请将“Now that the movement of Marx’s thought has been delineated and the founding subject named, the object of Marx’s criticism of Hegel comes in view. Marx wants to think the essence of the political realm - and this specification is key - from the viewpoint of the real subject as demos, and no longer, as Hegel does, in terms of a subject defined by the deployment of the Idea. Therefore, far from giving in to some sociological “tech ne,” Marx’s project is to break with Hegel’s logic, and simultaneously to unveil the specificity of the political realm in terms of the activity of the political subject. If Marx maintains, then, the idea of the State as an organism, he criticizes Hegel no less for having done only one part of the journey by replacing the question of the political realm’s essence with the deployment of logic. For the crux of the matter is to question the political realm. If we confront the critical essay of 1843 with other writings of the period - the correspondence with Ruge, The Jewish Question, and so on - we may notice that Marx’s fundamental preoccupation during this period, as much theoretical as practical, is to disentangle successfully the essence of modern politics, or more precisely, the historically specific figure of the modern State as a political State. In this respect, the criticism that Marx levels against Hegel’s presentation of the Idea of the constitution is particularly significant. Hegel does not think the constitution as the development of the State that determines the different powers that make it up in their particular essence (legislative power, governmental power), and he avoids the task of showing how, tested by the real differences of each power, the political organism as such can be constituted. Once again, the Idea is made subject, the different powers are grasped only as its result. For. Marx, by contrast, the presupposition, the subject, are the real differences or the various aspects of the political constitution; and it is only starting from the relations between these singular essences that one may question the relationship between the idea of the constitution and that of the organism. Marx consequently accuses Hegel of not thinking the political realm, of missing it altogether: the movement of Hegelian thought corresponds only to a logical schema, that of the relations of the Idea and its moments, without any grounding in the political element, without confronting any of its determinations. “The point of departure is the abstract Idea whose development in the State is the political constitution. Thus it is a question not of the political idea, but rather of the abstract Idea in the political element ... he [Hegel] tells us absolutely nothing about the specific idea of the political constitution.”12 Hegel’s determinations are not thought out because they are not thought in their specific essence; his propositions are just as appropriate to the animal organism as to the political organism. The logical idea functioning everywhere the same, be it in nature or the State, Hegel misses the essence of the political realm and the political essence of each power in particular, since the different powers are determined by the nature of the concept and not by their own nature as political powers. Hegel’s philosophy of right therefore offers only the false appearance of a real knowledge of the political realm. “He does not develop his thought out of what is objective [aus dem Gegenstand], but what is objective in accordance with a readymade thought which has its origin in the abstract sphere of logic. It is not a question of developing the determinate idea of the political constitution, but of giving the political constitution a relation to the abstract Idea, of classifying it as a member of its (the Idea’s) life history.”13 Marx concludes that an explanation that fails to provide the differentia specifica is not an explanation. By having failed to do justice to a dialectics of political experience, Hegel could only construe the State according to logical-metaphysical determinations. “Thought is not conformed to the nature of the State, but the State to a ready made system of thought.”14 To construct this organic unity, that is, to put this historically constituted - and problematic - unity to the test, the deployment of a logical definition is hardly adequate. In a first instance, a quasi-phenomenological description of the different powers must be offered: “The various powers each have a different principle, although at the same time they are all equally real.”15 It is necessary, moreover, to locate the collisions and the antagonisms between these different powers and to develop their unity neither in an imaginary realm situated beyond real conflicts, nor in the denial of conflict, but precisely through the conflict of the different powers, for it is by their confrontation that their real unity may come about.
In Marx’s terms, the philosophical labor here consists in allowing for the embodiment of thought in political determinations. Bringing to light what Marx himself designates as “the logic of the political body” demands unveiling the eidos of political affairs in a sort of permanent confrontation between “the political element” itself and the eidos of the forces that, in their complex and differentiated game - political energy being the specific nature of legislative power, the practical energy of governmental power - constitute the modern State as distinct from the city of antiquity and the Middle Ages.
