Abstract
The article is dedicated to the politico-theological critique of Judaism from the position of Christianity. It shows the affinity of Marx’s early critique of liberal state and of Hannah Arendt’s criticism of formal legalistic thinking in the contemporary judicial treatment of Nazism (and of similar international political crimes). Marx’s critique of nation-state finds its unlikely continuation in Arendt’s critique of international law. The politico-theological argument is explicit in Marx and implicit in Arendt, but both develop the Hegelian criticism of liberal state which shows its reliance on the abstract law, on the one hand, and on the egotistic abstract individual, on the other. The theological undercurrent of the argument is both sign of its limitations, and of the subsisting relevance of the politico-theological framework, even in the similarly novel circumstances of the twentieth century. It is only within and through the theological critique and critique of theology that these issues would stand a chance of resolution.
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Notes
Schmitt (1985).
The word usage goes to late stoic Panaetius; in Rome, Varro spoke of “theologia civilis”.
Cf. Walzer (1982).
Cf. Weber (2002).
Schmitt (1985, p. 36).
Blumenberg (1983, see particularly pp. 92–105).
Peterson (1951, pp. 45–147).
Schmitt (1970). On the “stasis”—a stagnant internal contradiction—as the very essence of the relationship between politics and theology, see a brilliant article by Vardoulakis (2009, pp. 125–147). The argument of this article, which written from the Derridean perspective, is in many ways similar to mine, and the relationship of Christianity to Judaism reminds of what Vardoulakis calls “stasis”.
Schmitt (1970, p. 122).
Marx (1975–2005, pp. 146–174). My reading of “On the Jewish question” is indebted to the seminar that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe taught in Strasbourg on early Marx, in 2001/2002. Unfortunately, Lacoue-Labarthe did not have time to publish or even finish this project during his life, but hopefully, there will eventually appear a publication of the notes of his seminar.
Bauer (1843a).
Bauer (1843b, 56–71).
Bauer (1843a, p. 49).
Bauer (1843a, p. 47).
Bauer (1843a, p. 61).
Bauer (1843b, p. 70).
Bauer (1843b, p. 67).
Marx (1975–2005, p. 159).
Marx (1975–2005, p. 162).
Marx (1975–2005, p. 159).
Tomasoni (2010).
Mendelsohn (1983).
Kant (1998, p. 130).
Cf. Shibata (2009, pp. 113–121). Shibata emphasizes that for Hegel, Judaism was a religion which opposed itself to the hostile nature and strived for domination over it, but unable to do so, confers this task on the all-mighty God.
Hegel (1971, pp. 182–301).
Hegel (1971, p. 230, translation modified).
Hegel (1971, p. 230, translation modified).
Hegel (1895, p. 196).
Hegel (1895, p. 216).
Hegel (1895, p. 218).
Agamben (1998).
Bauer (1841, p. 107, my translation).
Bauer (1843a, pp. 30–35).
Bauer (1843a, p. 48).
As is well known, for Hegel “civil society” was a utilitarian union of individuals, “a state of the need and the understanding.”
Feuerbach (1957, p. 114). Cf. M. Vogel (1990). It must be noted, however, that Feuerbach’s relationship to Judaism was complicated. Since the Essence of Christianity, his attitude to Judaism had significantly evolved, becoming more positive. Feuerbach felt interest and sympathy for the mystical element of the Jewish tradition: took private lessons from Rabbis, tried to study Hebrew, and befriended David Friedländer, a well-known German Jewish banker, activist, and intellectual. See to this point Bourel (2009, p. 127); also Tomasoni (1992, pp. 57–67).
Feuerbach (1957, p. 120).
Feuerbach (1957, p. 121).
Marx (1975–2005, p. 170).
Marx (1975–2005, p. 173).
