Equality Right Identity: Rethinking the Contract Through Hobbes and Marx

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The following essay is an investigation into the nature of the contract, the way in which the contract indexes “right” and equality, and the textual and historical expressions—as well as echoes—that this has taken from Thomas Hobbes to Karl Marx.� The opening set of conceptual remarks will lead to a reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan and Marx’s On the Jew-ish Question, with the intent of arguing that both texts were concerned with theoretically explicating the relationship between right and equality, germane to which was the problematic of the “nation,” which was itself conceived via the “Jewish question.” It will be argued that only an atten-tion to Marx’s reformulation of the older problematic as found in Hobbes will help us understand the significance of his critique of the French Revo-lutionary theory of abstract right, and the “consequent” development and critique of political economy.

In theoretical terms the distinction between equality and inequality is not a real one: equality is to be assumed within the individual term—iden-tity requires the act of assertion and justification; it is not simply that which is encountered as fact—for inequality to be expressed. Since justification

�. This essay was written as a Visiting Associate Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. It was part of a longer paper that included a comparison of Hobbes and Spinoza and a third section that was a critique of Benedict Anderson’s theorization of “nationalism”; it was circulated and presented at the internal seminar organized at Ranikhet in October 2008. I thank all participants for the discussion that ensued. Thanks to Prathama Bannerjee, Gananath Obeyesekere, Tanika and Sumit Sarkar for comments on the initial draft. Thanks also to Peter Fitzpatrick, Nikhil Govind, James Martel, and Maria Muresan for detailed comments, encouragement, and conversa-tion on the themes that will be pursued.

Rahul Govind

Equality, Right, and Identity: Rethinking the Contract

through Hobbes and Marx

Telos �54 (Spring 20��): 75–98.doi:�0.38�7/03��54075www.telospress.com

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takes place in terms heterogeneous to the term being justified, the assertion of identity for and through equality would include difference that is nec-essary and necessarily suspended, in attempting (even if unsuccessfully) to avoid regress, if (its) meaning is to be definite. Equality might only thereby be distinguished from—even while complicit with—inequality as difference. An ideal “relation” and axiomatic protocol, it cannot itself meaningfully characterize an epoch, civilization, historical moment, or tradition.

Following Hegel, one could argue that as an abstract idea, the aim to realize equality within a situation is a contradiction in terms, because a situation is made of particulars that by definition resist abstract commen-surability; as abstract it cannot articulate or guarantee.2 Right, on the other hand, especially when defined as natural, is deictic, directly articulating a stance, demonstratively positioning itself. Grounded on intuitive certainty, a perceptual and corporeal substratum cum continuum is necessary. This contrasts it with equality as inference, an abstracting that can only take place from that which is certainly present.

The integrating interplay between right and equality—intuition and the concept—disappeared in the French Revolutionary theory of abstract right, in which the latter was now no longer discernible from (necessarily abstract) equality.3 The meaninglessness of such a principle cut off from expression uncannily reflects the ever changing meaning of (the) “nation,” but a contingent collection of empirical characteristics. Hence the pres-ent incoherence of national sovereignty—a matter of fact presenting itself as principle—illuminates the illusion of abstract right/equality which sui generis cannot be brought to light, i.e., be meaningful itself. The follow-ing historico-conceptual essay sketches the means whereby the dialectic between equality and right under the fecund sign of the contract gives way to a complete abstraction of the two as one—abstract right as necessar-ily abstract equality—which is itself then opposed to the (in)terminally changing fact of the nation. The nation, as an arbitrary collection of markers, as fact, cannot ground itself except by an insistent affirmation via differentiation, making the distinction between internal and external

2. See G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cam-bridge: Cambridge UP, �99�), pp. 79–8�.

3. This tension of abstract man and the nation was early on indicated by the formula-tion “Rights of Man and Citizen,” but its (later) inspiration lay in its conception of an (abstract) man as such having rights.

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indiscernible.� What is here a logical-conceptual impasse has historically expressed itself in catastrophe after catastrophe.

The nation as factoid bereft of principle: such was not always the case. In fact the quintessential nation—the Jews—was in principle included within the dialectic between right and equality. And as will be a proposed here, a reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan, alongside Marx’s On the Jewish Question, bears out the above in different degrees. The place of the Jew in Hobbes, as well as in other writing of the period, was unique—in inte-grating the descriptive and the normative, fact and principle—in that he was defined by the peculiarity of being (part of) a people, a nation, but on the other hand he also embodied the normative by having (once) been regarded as the chosen people of God. Here will be manifested in its full complexity the means whereby “right” and “equality” are integrated and expressed in a theory that is at once universal but whose universality is not to be sought in fact, but (re)activated in principle. On the other hand, in the early nineteenth century Marx undertakes a critique of the (post–)French Revolutionary theory of abstract right through a redeployment of the Jew-ish question, in the initial development of the field and critique of political economy; targeting the ruse of abstract right by recognizing it as merely abstract equality; now impervious to present use, which was the essence of natural right.

I.So what was the Hobbesian—photographic—resolution, i.e., perspective? One would have to shed the times and open one’s gills to the milieu of the Leviathan. Hobbes here speaks of three ways in which God declares his laws: “the dictates of natural reason, by revelation, and the voice of some man, to whom by the operation of miracles he procureth credit with the rest. From hence there ariseth a triple word of God, rational, sensible, and prophetic, to which correspondeth a triple hearing, right reason, sense

4. Of course the expression that this took during the course of the French Revolu-tion—the “plot”—has been analyzed by François Furet and more recently by István Hont. However, the conceptual problem was well noted by Hegel and followed by Marx. The historical track record of nationalism—and any politics that takes an expressed identity (whether defined in terms of race, religion, or ethnicity) as figure and the abstract idea of absolute sovereignty as ground—have been no different in its violence. On the other hand, the importance of the Biblical heritage, even in the Enlightenment—determining “nationality” in terms of descent from Noah’s sons—has been pointed out by, among oth-ers, Thomas Trautmann and Colin Kidd.