In this sense the ceaseless intertwining in Marx’s investigations of the polemical with the affirmative is fundamentally geared toward finding an answer to the question: What is the differentia specifica of the political organism, once the philosopher no longer thinks the political world according to the logical idea of the organism but instead according to the specificity of the “political element” ? Here the questions come fast and furious, or rather, in order to get at the question of the specific difference itself, that question must be posed in a particular mode. How does the political element in its specificity lead to developing the idea of totality? What becomes of the idea of the organism once it is referred to this particular subject, to the theoretical and practical energy of the demos? Can we perceive here an alternative form of totality that breaks with the logic of identity? In short, is the idea of system maintained despite the change of subject, or does this change result in undermining the very idea of the system?
It is at the site of “true democracy,” which here figures as a sort of extreme point that plays out the logic of political affairs, where we may take our bearings to find an answer to this question.
If we accept my reading hypothesis, it seems that the 1843 Critique, despite the distance taken from the independence of the concept of the State, is not situated outside the Machiavellian moment and in a sense confirms Ernest Grassi’s thesis which, starting from an analysis of the 1843 Critique and its Feurbachian roots, points to a neglected relationship between Marx and the civic humanism of Italy. Grassi discerns at least two areas of affinity: a same denunciation of every form of a priori philosophy that privileges the dialectic of the Idea to the detriment of the world of real human beings; a same primacy of the terrestrial, and that in both cases results in thinking history in a new way, even if historicity is thought according to different activities.16 In reading Marx’s 1843 text and noticing the “return” of political affairs that drives it, we might then judge that his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right confronts us with another figure of the Machiavellian moment, one in which, in the name of Machiavelli, we are being introduced, as Merleau-Ponty says, to the “milieu proper to politics.”17
THE FOUR CHARACTERISTICS OF TRUE
DEMOCRACY
We may now return to the enigma of “true democracy” and attempt an interpretation of the formula: “The modern French have conceived it thus: In true democracy the political State would disappear. This is correct inasmuch as qua political State, qua constitution it is no longer equivalent to the whole.”1 These phrases are, as previously noted, indeed enigmatic: Marx invites us to think a paradoxical situation such that the disappearance of the political State would only occur in and by the full self-attainment of a political community that has reached its truth. In other words, the question is raised as to how the disappearance of the State could coincide with the advent of a political form that, in 1843, Marx views as the consummate political form. The stakes are not slight, since we here witness for the first time the theme of the disappearance of the State together with - and it is well worth emphasizing this point - the contrast between the political State and democracy. Echoes of this theme may be heard throughout Marx’s work: in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Marx evokes the post-revolutionary classless society and declares that in such a society “there will be no more political power properly so-called”;2 in the Civil War in France (1871), and in 1875, in the critique of the program of the German workers’ party, the disappearance of the State is thought more in terms of an inversion-transformation than as a simple negation: “Freedom consists in converting the State from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinated to it . . . The question then arises: what transformation will the State undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present State functions?”3 I have suggested that Marx’s project in the 1843 Critique is to think the essence of the political from the viewpoint of the real subject as demos. This is to say that research bearing on the essence of the political realm and research bearing on true democracy coincide necessarily, or even amount to the same. To question the essence of the political realm is to raise the question democracy; to grasp the specificity of democracy in relation to all other forms of regime amounts to confronting the very logic of political affairs. It indeed seems that in this text Marx adopts for himself the equivalence stated by Leibniz, “democracy or politics.”4 True democracy - by which is to be understood democracy that has reached its truth as a form of politeia - is politics par excellence, the blossoming of the political principle, its apotheosis. Consequently, to understand the logic of true democracy is to grasp the logic of political affairs. The quest for the essence of the political realm, as much as the choice of democracy as the form capable of presenting the secret of that essence, are hardly minor decisions for Marx. At the very least they testify to a complex thinking of the political realm - the work of radical criticism is not to be confused with simple negation - as well as to an investigation into the status of the political realm that is all the more solid as it seems to be developed in a triangular relationship between Hegel, Moses Hess, and Spinoza.”翻译为中文