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The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. - Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach”.

Thesis Eleven – what is ‘the point’? What is at stake? Eleventh - that moment beyond the neat ten, in excess of the theological commandments. Karl Marx’s eleventh comment on Feuerbach, while very far from being, as it is so often read to be, the purportedly a-theoretical pragmatic command which forestalls asking any significant or difficult questions about ‘how things are’ or, even less, amounting to a dialectics which seeks to project idealised versions of what exists into an infinite future, is nevertheless equivocal enough to have enabled interpretations of such varieties. Such are the contingencies of writing and reading, to be sure.

Below is a fragment from Lacoue-Labathe’s contribution to a 1980 seminar on Les fins de l’homme, which sought, as he put it, to “question of the links which indisociably unites the political with the philosophical.” The excerpt is from Retreating the Political. It clearly takes place as a response to what, in the 1980s at least, took the form of a dispute between Marxism and deconstruction.

But, since the effort of enshrining these philosophical/political camps is only functional to either/both the academy and sects - which is to say, to a certain priesthood, in both cases - the fragment might otherwise be read as the moment when the intersections (but also tensions) between - as I put it some time back - the philosophers of the désistance and the theoreticians of the refusal were explicitly put. Lacoue-Labarthe:

Paolo Virno’s “About Exodus” (trans. Alessia Ricciardi, Grey Room, n.21, 2005):

Among the different ways in which Marx described the crisis of capital accumulation (overproduction, the law of diminishing returns, etc.), there is one that goes largely unrecognized: the workers’ desertion of the factory.

A redux of Hamacher’s “Guilt History - Benjamin’s Sketch “Capitalism as Religion” (and the graphic I used last time), apropos recent debates. (I won’t blockquote it though, because it’s long and easier to read without doing so.) Trans. Kirk Wetters, Diacritics 32:3-4 (2002).

Again, though I’ve already posted an extract of this before, here’s the entirety of Werner Hamacher’s “The Right to Have Rights (Four-and-a-Half Remarks),” from SAQ, 103:2-3, 2004:

xposted and with some and with some prefatory remarks conveniently out of the way, and since it is the occasion of Marx’s birthday, a pastiche on origins, emergence, dates and anniversaries:

Following the recent Long Sunday blogweave on Spivak … wait, there’s more …

Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx begins at his funeral, thus setting the scene for opening remarks on Marx’s legacy. Wheen writes:

The history of the twentieth century is Marx’s legacy. Stalin, Mao, Che, Castro - the icons and monsters of the modern age have all presented themselves as his heirs. Whether he would recognise them as such is quite another matter. Even in his lifetime, the antics of self-styled disciples often drove him to despair. On hearing that a new French party claimed to be Marxist, he replied that in that case ‘I, at least, am not a Marxist’. Nevertheless, within one hundred years of his death half the world’s population was ruled by governments that professed Marxism to be their guiding faith.

And yet, the 20th century came to a close with the declarations of a triumphant liberalism that had, it was said, brought history to an end and, thereby, exhausted the legacy of Marx in that purportedly faithful expression of Marxism as raison d’etat.