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supernatural and faith.” The middle category is placed aside since it is by definition particular, and therefore not subject to universal laws. From the other two, Hobbes speaks of the twofold kingdom of the natural and the prophetic. The first books of the Leviathan famously speak to the central problematic of the first category: the laws of nature and natural reason, even with asides to the “prophetic.” At the midpoint of the text, Hobbes finds it necessary to fully address the second, i.e., the prophetic. In this case “having chosen out one peculiar nation (the Jews) for his subjects he governed them, and none but them not only by natural reason but by posi-tive laws, which he gave them by the mouths of his prophets.”5 One must emphasize that natural reason is interwoven with the “prophetic”; there is no question of a simple distinction or distinguishing between reason and faith. Furthermore, we must note the ways in which an understanding of the “prophetic” proffers a philosophical problem: how is that which is peculiar—the Jews with their God-given positive laws—at the same time universal. That is to say absolutely legitimate. But before ascending to the second fold of the prophetic, we will have to clarify our understand-ing of the first fold: the “natural,” which had occupied the first books in Hobbes’s treatise, and which has monopolized the attention of subsequent generations.

This would also mean questioning an interpretation of Hobbes—how-ever sophisticated its variants—that stresses the “social contract” of people coming together, overcoming the state of nature, giving up their powers, thereby instituting absolute political sovereignty; assuming as this interpretation does, a real distinction between the state of nature and a civil-political society. Yet, Hobbes very clearly writes to the contrary. First, Hobbes speaks about not just one but two forms of sovereignty: not only the “instituted” form, but also the “acquisitive” form, where in conflict the captive gives up his freedom in exchange for his life. This for Hobbes is a covenant, entered into, motivated by fear, involving in itself an equivalent formal structure to the “instituted” form, where fear also motivates people to come together; collapsing at one level the distinction between acquisi-tive and instituted.6 The covenant as a mode is not de-linked from fear,

5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, �994), p. 235 (emphasis mine).

�. See “Of Dominion Paternal and Despotical,” ch. 20 in ibid., p. �25. For Hobbes, a covenant is when a contract has not been completely fulfilled, i.e., when both parties have not done what was promised and one in trust waits for the other to fulfill his promise. In


urging a rethinking of the self-evident linking of equality and the contract. Second, the “history” of conquest (the “acquisitive” form) introduces a particular form of temporality that cuts through the instituted form, which seems, in the first instance, to be caught in the binary between a state of nature and a civil polity, the distinction dissolved herein again. Conquest as an “event” traverses, and is one that fundamentally ambiguates and supports, the civil and the natural; it plots the alteration of nature and the civil. Third, and related to the previous point, the second form of sover-eignty (“acquisitive”) can be retranslated into the first, because even in the instituted form, sovereigns are in a state of nature in relation to one another, as “civil-sovereign” bodies. Here conquest takes on a horizontal/spatial dimension, where one can defeat and negate the other through the law/state of nature. Last, and perhaps most importantly, in the “instituted” form one still retains one’s natural reason/sovereign right and therefore could “in an instant” decide that the sovereign is no longer a sovereign, or attempt to force such a transformation, which is but war-rebellion.7 By stating that “rebellion is but war continued,” Hobbes is rather emphatic about rendering porous and contingent the boundary between the inter-nal/genetic and the external state of nature. There is thus no meaningful distinction between conquest and the contract-covenant, categories that become functions of the current situational ensemble in which they are invoked.

In this sense what theorists and intellectual historians have tried to iso-late as “social contract” is in reality part of a far more complex assemblage that is fundamentally at odds with the kind of interpretation imposed. It still needs to be asked whether there is any unitary framework that exists within which the various complexities and seeming contradictions can be integrated, made whole, and grasped.

“Natural reason” seems to offer the first clue, perhaps even a guid-ing thread. As the expression itself indicates, natural reason cannot be understood as a tool at the hand of the being called man, but rather is the

practical terms as words, they can be used interchangeably, since absolute simultaneity is impossible, and the contractual link remains insofar as it has not been exhausted in the reciprocity of promises and acts.

7. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. ��, �45, 208, 233–34. Locke would not dispute any of the above, even as he does not have the typology of sovereignty that is sketched above. Importantly, he would consent to the state of nature–natural reason nexus, as well as the “external” state of nature. The accent on liberty, labor, and property, however, is his own.

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dimension in which the human can come to be itself, or in terms of which he understands himself in a world that is already given. Such a being is shaped by a theological horizon where natural reason is the medium by which man cannot be abstracted from the divine. It does not seem the case that in Hobbes it is all a matter of “will,” as a recent and rather domi-nant set of interpretations have insisted.8 Rather, natural reason is what continues into the civil, guaranteeing the link between sovereignty and reason; allowing a reversal into a state of mere nature, or absolute liberty. Its ontological texture makes it invulnerable to simple designation, since it is that which supports the (f)act to be realized. In other words, it is the onto-theological anchoring of reason that constitutes and unfolds politi-cal subjectivity. Whatever Hobbes’s stress on the sovereign, it is in the twofold-reversible sense discussed; one can never in advance say, by an exterior rule, who the sovereign is. This is broadly where the first couple of books leave us. From such a perspective one has to question the slew of recent studies that have tried to argue that Spinoza was unique in dissolv-ing/de-signifying the distinction between the natural and the civil.9

8. James Tully has argued that “the voluntarist notion of freedom runs parallel to Berlin’s concept of negative freedom, “freedom from,” and there is no question that through Hobbes, the voluntarist view, has deeply influenced our secular language games of pluralist and utilitarian freedom.” Tully, an approach To Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, �993), p. 298. This can also be found in Knud Haakonssen, who speaks of “mere will theories,” referring to Natural Law, as well as Quentin Skinner, who argues that “you remain free as a subject so long as you are neither physically nor legally coerced.” See Haakonssen, natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge UP, �99�) and Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, �998), p. �0. This dominant historiographic tendency tended to project Berlin’s “negative liberty” onto Hobbes. A significant and timely exception has been James Martel’s Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical democrat (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), an altogether fine and original contribution to the field. I read Martel’s work after writing this essay, and so I have not been able to engage with it in a way as I might have here. Although I share with it a critique of—and dissatisfaction with—what I have called a dominant historiographic tendency, important and productive differences remain on the question of natural reason, political subjectivity, the place of the “Jews,” temporality, and sovereignty in their particular configuration. I also register here my gratefulness for the subsequent triangular electronic correspondence with Peter and James on these issues.

