Machiavellian moment - as that which tests Marx, and as that which is tested by Marx - is important to keep in view, for it guides Abensour’s study from beginning to end; it directs the care with which Abensour brings out the nuances of Marx’s thought, as well as the constancy with which he thinks Marx’s early writings independently of extraneous interpretations (not least of which are Marx’s own). It is no surprise, then, that Abensour’s close reading of the 1843 Critique has only a polemical relationship to the evolutionist dimension of Marx’s later writings, where the political realm is subordinated to the economic infrastructure of society and its laws of development. But above all, the dual character of the Machiavellian moment emphasizes the tensions proper to Marx’s texts from 1842 to 1844. It is as though the Machiavellian moment in Marx were continually threatened by a facile resolution of the forces on which it depends, which in turn produced a renewed effort by Marx to clarify the stakes at hand. The criticism of religion must be wary of a religion of politics, just as the criticism of politics must be wary of a criticism that has ceased to be political. Indeed, it is precisely by means of this wariness that the dialectical movement of Marx’s thought opens and reopens the most decisive inroads to a Machiavellian moment.”翻译为中文