www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, MAY 2003
Essay Article
Marxist-Humanism, Critical Theory, and the quest for radical subjectivity
by Tom More The contemporary climate of philosophical discourse casts a pall of suspicion on the philosophy of the subject and the philosophy of history. Jean-Francois Lyotard's injunction against grand narratives and meta-narratives has broad currency in the new dispensation of "postmetaphysical thinking." Within Critical Theory, deeper than Jürgen Habermas's criticism of French postmodern thought is his agreement with this dispensation.(1) In this respect, he is a "Kantian" and not a "Hegelian." However, whether this figure of stepping back from '"Hegel" to "Kant" counts as philosophical progress is an open question. The deeply engrained residues of Kantian dualism that show up in the series of dualisms that characterize Habermasian Critical Theory also help to explain Habermas's rapprochement with liberalism, which some of us have come to think of as a kind of betrayal of the radicalism that once upon a time inspired it in its inception. At just this post-Kantian juncture or impasse, the figure of Hegel looms large. And standing on the shoulders of this giant, Marx looms large. It was the singular achievement of the founder of Marxist-Humanism, Raya Dunayevskaya, to have re-created the dialectical relationship between Hegelian philosophy and Marxism, most recently made available to us in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY.(2) This volume is so multifaceted that I have chosen to focus on just one theme, but the theme itself is so grand--in the very sense that Lyotard criticized--that I cannot do it justice here. This is the theme of the renewal of the philosophy of the subject that, at least by intention, aims to complete the radicalism of the critique of the bourgeois subject by being genuinely post-bourgeois and even revolutionary. Douglas Kellner and others have recently articulated the need within Critical Theory to come back to the question of the subject again.(3) The publication of THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY coincides perfectly with the emerging sense of this demand. DOES THE LEFT HAVE AN IDEA? George Lukács' theory of imputed class-consciousness, or the theory of the vanguard party, having essentially gone the way of the USSR, discloses both the danger and the failure of proletarian romanticism. The conception of the proletariat as a collective, world-historical subject is now generally held to be as fictive as the philosophy of the subject itself. In fact, one of the distinguishing features of contemporary left academic radicalism is its celibate relationship with working class politics. The question, Who is the proletariat?, has been held to be as empty and idle as the question, Who is the subject of history? Another way to make this point is to observe that the very idea of an "idea of history" has come to be held as a dead letter, as dead on arrival as Lyotard's "grand narrative. From this vantage point, Hegelian Marxism might seem to be merely quaint at best. There is nothing especially novel about this: it has been a long time since Daniel Bell proclaimed "the end of ideology." The 14th chapter in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, entitled "Marxist-Humanism and the Battle of Ideas," might sound like a parlor game. In reply, however, it is quite possible that the fundamental poverty of the Left in the U.S. is that it has no idea. The miserable defeat of the Democratic Party in the elections of Nov. 5, 2002 is only one measure of how little what passes for opposition to the Bush Doctrine, in its present organizational forms, is able to articulate itself either to itself or to the public. But this self-defeating paralysis of ideas, the postmodern attitude that Richard Rorty christens as "liberal irony," paralyzes the Left but not the Right. It would not be remiss to suggest that what most of all characterizes the emerging fascism of the Right is precisely that it DOES have an idea. I make these remarks to instigate this thought: that whereas the Right has an "'Idea" in the Hegelian sense--in the degraded sense of Right Hegelianism that sanctifies the given--the postmodern academic Left really has no idea. And it has no idea in the Hegelian sense because, to plagiarize Slavoj Zizek, it has not "tarried with the negative." Not having tarried with the negative in the battle of ideas, its critical dismissal of the philosophy of the subject and the philosophy of history has failed to be post-bourgeois. It finds itself stalemated by the bourgeois form of life and the philosophical disposition it had thought to eclipse and surpass. A PHILOSOPHIC ALTERNATIVE What I now propose is that waiting in the wings all along has been Raya Dunayevskaya, who had the nerve to take Hegel seriously, and who regarded Hegel as her contemporary mentor, as he had been the unparalleled mentor to Marx. By setting Marx in his proper philosophical context, Dunayevskaya re-created Marxism as a philosophy of freedom. She was as bold as Marx and Hegel themselves in holding that the idea of freedom is the very "Idea" of history. Recalling the more notorious passages of Hegel's own LECTURES OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, which she studiously ignored as more or less irrelevant to the task of re-creating dialectics, we might be tempted to conclude that this philosophy of freedom is really only the Eurocentrism that postmodernism and postcolonial theory have labored so hard to overcome. But this is a hasty conclusion. Dunayevskaya's is a Hegelianism of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It is a Hegelianism of what she called the "Black dimension" in the U.S., and of wildcat strikes in the coal mines of West Virginia. It is the Hegelianism of Nat Turner and Frantz Fanon. It is the Hegelianism not of the PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT but of the "Absolute Idea as New Beginning."