9. A host of writings across disciplinary affiliations, stretching from Jonathan Israel to Étienne Balibar, and from Gilles Deleuze to Antonio Negri—make such an argument in the context of an evaluation of Spinoza. However, such a position is inaccurate because Hobbes, like Spinoza, never made a real—non-artificial—distinction between the state of nature and civil society. In a different context, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Carl

EQuaLITy, RIGHT, and IdEnTITy 8�

From the first two books, which are in essence about a “kingdom of nature,” the next two books take us to a “Christian Commonwealth.” Here the “Jewish question” arises in its prominent form. This “prophetic” dimen-sion is not simply distinct from “natural reason,” but is its supplement. The Jewish nation, a holy nation, was simply a “peculiar” nation among the many peoples, since they were under the direct suzerainty of God; God was their King. Unlike the other people(s) who were ruled through God’s power, with Abraham a covenant was established (distinguishing again the “contract” from “equality,” allowing for “fear”).�0 Since God was their king, “civil” law was sacred��—since all people were in any case under moral/natural law, suggestive of an umbilical cord with the divine sky. In the Jewish case we confront the problematic of the “absolute positive law.” The nation was a holy nation, that is to say wholly “public,” for in other kingdoms the King was the public person, Representative of the people,�2 with all the caveats regarding the “ontological fabrication” of sovereign reason in mind (natural-moral law). The key place of justice underlay the Jewish heritage, since under the direct suzerainty of God, to whom they owed “allegiance,” people had to be just to one another. Such an inheritance was maintained through the prophets, who were marked by two signs: miracles and preaching a doctrine that already existed. The miracle is a temporary act of God and does not in any way contradict reason; it is merely a measure to instill belief. Thus, what was earlier a miracle might be easily explained later, its function being but strategic,

Schmitt have argued that Hobbes lays the foundation for modern liberalism because of the distinction between inner and outer (Schmitt), and because of his (Hobbes’s) “political epicureanism” (Strauss), which simply identified pleasure with the good and reduced life to needs (Arendt and Strauss, whose influence on Schmitt has of course been noted, with the latter arguing for the inauguration of the modern “subjective” notion of natural right). All these positions unjustifiably obscure the reason-sovereign-onto-theological nexus as found in Hobbes, only through which such an array of arguments can be made. This reason-onto-theological nexus—rather than any alleged “authoritarianism,” as for instance found in Habermas—renders any comparison with modern liberalism (for instance, in political theory in John Stuart Mill and his followers) unconvincing.

�0. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 272–74.��. Ibid., p. 323. �2. Ibid., pp. 277, �87–88, 300. Cf. Spinoza: “We may therefore conclude with final-

ity that religion, whether revealed by the natural light or by prophesy, acquires the force of command solely from the decree of those who have the right to command, and God has no special kingdom over men save through those who hold the sovereignty.” Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., �998), p. 2�4

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relative, and temporary. On the other hand, the decision as to what consti-tutes a miracle is left at the hands of the—already existing—public, i.e., the sovereign.�3

It is this politico-theological horizon that the King inherits. This is made clear at every level, and even the crucifixion is understood to be undertaken as a political act: it was perceived as an act of political rebel-lion. But even within the “prophetic heritage,” Hobbes has to emphasize the natural reason–sovereign power nexus. Taken for granted, yet not failing to be reiterated at every moment, the link between natural reason and moral law, prophesy and divine revelation, is also subjected by the same mediation. Since it is impossible to really know whether another has divine revelation, the only reason for obeying the one who makes such a claim can be the fact that he is already sovereign. Hobbes further empha-sizes the fact that the decision concerning revelation is also one that is made through the authority of sovereignty: such a theoretical maneuver renders quite literally the meaning of revelation meaningless.�� What at first glance seems curious, and not without interest, is the fact that the Abrahamic pact—the Jewish heritage—that Hobbes alludes to is under-stood to be authoritative only on the basis of Abraham (already) having sovereign power: as a patriarch and as sovereign. Needless to say we are perilously close to Filmer. Remembering the conquest/despotic/acquisi-tive form already outlined above, we are perhaps already ashore on the isle patriarchalism.�5

Sovereign power–natural reason conquest has squeezed out revela-tion. This is also done through Hobbesian “metaphysics”: the visions that the prophets receive are part of their own imaginations,�6 themselves a

�3. See Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 300. Here again the link of this critique via Spinoza to Hume has not been noticed. The contemporary emphasis on Spinoza and Hume in this regard is symptomatic of the tendency to try and separate (so-called) radical atheism, dog-matic religion, and political authoritarianism. See ibid., p. 3�7. This was alluded to earlier in the chapters on Civil Laws, pp. �8�–88.

��. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 3�8.�5. Ibid., pp. 322, 3�8, 387.�6. Here of course, in the early sections of the text, sense and imagination are

redeemed and recuperated. For while previously imagination was defined as a “decay-ing sense” (ibid., p. 8) and later “so that generally the prophets extraordinary in the Old Testament took notice of the word of God no otherwise than from their dreams or visions, that is to say from their imaginations, which they had in their sleep or ecstasy (which imaginations in every true prophet were supernatural, but in false prophets either natural or feigned)” (ibid., p. 28�). In this too Spinoza followed.


constituent-sign of (sense) perception. This is always double-edged, like sovereignty, and is soon written otherwise: when speaking of the authority of Moses, Hobbes informs us, in contradistinction to the exposition on Abraham, that it was the people who gave him his power and authority. Since such things cannot be inherited, it is only the belief and reason of the people—and not their direct experience of revelation—that bestows the power on Moses.�7 Moses is followed by Christ, who integrated the scape and escape goat—sacrifice and redemption—reiterating the covenant with God. But Christ’s role was different from Moses’s insofar as he was pro-claiming his Kingdom to come. His presence was one that redeemed and saved, that persuaded people to have faith and obey the (present) laws. Not lawmaking but convincing the people of the truth and justice of exist-ing laws was Christ’s mission, while he would reign in the Kingdom to come: “He came not to judge but to save the world, he hath not subjected us to other laws than those of the commonwealth—that is, the Jews to the laws of Moses, which he saith, he came not to destroy but to fulfill: other nations to the laws of the several sovereigns; and all men to the laws of nature—the observing whereof, both he himself and his apostles have in their teaching recommended to us, as a necessary condition of being admitted by him in the last day to his eternal kingdom, wherein shall be protection and life everlasting.”�8 This is the manner in which, for instance, the Catholic Church’s claims to worldly inheritance are radically undone.

