请将“In the case of Maximilien Rubel, the voice is more explicitly political. Rubel’s rejection of any attempt to link Marx and Marxism is so emphatic that he actually winds up presenting Marx himself as the original and most essential critic of Marxism. Once the author of Capital is freed from his mythical role as the founding father of Marxism and as the progenitor of the October “Revolution” - the transformation of Marx’s critical thought into party and statist ideology - he reemerges as what he never ceased to be: the theorist of workers’ self-emancipation, responding to the double ethical exigency of utopia and revolution.2
As we observe the traditionalist form the return to political philosophy has taken in France, there is some concern that the return to a non-Marxist Marx may ultimately lead to a neutralization of his thought. Might the next step be Marx’s integration into the academic corpus, with his thought safely severed from its roots in revolt and messianism? This concern, expressed by Jacques Derrida, is understandable, but there is nothing inevitable about this neutralization, because the return to Marx at the same time raises once again the question and the necessity of emancipation.3
In what follows, I will side with this type of return, which in truth is more like a reactivation than a return. I will focus in particular on an outstanding essay of Marx’s that was published well after the establishment of Marxism: the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, written very likely in the summer of 1843 and published by David Riazanov in 1927. In this text Marx criticizes Hegel’s Philosophy of Right virtually line-by-line, specifically §§261-313 in the third section of part III devoted to the State. My goal is less to propose a new overall interpretation of Marx’s 1843 Critique than to find an answer to two essential questions: What status does Marx give to the political realm when he attempts to free the political logic specific to it from the grips of Hegelian logicality? And what type of society does Marx have in mind when he envisions a “true democracy,” a democracy that would develop in tandem with the disappearance of the State? It is as though Marx, by raising the question of true democracy, were at once taking over for himself and pushing to its extreme the enigma brought to the world with the French Revolution.
This brings us back to the rift between Marx and Marxism. For it was by proposing an analysis of our contemporaneous Machiavellian moment - which may be considered as establishing itself through a critique of Marxism in order to rediscover a political realm lost either in philosophies of history or in scientistic projects - that I first became aware that an earlier Machiavellian moment already existed in Marx. And this moment was not unconnected with the adventure of the Young Hegelian movement, which is one of the sources, or testing grounds, of political modernity. We need only recall that in the span of just a few years, this movement gave birth to radical political liberalism (Rüge, Marx), socialism and communism (Moses Hess, Engels, Marx), anarchism (Bakunin, and perhaps also Stirner) and Zionism (Moses Hess).
That said, my aim is not to provide yet another rereading of Marx in light of some external referent, but to reactivate his major concepts and insights by following his own line of thought. If we consider the relationship of Marx’s thinking to Machiavelli and Spinoza, we find an ongoing questioning of the political realm, a practical will to emancipate the res publica from the theological-political and from the vestiges of feudalism.
How does Marx’s text - in which the notions of the political and of democracy seem to be so strongly linked - hold up when confronted with the examinations of his most scrupulous critics? I have in mind Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, and Theodor Adorno - critics who were respectful of Marx in the same sense that Benjamin Constant respected Rousseau even as he criticized him. Is it true that Marx was inclined brevitatis causa to neglect the specificity of politics by focusing on social forces, or to derive politics from economics, or to cloister himself in a sort of quietism as soon as the matter of ending domination was actually posed? In Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes: “Economics is said to precede domination, which must not be deduced otherwise than economically . . . The revolution desired by him [Engels] and Marx was the overthrow of the economic conditions of society as a whole, rather than a change in society’s political form, in the rules of the game of domination.”4 But is it not more true to say that true democracy can be examined and understood only in terms of radical political concerns and the unceasing questioning implied by them?
Democracy against the State: this title is deliberately paradoxical in the literal sense of the term.
Its first target is the doxa of those partisans of democracy for whom democracy and State go together like two peas in a pod. They identify the two so easily that they seem to have no problem speaking of “the democratic State.” Yet the linking of these terms, which seems so natural, does not go without saying. Why would there be any inherent affinity between the State and democracy when the latter was born in the ancient Greek cities? The notion of the “democratic State” has enabled State sovereignty to appeal alternately to both democratic and authoritarian modalities of political power, depending on circumstances or the whims of leaders.
But is democracy, or can it be reduced to, the modalities of State power, that is, to a mere method of government? If this is not the case, if, on the contrary, democracy is essentially a political institution of human sociality, then tensions, conflicts and even contradictions emerge between democracy and the State.
What if we reverse the terms and tackle the question from the standpoint of democracy instead of that of the State? Can the expression “statist democracy” be imagined without difficulty? The opposition between political democracy and “social democracy” is easily conceivable. Even the pleonasm “popular democracy,” which was turned into such a cruel joke, can be understood. But “statist democracy” immediately strikes us as incongruous. In this resistance of language itself, it is as though a hidden antagonism, a latent, subterranean antagonism between democracy and the State were revealed, making it apparent that the State is definitely not the best form for democracy. Our society has adopted a peculiar way of functioning that is close to repression: as soon as a situation presents itself as a problem, it becomes an unsurpassable horizon - or worse, an insurmountable obstacle. Hence the habit of forgetting, or of hiding, the breakthroughs that shake up the limits that have been set on the possible. When we pause to consider the State, who still will debate the good news documented by Pierre Clastres under the title of Society Against the State?
The title of this book also deliberately contradicts the doxa of the opponents of democracy - or “democratism,” as they sometimes call it. Despite their diametrically opposed perspective, they too unquestioningly identify democracy with the State. They reject democracy in the same breath as the State, and they do so all the more readily because they remain oblivious to the mutual antagonism between democracy and the State, democracy’s inherent tendency to rise spontaneously against the State. But the invitation to envision democracy as arising over the dead body of the State is one of the great merits of Marx’s 1843 manuscript; Marx creates an opening that must be explored, so that we can access this extraordinary form of political experience and confront the enigma of true democracy.
If Marx, like many of his contemporaries struggling for emancipation, was tormented throughout his life by specters, he also never ceased to contend with enigmas. Moses Hess, Marx’s collaborator on the Rheinische Zeitung, offered in his article from 19 April 1842 one of the best summaries of this enigmatic horizon of the nineteenth century:
The French Revolution entrusted modern times with the task of finding the solution to this enigma. Liberty and equality, this is what I want, declared the world revolution (. . .) Yet it was not as easy as it had originally seemed. The first primitive, natural, crude form of liberty and equality - sans-culottisme - did not last long: the Empire was the sickness engendered by the Revolution, and the Restoration was its tomb. Only then did the real history of the enigma begin, which is the history of bringing about its resolution.,What was the July Monarchy, if not the first reasonable and intellectual attempt to realize liberty and equality? (...) But when we consider the great changes that have taken place since 1830 in the French, English or German nations, we have good grounds for hoping that the enigma has taken a step toward its solution.5
The difference between the nineteenth and the twentieth century is that the former believed that it possessed, or could possess, the solution, whereas the latter makes the enigma its dwelling, forewarned that the historical and political domains are destined to remain endlessly in question.”翻译为中文