(4) It is the revolutionary Hegelianism of Karl Marx. Or conversely, Dunayevskaya's is the Marx who emancipates the Hegelian revolutionary idea of freedom from its bourgeois horizon, and who emancipates the "Idea" by situating it in a philosophical vision of new human social relations at the point of production--on the premise that the mode of production is the center of gravity that determines the form of social relations and therefore the social form of life that prevails in an epoch. SUBJECT/OBJECT Of any number of points of entry we might take into THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, one way into its philosophical core as a philosophy of the subject might be to situate it in the landscape of Martin Jay's book, MARXISM AND TOTALITY (1985). Jay there traces the fate of "totality" from Lukács to Adorno and Habermas. In short, whereas Lukács affirms "totality," in Adorno's NEGATIVE DIALECTICS "totality" becomes totalitarianism, and Hegel's "absolute" and absolute negativity become a "philosopheme of pure identity and death," the figure of which is "Auschwitz." In this way, Adorno anticipates the death of the subiect as a harbinger of certain aspects of postmodern thought. Inasmuch as the subject's objectivity in capitalism is the result of alienated objectivity--the reality of the human subject crushed by the oppressive nature-like necessity of the domination of dead over living labor, of constant over variable capital--the subject-object identity of the Hegelian logic of history would almost inevitably appear to be imputed to the subject from without, externally and from above, a mystification and an onto-theology, whether of God or the vanguard party to lead. But from Dunayevskaya's perspective, this appearance is only show, belonging among the false appearances of capital itself. Capital is the sham "absolute," the form of appearance of which appears to abrogate human subjectivity. However, in Dunayevskaya's re-creation of the dialectic, this false absolute, the apparent historical necessity of capitalist social relations at the point of production, concretely calls into being, as logically it must, its absolute opposite--that is, the absolute negation of this absolute mystification of social reality, at its root, in the contradictory relation between wage labor and capital that constitutes the capitalist mode of production. Like the concept of totality, the Hegelian logical categories of contradiction and mediation have fallen into philosophical disrepute. They are supposed to belong to the onto-theological project of the totalization of identity at the expense of difference. The speculative projection of subject-object identity through dialectical mediation, it is claimed, either spells out the absolute of capital, a false totality; or if not capital then Stalinism.(5) But these postmodern, postmetaphysical conclusions follow only upon the identification of the subject to be eclipsed as the bourgeois Cartesian-Kantian subject, constituted as the European project of domination and conquest. The repudiation of this subject on behalf of difference is as one-sided as the totalitarian conception of identity that abolishes difference. Either capital is the absolute subject, or there is an "other" of capital. The false appearance of the former has the physiognomy of the Cartesian sovereign subject beheld in the philosophical mirror. In that case, either the withering gaze that penetrates this false appearance (say, the gaze of Karl Marx) is simply critical and negative, illuminating nothing of the other of capital; or what is disclosed in the critical gesture, the gesture of Dunayevskaya, is a second subjectivity--that is, the objectivity of a working class struggle, a Black struggle, a women's struggle to be free. The philosophical struggle of ideas to identify and to stand in solidarity with the subjects of revolution who are the absolute other of capital, would be effectively blocked by the postmodern discourse of the death of the subject, a discourse supposedly on behalf of the other. The trouble with this negative dialectics, however, is that it stops short at first negation. The negation of Auschwitz that is merely a first negation not only discloses nothing positive in the negative, but it is also dialectically constituted in such a way that it can only assert itself in the dark shadows of the totalizing identity it claims to transgress. As a negative gesture, it implicitly capitulates to the totalizing claims of the absolute subject it opposes. On the other hand, the second negation, the negation of the negation, the speculative moment of Hegelian philosophy, also discloses a second subjectivity, speculatively projected. This second subjectivity, for Dunayevskaya's Marxist-Humanism, is concretely or materially grounded in the real, material, political aspiration and the struggle of human beings to be free--the liberation struggles of the subjects of revolt. If we ask who are the auditors of THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, Dunayevskaya is in conversation with the subjects of revolt everywhere she could find them: in class struggles, in the Black dimension, in postcolonial struggles, in women's struggles, and in the philosophical battle of ideas. Her own philosophical struggle dictated her
conversations with partners as wide-ranging as Herbert Marcuse and Adrienne
Rich, George Armstrong Kelly and Louis Dupré, and the Hegel Society of America. In a time as urgent as our own, the place she occupies in the battle of ideas answers our compelling need: for a philosophy of liberation, a philosophy of the subject and an "Idea" of history, a re-creation of dialectics that renders Hegel and Marx our contemporaries once again. NOTES 1. See Jürgen Habermas, POSTMETAPHYSICAL THINKING: PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS, trans. W. M. Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 2. Raya Dunayevskaya, THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY: SELECTED WRITINGS ON THE DIALECTIC IN HEGEL AND MARX, eds. P. Hudis and K. Anderson (Lexington Books, 2002). 3. See Douglas Kellner, "Marcuse and the Quest for
Radical Subjectivity," in NEW CRITICAL THEORY: ESSAYS ON LIBERATION, eds.
J. Paris and W. Wilkerson (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). 4. See her paper for the Hegel Society of America, delivered in 1974, "Hegel's Absolute as New Beginning," reprinted in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY. 5. That is, from the viewpoint of Adorno's "negative dialectics," leaving to one side Dunayevskayas trenchant critique of the Stalinist USSR as "state-capitalist." |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