In addition, a “radically” nominalist theory would cut us loose from any ground; Hobbes insists that we can never know God’s attributes but only attribute to him what we perceive as glorious and good.�9 Yet the insistent critique of the scriptures, a matter of fact and not reason, makes way for a non-determinative theory of sovereign power; the sovereign rules with no rules. Rather, it is an orienting univocity that is Hobbes’s peculiar con-tribution, one that is further strengthened by scrupulous exegesis, where a detailed etymological cum historical analysis is undertaken. The Church is merely the house of God, the “public” place, the locus wherein authority is

�7. Ibid., p. 3�8. �8. Ibid., p. 355. Although as indicated we have tried to deal with the Spinoza-Hobbes

comparison elsewhere, we could say in a nutshell that while for Hobbes Christ plays a redemptive and temporalized role in the act of political constitution, in Spinoza this is “abstracted” into the realm of “pure perception,” which is how Christ is distinguished from the other prophets who merely imagined. Necessarily this is linked to the metaphysics, i.e., the Ethics, and the clue to the difference between the two lies in this passage.

�9. Ibid., pp. 239, 24�. We know that Spinoza and Locke would not disagree.

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constituted and articulated, and therefore one to which the (present) King has an original access: “Church (when not taken for a house) signifieth the same that ecclesia signified in the Grecian commonwealths, that is to say a congregation or an assembly of citizens, called forth to hear the magistrate speak unto them; . . . and in this last sense only it is that the church can be taken for one person, that is to say that it can be said to have the power to pronounce, to command, to be obeyed, to make laws or to any action whatsoever.”20 The already existing sovereign is one that Jesus too paid heed to. But now—the workspace of the indexical—(since) the prophesies are complete and sealed, the contemporary sovereign can access such a history (even) without having to mediate through “ecclesiastical” author-ity. There is here no question of the separation between Church and State, but the assertion of unitary sovereign right by the Christian King, who is himself in his person an inheritor of the theological-political right. In fact even the “Christian” element is rendered inessential when we are told that outside the Christian kingdoms, one could not rebel even if one were not allowed to follow the “Christian” sacraments. This argument had already been theoretically foreseen, when Hobbes in his astute etymological anal-ysis had argued that a sacrament was simply a sign of reverence, a sign of the entry into the admission of the Kingdom of God, i.e., a consecration, and need not be limited to that which was already known: the initial ones of circumcision, Passover, and later baptism; others could very well be invented.2� The prophetic thus becomes simply another medium through which unitary sovereignty is asserted and proclaimed. The Jewish case, in its rejection of Christ, remains frozen at a state where (its) positive law remains sacred, and the people remain bound together as a people (the meaning that Hobbes lends to “holy” or the fact that it is a “sacerdotal priesthood”), but at the cost of the (“future”) universality of the Christian. Christ the true King to come is what perpetuates the present in its fullness. For the Jews, their historico-political failure reverse-rationalizes itself into truth and oblivion simultaneously.

The various inroads into sovereignty are integrated by creating a strict series of equivalencies between the divine, the natural, the public, and laws. Hobbes has no hesitation in proclaiming the divine right of Kings, which is completely consistent with his initial arguments about natural

20. Ibid., p. 3�5. In this use of historical cum etymological criticism of scriptural “authority,” Hobbes anticipates Spinoza.

2�. Ibid., pp. 278, 4�7–�8.


laws and the instituted form of sovereignty. (We have to simply reiterate the divine-natural laws—natural reason nexus).22 Revelation and the Jew-ish heritage is reduced to positive law since the prophetic visions have to be understood simply as part and parcel of the perception/imagination of the prophets, binding them swiftly to measurable time and place. The insistent necessity of mediation by, and “overlap” with, natural reason once again emphasizes the already existent sovereign. Absolutism at the level of politico-religious sovereignty is what allows a plurality of beliefs.23 Belief is that which is in the hearts of men and can never be “accused” (known/knowable) and therefore rendered visible, “public.”24 However, actions and words can be monitored and dealt with; the sovereign decides on its legitimacy. Thus, the propositional form would always require a “public” and is not a “vocabulum.” It is in this sense that the sovereign “rules,” and obeying the laws and freedom of thought/belief becomes an important ingredient in Hobbesian theory. Christians do not have to insist on the sacraments of the Church when being ruled by heathens, and will have to accept the latter’s sovereignty, since he is the law when it comes to actions and words.25 The Christian, or anyone for that matter, may believe or think what he pleases as long as he cannot be accused of threatening the

22. “A law of nature (lex naturalis) is a precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life or taketh away the means of preserving the same, and to omit that by which he thinketh it might be preserved” (ibid., p. 79). “I conclude therefore that in all things not contrary to the moral law (that is to say, to the law of nature) all subjects are bound to obey that for the divine law which is declared to be so by the laws of the commonwealth. . . . For in whatsoever is not regulated by the commonwealth it is equity (which is the law of nature and therefore an eternal law of God) that every man equally enjoys his liberty” (ibid., pp. �88–89). “Having spoken of the right of God’s sovereignty as grounded only on nature, we are to consider next what are the Divine laws or dictates of natural reason” (ibid., p. 237). “And thus far concerning the constitution, nature and right of sovereign, and concerning the duty of subjects derived from principles of natural reason” (ibid., p. 243). “For if the law declared be not against the law of nature (which is undoubtedly God’s law) and he undertake to obey it he is bound by his own act” (ibid., p. �85)

23. Here, Hobbes’s place in a history of what is called “religious toleration” is yet to be adequately staked.

24. “In sum, he hath the supreme power in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as civil—as far as concerneth actions and words, for those only are known, and may be accused. And of that which cannot be accused, there is no judge at all but God that knoweth the heart” (Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 373). One need not belabor the relations between categories and accusation, a traversal that joins Aristotle to Foucault.

25. Ibid., p. 4�0.

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public peace. Thus, heresy too is defined in such terms, it being understood as a subversion of the public rather than being an opinion or act against a “religious” dogma.2�

We have here a peculiar twining of the private and the public, rea-son and belief. While the being that is man can come together to create a civil polity, his humanity as reason articulates sovereign action in the language of the public. The residue of the peculiar torsion that creates the public is that which is the private: that action or word that is undertaken and yet whose legitimacy cum meaningfulness is determined by—itself as—the public. At the deepest level of the private lies the disposition and the thought, which can in any case not be known (accused), and therefore is as such free. Free of significance, it is this space that the public as public cannot (the imperative here transpires into the propositional) cultivate/ interfere in. Belief, however, as a private act is a sacrament that can be performed only by the sanction of the public. But thought is free precisely because it is outside the orbit of sovereign reason (the sovereign state). This is the realm of “faith” and belief, and as content-less it is an affirmation, the affirmation affirming which underlies the affirmation-of. “For internal faith is in its own nature invisible and consequently exempted from all human jurisdiction, whereas the words and actions that proceed from it, as breeches of our civil obedience, are injustice both before God and man.”27 This, as we hope to indicate, will become the free labor of Marx, at once free and open to being the captive of Capital, the new “public” in an ana-lytic situation without the “natural”/deictic redemption.

