Introduction: Spinoza, Marx and the Politics of Liberation

Summary

What if, to conclude, we floated the idea that not only Spinoza, but Marx himself, Marx, the liberated ontologist, was a Marrano? A sort of clandestine immigrant, a Hispano-Portuguese disguised as a German Jew who, we will assume, pretended to have converted to Protestantism, and even to be a shade anti-Semitic? Now that would really be something.

Jacques Derrida, ‘Marx & Sons’

The examination of the relation of Marx with Spinoza has often been driven – most notably with respect to Althusser and the Althusserian tradition – by the project of ‘giving Marxism the metaphysics that it needs’, according to an expression used by Pierre Macherey specifically with respect to Althusser. The intention was laudable, but, times having changed, our project can no longer be exactly that. We begin from the idea that the philosophy specific to Marx, or the specifically Marxist philosophy, is still largely unknown, that Marx as a philosopher is still largely and for the most part unknown. For a long time this was due to factors largely external to the thought of Marx: initially, the urgency of militant practice; later, the theme of the rupture with philosophy expressed by the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach and in The German Ideology, which meant that any reading of Marx that was resolutely philosophical was suspected of being ideological. Then, at the margins of orthodoxy, several authors – and not insignificant ones – both at the heart of the history of Marxism and outside of it, maintained that while there is a critique of philosophy in Marx, this critique would still be a determinant practice of philosophy. The ignorance of ‘Marx's philosophy’, however, is equally due to factors internal to his work: the critical relation that Marx enters into with philosophy implies in effect that when it appears it does so in unfamiliar and novel ways, which are not those of a doctrine expressed as such – Marx, who never completed any of his grand works, always refused any dogmatic or systematic presentation of his thoughts – but are also not a matter of mere fragments. Neither systematic nor fragmentary, philosophy in Marx appears diluted, omnipresent but always mixed, and everywhere combined with elements of the discourses of history and political economy, but also the natural sciences and literature.