Interestingly, Francesco Tomasoni, in his above quoted book Modernity and the Final Aim of History does not give a convincing interpretation of Marx’s text on the Jewish question. He erroneously attributes to Marx a more moderate denunciation of Judaism than Bauer’s because Marx, to him, would be interested in economics more than in theology and therefore would see Jew as an earthly, concrete figure, which “rather than condemning him to immobility and relegating him to the margins of history, put him at the very heart of the transformations” (2010, p. 184). Moreover, Tomasoni says that “religious doctrine interested [Marx] little (…) the economic practice was more his line (…) [and] the incentive to grasp its importance came more from the concreteness of Judaism than from the abstractness of Christianity” (2010, p. 186). Nothing could be further from the actual intentions of Marx. Firstly, the interest in theology and economy is for him (as for Hegel) one and the same. “On the Jewish question” is a work on theology, on the religious rupture within the Modern state. Secondly, the materialist, prosaic character of Judaism is for Marx precisely abstract, not “concrete,” because it depends on the rupture between the universal and the particular. Thirdly, the sheer materiality of the “Jew” shows the victory of Judaism over Christianity in our time, but it is far from being the final word of history, since this is the materiality artificially separated from its ideal meaning. Tomasoni, in the title and in the introduction to his book, denounces the Hegelian vision of “the final aim of history,” and perhaps he is right, but nevertheless for Hegel and for Marx, “Judaism” is a concept strictly correlate with the Christian and Enlightenment eschatology. In Hegel and Bauer, it represents the resistance to Aufhebung, in Marx, it appears as its hidden truth, regression under the guise of redemption. However, Marx is indeed ambivalent towards Judaism, not because Judaism is “materialist” but because it is Messianic. Reduced to sheer material existence, a human being turns to the future redemption, concrete but unaccomplished as yet (Tomasoni rightly points at this other aspect of Judaism, obliterated but sometimes surfacing in the Hegelian tradition, in p. 15).
Arendt (1958, pp. 248–257).
Arendt (1958, p. 254).
Arendt (1958, p. 253).
Heidegger (2008, pp. 213–267, cit. 243): “What Marx recognized in an essential and significant sense, though derived from Hegel, as the estrangement [Entfremdung] of man has its roots in the homelessness of the Modern man.”
Arendt (1979, pp. 290–302).
Arendt (1979, p. 291).
Arendt (1979, p. 296).
Arendt (1979, p. 301).
Arendt (1978, p. 246).
This is rightly noted by Richard Bernstein in his book Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (1996, pp. 15, 185). But Bernstein looks for the traces of the Judaic tradition in Arendt’s work, such as her notion of “love of the world” or the criticism of the fixation on the ego in the Modern culture (1996, pp. 188–189). This attempt is not overly persuasive, because the arguments in question can be equally attributed to the Christian tradition and because Bernstein does not take into account Arendt’s latent polemic against Judaism. Thus, as we saw, for Bauer and Feuerback it is precisely Judaism, as opposed to Christianity, that is egoistic and egocentric. See also an interesting book by Martine Leibovici (1998). Leibovici pays little attention to the theological side of Arendt’s argumentation in the Jewish question, but she notes that Arendt had consistently criticized the “acosmism” of the Jewish people (1998, pp. 279–340). Acosmism is also a theological motif, used by Hegel, for instance, in his critique of the Jewish thinker Spinoza. But acosmism often figures as an argument against the religion as such.
Arendt (1979, p. 34, 47–48).
Arendt (1994).
Arendt (1994, p. 19).
Arendt (1994, p. 263).
Robespierre (2000, p. 195).
See on this Agamben (1998).
Arendt (1994, p. 396).
Arendt (1994, p. 49).
Arendt (1994, p. 137).
Arendt (1994, p. 137).
Arendt (1994, p. 263).
Arendt (1979, pp. 290–302).
Arendt (1994, p. 252).
To Hegel, not only a general law, but a brutal senseless fact, or an isolated individual, are “abstract.” In the text “Who thinks abstractly” in Kaufmann (1966, pp. 113–118), Hegel discusses the generalized judgment of a criminal as an example of an abstraction. “This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality” (1966, p. 117).
Arendt (1994, p. 279).
Arendt (1994, p. 296).
Arendt (1978, p. 72).
Arendt (1978, p. 250).
Arendt (1993, pp. 49–146).
Arendt (1993, p. 116).
Bernstein (1996, pp. 188–189).
Both Rosenzweig and Buber knew Feuerbach’s philosophy. Rosenzweig acknowledges his role in “The New Thinking” (1999, p. 87). Buber refers to the “extraordinary importance of Feuerbach,” for instance, in “Das Problem des Menschen” (1926, pp. 339–342). On Feuerbach’s Jewish reception (which started as early as mid-nineteenth century), see Bourel (2009, pp. 125–134). It is highly ironic, however, that Feuerbach, with his critique of Judaism, was a predecessor of the neo-Judaic twentieth century tradition.
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Magun, A. Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt on the Jewish question: political theology as a critique. Cont Philos Rev 45, 545–568 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-012-9235-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-012-9235-8