II.We have discussed a set of problems that had besieged the late seventeenth century.28 However, in certain ways things had not radically changed in the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the univer-salizing mission was one of a human freedom that was itself ostensibly disassociated from a Christian eschatology, even if, as will be discussed below, Marx radically questions such a disassociation. In addition, the institutional infrastructure of the new political state in France, was one

2�. Ibid., p. 394.27. Ibid., p. 355.28. This section is primarily a discussion of On the Jewish Question. Since the latter

is a short essay, no citation will be given. The edition used is from Karl Marx, Early Writ-ings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage Books, �975).


dependent on the past absolutist King. The debate regarding Jewish eman-cipation in early nineteenth-century Germany now locates the Jewish problematic within the horizon of the French Revolution and its proclama-tion of the universal rights of man and citizen (the “dominant” political code, especially under the imperializing shadow of Napoleon, provoking a reform movement). From such a liberated perspective, in “Germany” the Christian King now presided over a hierarchical system of “privileges,” rather than “universal (abstract) rights,” which was the now-inspiring category of politics. Here the Jewish people as a people asked for their privileges within the existing hierarchical mode of sovereign power, thereby constituting and perpetuating it in their own peculiar manner.

Such is the analytic situation that informs Bruno Bauer’s argument29 regarding the Jewish question. For him only the political condition of free-dom—as enunciated by the ideals of the French Revolution—would at once free both the Jew as well as the Christian from the present hierarchal and oppressive arrangement of politics that is Germany: the granting of, and the rights to, privileges. Just as the Jewish people allegedly made a covenant with God (Hobbes and Spinoza), they seemed to want to preserve their peculiarity by requiring special concessions from the present Chris-tian King. They thus preserved their civil-religious laws-rituals under the suzerainty of a King whose politics lay in ruling over corporate and spiri-tual-religious groupings, not individuals. This was antithetical to Bauer’s understanding of real political emancipation, which targeted individuals directly and in an unmediated fashion. For this to be accomplished, the Jews would have to give up their identity as Jews and become human, i.e., assert their humanity first and foremost as their true nature, rather than their “nation.”

According to Bauer, the impossible situation at present simply pre-sented a series of interlocking contradictions: to ask for privileges as Jews to a Christian King would be a contradiction, since they were enemies precisely when defined in such religious terms; and to ask for civil rights as humans would also entail a contradiction, since they were doing so as Jews first, in distinction from “other” humans. Even in France universal freedom was yet to be made a law, because of the hurdle put forward by the (allegedly) intransigent opacity of Jewish identity.

29. We will be reading Bauer through Marx, and not independently. However it is important to here emphasize that Bauer, too, was deeply involved in Biblical criticism.

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It is this analysis that Marx subjects to a critique, on the back of Hegel and looking back to Kant.30 He insists on a further clarification of the meaning of real political emancipation, the final term in Bauer’s analysis. Opening with arguments that are pointers—to what will become substan-tive—Marx refers to America, where the State is secular even as religiosity is to have completely pervaded society, revealing that a secular state is no guarantee against religion. Thus, the analytic lens has to be trained on society, which is what is real and discernible (in reality, Americans would never trust a secular man), rather than the characteristic of an abstract state. The other hand points to France, where the rights of man had in fact guaranteed the rights to conscience and religion; and if France was the ideal, on what basis could Bauer ask the Jews to renounce their faith. However, the substantive nature of Marx’s enterprise shows itself once he proposes an analytic equivalence between the Jew and civil society (in its fractured Hegelian theorization). Thus, the political emancipation that Bauer demands so enthusiastically is in fact simply the alienated form of the political community as abstracted from the sphere of real difference that is civil society. The particularity and difference that the Jew indexes is but the exemplification of the difference(s) that encrypts civil society in its own difference (as reflected in itself) as well as from the State. In Hegel, the philosophy of right ensures that civil society is absorbed (back) into the State; but Marx strategically abstracts from such a dialectic, and he is only thereby able to mobilize such a suspension for his critique of Bauer. If political emancipation is but the sign of the radical separation between the abstract citizen (that is, man as a political being) and the reality of civil society where it is a “free for all” (the old state of nature, bellum omnium contra omnes), in what sense can one call this emancipation? Political emancipation has to be taken a step further and become human emancipa-tion if it is to be truly radical, argues Marx.

But at this point in his analytic tread, rather than the abolition of religion—as argued by Bauer—Marx gets back to religion by positing a dialectical relation between Judaism and Christianity. If the Jew stood for civil society, the political State that Bauer argues for is, in fact, religious since it requires a mediation—the familiar unhappy consciousness—for ultimate salvation: civil society, while emphasizing difference, can resolve

30. It will be noticed that the contemporary discussion around Arendt’s critique of the Rights of Man does not sufficiently take into account the critique of the young Marx, to which Arendt’s arguments bear an uncanny resemblance.


its difference(s) only through the (intermediary of the) State. This state of affairs is defined as essentially Christian, or essentially religious, by Marx, because only Christianity has at its basis the human as such—at once universally absolute and absolutely individual. Only the human as such allows for the abstraction of the political (when defined purely in terms of the human) from the reality of civil society (competing differences), find-ing its essence in the intermediary (emphasizing at once difference and its overcoming). On the other hand, the difference that civil society stands for finds its exemplary instantiation in the Jew, as indicated above. Yet it must be remembered: not the religious Jew but the secular Jew. For civil society presents the actual state of affairs—rather than the idealism of the State and its eternal promise of (abstract) equality—for whom exchange is practice and money is God. The reality of the (secular) Jew is the same as the reality whose essence is civil society. The commodification of every-day life that is the present historical condition is amply realized in the Jew, who thereby integrates monotheism (money as the general equivalent, to use the language of the older Marx) and polytheism (the evaluation/devaluation, which is the alienability of everything). On the other hand, Christianity while conceiving of the human as such, only accomplishes an exemplary alienation, the affirmation of which lies at its basis; singular-izing human alienation that is the body of the Kingdom to come. This is why the Jew and the Christian criss-cross continually, even as we see a radical re-signification of religion. The so called Christian State—present “Germany”—in fact is an essentially imperfect State because Christianity at its basis is a rejection of the world as a world of appearance, a negation that is a “devious affirmation” of the political state as such: the enduring promise of equality.

The Christian contribution has as its end the human, and thereby in reverse, as practice allows for an exemplary de-humanization, which is the living reality of the secular Jew. While Christianity is successful in intro-ducing the idea of the new political system (equality that presupposes the human as such, allegedly the contribution of the French Revolution), the Jew has simultaneously been successful in the overwhelming dominance of money and finance; the historical situation at hand. This is once again the mark of the age, i.e., the contradiction between State and civil society. In this sense Bauer’s argument about the “privatization” of religion—its essential insignificance, the old private—would never be successful since the so called private—civil society—is in fact the actual reality of conflict,

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i.e., the social. On the other hand, the attempted emergence of the State out of civil society is a necessarily violent one, as witnessed in the French Revo-lution,3� because the movement is involved in the “painful contradiction”32 of destroying that which it presupposes. Ironically, while Christianity has exhibited the human as such as end, the kind of human conceived in reality has been the “Jew,” i.e., the egoistic and selfish individual whose life is based on need, not freedom, and buying-and-selling (alienability). And this fetishized individual is declared as the end of even the political State. This is the situation depicted in the various constitutions of the new political ethic that guarantee liberty, equality, security, and property, as found in the French Revolution. The rights of man—of this new man who is no longer truly human but a historically determined creature of need33 and self-interest—are the summation, the summum bonum, of the political system of abstract equality. The rights of the citizen are for “man,” for this creature. Thus, from inside (civil society) the Jew has now also become the orienting telos (the new human who is given his right), and all this is accomplished through the abstractive alienation whose medium and force is at its essence Christian. The (abstract political equality) State becomes a mere means towards the end of man (the creature of civil society). The classic conundrum of the new man is that while he is given full political rights in theory (which is the existence of the State at the abstract level), that which determines his value is the law (which in political systems of equality would be civil society and its perpetually conflicting determi-nations). Abstract freedom is here doubly rendered equivalent to abject existence at the levels of State and civil society. Such a distinction and the attendant mediatory requirements are Christian, while the absolutist practice that doubles at both levels (where civil society is the end of the State and the difference that is within the State) is the differential that is the Jew.

3�. Here Marx is of course following Hegel’s brilliantly dark analysis of the French revolution in Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, �977). It is hard to forget the “mouthful of water” and the “head of a cabbage.”

32. The phrase is perhaps an invocation of Hegel’s Logic. “It is said that contradic-tion is unthinkable; but the fact is that in the pain of a living being it is even an actual existence.” See G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen and Unwin, �9�9), p. 770.

33. The first section on Civil Society outlines it as a “system of needs,” which in turn has to be supplemented by the police and the bureaucracy. Of course the final resolution can only be found in the State. See Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right.

EQuaLITy, RIGHT, and IdEnTITy 9�

In such a manner, Marx argues that the new political, rather than negat-ing religious or material corporations and interests, has merely rendered them all the more politically powerful, even if their activity is no longer directly nominated as such. While in the feudal system such corporations had a direct political being in their relationship to the sovereign, at the same time this ensured their subjection to the source of sovereignty. On the other hand, at present, the abstractness of the political as mere right, is what ensures the actuality of conflict that is civil society. Through such a maneuver, Marx will announce the overwhelming necessity to further diagnose and critique civil society; a baptism of fire from which emerges Marxian political economy. Rather than finding its theoretical resolution in the spiritual dimension of the State (Hegel), for Marx, the resolution can only be recovered in the materiality of society, and in the interpret-ing of signs in its wake (history). At one level this is a turn inward, since the exteriority of the State—itself in a state of nature, as Hegel, the heir of the natural law traditions, recognized—is occluded from Marx’s ana-lytical vision. In this sense society is the new terrain that has to be carved out, not the Hegelian State. Only a radical reconfiguration of the actual state—which for Marx is civil society—would get rid of the Jew as well as the Christian. Christianity makes sense as a sign of the times:34 the split between the fact of conflict and abjection, and the mere abstract promise of freedom. And the sign can be done away with only be reconfiguring its support, i.e., by changing the material world. Similarly changing the foun-dations of the present exchange society will render the Jew superfluous. The human can become whole without the perpetual dialectical mediation that reifies and sets rolling the split between abstract subject and creaturely abject. This is what informs all other splits, such as the power of Jewish financial wealth and the Jew’s ghettoized condition elsewhere, the right of people and the realities of their lives. Immediately, “right” is but the

34. This understanding of Christianity—and the equation of Christianity with reli-gion in general—is of course pursued in the famous introduction to Contribution to the Critique of the Philosophy of Right. Here, too, we see Hegel: the “unhappy consciousness” not only in its well-known moment as the “terminal” point of “self-consciousness” but also in its reappearance the moment before “Absolute Knowing.” See the section “Revealed Religion” in Phenomenology of the Spirit. It would not be amiss to point out here that the Hegelian dialectic as aufhebung—negation, preservation, and sublation at once—is among other things an accurate description of the “Christian” critique of (its simultaneous percep-tion of) Judaic law as it “fulfills” through death and redemption.

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reaffirmation of things as they are: the actual conflictual determinations of civil society.

In Hobbes, the Jewish state stands as a model and exemplary condi-tion wherein the sovereign is absolute and exercises his right, whereas Christianity reconfirms this sovereign situation by rendering the present perpetual until the coming of the real King, Jesus. Jesus is the Christ, i.e., Jesus is the King, but he is the King to come. The power of the sovereign is that which had predated the covenant even of the Jewish people—Abraham already had the sovereign right based on patriarchal power. The mediatory function of Christ, which is also his redemptive function, operates through its own perpetual displacement, ensuring the fullness of the now in which the present sovereign ripens his right. To an extent this finds an echo in Marx’s interpretation of Christianity as eternal (mere) promise, but on the other hand, he shifts the political question into one of exchange, recoding it radically into one of interest, and the actual differences that difference produces (civil society). While the contract or covenant in Hobbes was an agreement that did not have equality as a necessary ingredient—lib-erty itself was understood as consistent with fear and necessity—in Marx the processes of exchange only indexed the abjection of humanity in the haggle of the Jew (market society as civil society, where Money is the hid-den puppeteer, the “Turkish despot”). Self-interest is here the thick glue that forms civil society and expresses the essence of the state; the very self-interest that Spinoza had already noted to be the expression of Jewish patriotism. Missing from Marx, and an active ingredient in Spinoza, is the hatred toward other States. And yet, such a state of hatred has been rendered superfluous for a civil society that is itself—in its self-reflected state—the site of difference and competition. At this point we can proceed with a Kantian incision. The extraordinarily “moral” tone that Marx takes in relation to exchange and value, and the essence of alienability, is one that easily find its way back to a Kantian provenance: pathology.

The contract of course was critical to the political establishment of the seventeenth century. There, the moral and the natural were linked in sovereign power as signifying divine laws. For young Marx, contract and exchange becomes a sign of civil society: that is, the site of difference and conflict and a return to a state of nature. This was not different from the seventeenth century, because civil society was then not rendered ana-lytically independent from the State. And the political establishment too could well be the site of conflict and difference: not only “internally” but


also the “existential” state of nature that existed between states, and their various translations into one another outlined above. “Rebellion is but war continued.” However for Marx, the problem with the idea of exchange lies in the fact that a value can be placed on the human, thereby reducing him to but a thing, weighing and measuring him, according to a rationale not his own. Value can be measured and branded only once the human has been materialized in the exchange of things, with the final measure being money. Here civil society mirrors the political state, because having nothing but himself—human as such—is all he can sell or give up. The famous double-edged freedom captured (Hobbesian belief), whereas in Marx, capital comes to be the erstwhile public. But here alienability is what ensures a condition where the State is but the sphere of abstract right, whereas all that remains is the sordidly material sphere of exchange and competition. This state is, in fact, the state of affairs. But the alienability is not simply a fact but is also one that involves the human in his essence: the new man produced by civil society is the telos even of the spiritual state. Here is where Kant introduces himself. What Kant had critiqued as the “pathological principle”—being determined by an external object is the state of mechanism—is what Marx seems to have made his own via Hegel for whom civil society was the sphere of “need,” the specification of the inhuman/non-human “drive” within the human; subhumanity is traced as placeholder, a silhouette as relief. This is what is responsible for the “moral” tone, moral in the ontological sense that humans are dehumanized in the valuation of exchange and objects, are on the sliding scale of infinite regress. External determination ensures that one is merely operating in a rule that has already been established, indicating man as but a cog, an instant leaking from the continuum of things. It is against this state of affairs that “practical reason” is required, the real of freedom, the kingdom of ends, postulating grace.35 The splitting off, the transcendental realm, is

35. This is the “resolution” of Critique of Practical Reason as well as the Ground-work. By and large, by evacuating the “religious” dimension—subtracting Grace as the essentially “Christian” inflection—much of contemporary scholarship has been problem-atic. For instance, see Charles Taylor’s recent (and continuous) reading of Kant, which amounts to saying: “We have the power as rational agency to make the laws by which we live” (Taylor, a Secular age [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007], p. 8); and later, “In spite of the continuing place of God and immortality in his scheme, he is a crucial figure in the development of exclusive humanism, just because he articulates so strongly the power of the inner sources of morality” (ibid., p. 2�3). Neither the “we” nor the “inner” is theorized, and if we remember that for Kant, from the paralogisms of pure reason, to the understand-

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the realm of practical reason, which is practical in the absolute sense: it follows no determining rule. While earlier the slave was he who gave up his freedom in the desperate aftermath of conflict, now his freedom was robbed from him in the fact that the commodity had set the rules of his existence, including that of his “political” stature determined by present civil society. Rule has lost its (sovereign) personality.3�

Thus, according to Marx, the “chimerical nationality” of the Jews could never express the real problematic. Rather, it is but the ruse of a historically determined present reality that has outwitted Bauer. The terms have shifted their meanings, and one can keep up only by changing them all the time. For the religious Jew, religion is done away with in the unity of civil and sacred law, but it is the secular Jew who supports the essential religiosity that is Christianity, which establishes and hypostatizes the dis-tinction between man and man, abstracting him from his present condition (man as such, man as here and now). It is the radical distinction between civil society and State that informs all other such distinctions, and only if it were to be explained in present religious denominations would one need to have recourse to the Christian and the Jew. Be that as it may, the radical changing of the present situation—of the abject, abstract spiral—would act as the solvent for the distinction between State and society, Christian and Jew. Since for Marx is it civil society that presents reality—as opposed to the abstract state—only the difference(s) here would need to be subjected to a critical diagnosis. From here, the road to Capital as a critique of politi-cal economy is an open one.37 In this manner, Marx deliberately rushes right through the national question, willing it away—an internationalist in the act of rendering nationalism obsolete and meaningless. Here he is

ing of freedom as transcendental, to the recognition of the animal as a dimension of Man in his writings on religion, the “inner” and the “we”—the human as ideal not even idea—is anything but “innocent.” On the other hand, Taylor’s reading of Hobbes—“Nor that the modern predicament is that defined by Hobbes: how do we rescue atomic individuals from the prisoners’ dilemma?”—is not atypical (ibid., p. ��9).

3�. This was the path that Hegel took, but personality in a way that followed Kant, as the umbilical cord that tied the human to the divine.

37. It will of course be impossible to fully address the Althusserian intervention—both the break as well as the critique of humanism, which are of course linked—because he does not seem to analyze the young Marx as he analyzes the first volume of Capital. For our purposes the fact that a Marxian critique of political economy is a critical redescription of civil society, where the latter is not the rational agency through which the power of the State is limited, as recent interpretations would have it.


faithful to the history of our times, for “nationalism” is incoherent as fact and can never be an interpretative category. If interpretation has in the first place to recede from the given, its essence would be to shift the terms in which reality presents itself, i.e., change. The “nation” mattered to the Jews, and it mattered when taking the Jews into account only because the Jews embodied a certain theological imperative; it made way for the emergence of the absolute State (Hobbes and Spinoza), i.e., a theory of the universal. Subsequent empire and capital formations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not and could never be interpretively guided by—nor did they betray—a hint of “nationalism.”

For if indeed “nationalism” is the identification of a people and a ter-ritory following an “enduring” set of customs and laws, this could perhaps be truer for fifteenth-century hamlets than for “modern” times. “Primitive tribal communities” are more likely, perhaps, to fulfill the criteria of nation-states and nationalism than anything else over the last few centuries. Yet the persistence of the nation-state and nationalism at the forefront of—and at the same time underlying—both policy and university discourse merely betrays its ideological nature. Since Marx and the realities of the politico-economic framework coding the political one, it would not take much to prove that “national sovereignty” has been the myth, the aura mystifying the workings of empire and capital.38 The question of national sovereignty today still occupies itself at this solitary intersection—no Hobbes or Marx thought too much of it—because it lacks depth. There is no principle by which it can be renewed. If a nation is truly sovereign, it cuts the branch on which it sits. Whereas discourse on nationalism speaks of it rightly as

38. Here, Benedict Anderson’s understanding of print capitalism as enabling national-ism or its consciousness serves the purpose of eliding the work of imperialism and capital. His also is a misreading of Benjamin, for whom the newspaper “scattered” experience and was not its simple staging: “If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just the opposite: to isolate events from the realm in which they could affect the experience of the reader. The principles of journalistic information (newness, brevity, clarity, and above all lack of connection between individual news items) contribute as much to this as the layout of the pages and the style of writing (Karl Kraus never tired of demonstrating the extent to which the linguistic habitus of the newspaper paralyzes the imagination of their readers). Another reason for the isolation of information from experience is that the former does not enter tradition.” See Walter Benjamin, “Some Motifs on Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, �9�9), pp. �58–59.

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a “cultural artifact,” by taking it thereby at face value—instead of submit-ting it to a critique—it becomes the busy secretary of the victor, making an inventory of his spoils.39

Marx’s concentration on exchange and alienability leads him to labor and production, his blueprint of real exploitation.40 Economic analysis here critically re-describes the political, for it is in such a state that the political as overt coercion or “force” has in fact (allegedly) disappeared into the cunning of nominal equality. Yet at another level, one could argue that no shift was really required because through exchange the sovereign-political principle was in any case always realized. The “keeping of promises,” key to the political principle, was simultaneously that which underwrote the economic transaction. And here it should come as no surprise that monetary currency at one time embodied the King—its disfigurement or replication warranted capital punishment. As the political, it set the terms of (unequal) exchange. In On the Jewish Question, Marx reads money otherwise, as the abstract equivalent that expressed the fall of man into the transaction in things. Here the overcoming of the political principle by the State meant that the new threat of money lay not in the brutality and locus of political sovereignty, but rather in the general condition where humans were in essence involved in commodity exchange, with money as the absolutely absentee despot. This was the new (economic) despotism, though reiterating the (political) older one: the submission to arbitrary rule. Such an understanding of money continues through the wonderful sections of the Grundrisse as well as the first volume of Capital. Money as general equivalent had to be supplemented by capital in the extraction of surplus value. But in the second volume of Capital, money�� returns to an older idiom in essence—even if not expression—where it has an operative function. It is here also a store of value, not simply a general equivalent, thereby reproducing the orienting function with which the politico-sover-eign had endowed it. This survives barely as a clue to political texturing of trade, finance, and currency, i.e., empire and capital, that the history of modernity has all along provided us with. It allows a translation of the “incidental” history of massive famine and war into an essential mark of

39. Needless to say, this is an invocation of Benjamin’s Theses.40. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. �, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, �992). Instances

can be found on pp. 292, �44, and 7�7–�8.��. See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, �993),

pp. 598–99.


our times. Money supply as real political determinant—rather than abstract economic equivalent—becomes possible again.

This densely interwoven nexus of trade, imperialism, and finance capital only unraveled the new exchanges between the contract and poli-tics. Here the specifically imperial dimension, having as its essential thrust “global conquest,” is one that conditions the “national question.” Thus the global wars of the eighteenth century that grew out of the even more dispersed political regimes of finance capital in the seventeenth century: the history of the East India Company is instructive here as a vector of the British Kingdom that conquered through an integration of finance capital, trade, and politics from the seventeenth century. The so-called formal equality of the political state that Marx critiqued on the basis of its abstractness has to be understood as actual and real in its “external” conquests. There is no need to delve into the interior to find the inequal-ity of society, one might find a more virulent state of inequality in the integration of “foreign” peoples into the essentially hierarchical politico-economic regime of imperial states, such as France and Germany. And this integration included nations, nations that were formally, i.e., even nominally, unequal, suspending the myth of abstract political equality. In fact, the hyphenation of the nation-state illustrates in radical fashion the difficulty of absorbing one into the other. The hyphen is the work-space of history, the slate on which the narrative of expansion—and the purging of peoples—plots with itself.

III.To return to the initial set of observations: Marx’s critique of “abstract right” unravels its strategic and purposive meaninglessness. As abstract and universal, it cannot guarantee; it thereby but re-inscribes the pres-ent and persistent state of affairs. This understanding of right is a far cry from the natural right of Hobbes, who saw it as the nexus of relations between the person, reason, and the transcendental. Far from being merely abstract, it was characterized by the ever-present possibility of “use.” Here we return to our initial definition of “right,” which grounded it in pres-ent certainty (Hobbes understanding of “sovereignty”). Marx’s target is an abstract right that has turned into abstract equality, from which it can no longer be distinguished; together they exist as mere promise. While with Hobbes equality was a promise of the Kingdom to come in no way subtracting the reality and reason of “right,” Marx realizes that in the

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new political ethic the indiscernibility between right and equality in their ideality at once affirms the never-ending reality of inequality and right-lessness. The State has disappeared, leaving only the fact of differences and conflict (civil society). Here we see the ruse in its finality: the modern political system of right and equality is a massive regression to a state of nature without exit. It is no coincidence that Marx describes civil soci-ety—for him, the current situation—in the Hobbesian formula for the state of nature: bellum omnium contra omnes. Abstraction as such marks out present powerlessness. With the person as person losing access to a tran-scendental guarantee cum horizon, within which was grounded a political subjectivity, he can only depend on a contingent collection: a political ideology cum structure, such as that of the nation-state. While in Hobbes the Jewish question allowed for a critique of what he saw as an arbitrary and contingent collection of empirical characteristics as well as a ground of a univocal sovereignty, in Marx it enabled a “reverse critique” of the complicity between abstraction and actual difference in the enunciation of an abject state of affairs. The continuum and logic between abstract infer-ence and actual perception thereby gives way to a complete severance. In other words, the flagrant tension between abstract universal principles and the present ideologies of fact, such as identitarian politics of whatever hue, remains necessarily unresolved. The blindness of taking equality as a fact—from all nations are equal to all humans are equal—occludes the very fact of experience, which is necessarily one of inequality in differ-ent degrees. The person is thus fully rendered an object among objects, a fact among facts, an idea among ideas, always interpreting the interpreted world—reflecting the inequality that is and theorizing the equality that is not—and never changing it.

Equality Right Identity: Rethinking the Contract Through Hobbes and Marx

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