I am suurounded by the reminders of our future.

So this is where I will start—where I will take my position—somewhere between the literary and the theoretical. More and more I find that the literary becomes the theoretical. For Althusser, the literary is a literary event because it has been re-presented, re-translated—re-produced. He is remaking on the rescue of a text from obscurity, from misunderstanding through language. Now, today, we must struggle to rescue so much, so much more. It may be necessary to unearth that which has been lost or stolen from our grasp. That which is theoretical can possibly be rescued by the literary.

We live in dark times. We have seen the waves of resistance and clear understanding of yje need for resistance and its futility come and go. We have seen the need for change been made irrelevant over and over again. The horrors of our time reverberate in our ears as we try to listen for words of hope. Now, this is because we can find hope only in words—words and their actions. We need the force of language to be able to undermine the sense of the scientific demanded by the theoretical.

Now, we need the force of the figure. The demands of the figurative. Only through the lingering pulls to the sense of what language means allows us to function in the face of overburdening reason. Sense threatens to strangle the life from the corpse.

It is, first of all, a literary and critical event. Up till now, the Manuscripts have only been accessible to French readers in the Costès edition (Molitor, Vol. VI of the Oeuvres Philosophiques). Anyone who had to use it knows from experience that this partial text, with important arguments cut out and afflicted with errors and inaccuracies, could not serve as a tool for serious work. Thanks to E. Bottigelli, who is to be highly praised, we now have an up-to-date version (the most up to date there is, for Bottigelli has made use of the latest readings and emendations, sent him from the Marx-Engels Institute, Moscow) presented in the most reasonable order (that of the M.E.G.A.) and in a translation remarkable for its rigour, its attention to detail, its critical annotations, and may I add – and this is particularly important – for its theoretical reliability (it should be obvious that it is impossible to conceive of a good translator except on the express condition that he be much more than a translator, in fact, an expert, steeped not only in the work of his author but also in the conceptual and historical universe in which the latter was brought up. On this occasion this condition has been fulfilled.)
But it is also a theoretical event. This is the text which has for thirty years been in the front line of the polemics between defenders of Marx and his opponents. Bottigelli gives a good account of the way the roles were shared out in this great debate. First Social Democrats (initially its first editors, Landshut and Mayer), then spiritualist philosophers, existentialist philosophers, phenomenological philosophers, etc., ensured this great text’s success; but, as might be expected, in a spirit foreign to an understanding of Marx or even to the simple comprehension of his formation. The Economic-Philosophic manuscripts have nourished a whole ethical or (what amounts to the same thing) anthropological interpretation of Marx – making Capital, with its sense of perspective and apparent ‘objectivity’, merely the development of a youthful intuition which finds its major philosophical expression in this text and in its concepts: above all in the concepts of alienation, of humanism, of the social essence of man, etc. As we know, Marxists did not think to react until very late, and their reaction was often of the same order as their fears and haste: they have tended to defend Marx in toto, and to take over their opponents’ thesis, thereby overestimating the theoretical prestige of the 1844 writings, but to the profit of Capital. On this point Bottigelli has some noteworthy comments (pp. IX, XXXIX). They are a prelude to a demand which no serious commentator can avoid: the demand for a definition of a new and rigorous method of investigation, ‘another method’ (p. X) than that of a simple prospective or retrospective assimilation. So we can and must now deal with these Manuscripts, which have been the argument of a struggle, the pretext for a prosecution, or the defence’s redoubt, by an assured method: as a moment in the formation of Marx’s thought, which, like all the moments in an intellectual development, does obviously contain a promise for the future, but also pin-points an irreducible and singular present. It is no exaggeration to say that in this irreproachable translation Bottigelli has given us a privileged object which has a dual theoretical order of interest for Marxists: because it concerns the formation, or rather the transformation of Marx’s thought, but also because it provides the Marxist theory of ideology with an excellent opportunity to exercise and test its method.
Finally, I should like to add that this translation is introduced by an important historical and theoretical Presentation, which not only brings us to the essential problems, but also situates and clarifies them.
What, in fact, is the specific feature of the 1844 Manuscripts if they are compared with Marx’s earlier writings? What is there in them which is radically new? The answer is given by the fact that the Manuscripts were the result of Marx’s discovery of political economy. Naturally, this was not the first time that, as he put it himself, he experienced the ‘embarrassment’ of having to give an opinion on questions of an economic order (as early as 1842, the question of wood thefts evoked all the conditions of feudal agrarian property; similarly, also in 1842, an article on censorship and the freedom of the Press came up against the reality of ‘industry’, etc., etc.,), but these encounters with Economics only concerned some economic questions, and from the angle of political debates: in other words, these were not encounters with political economy, but with particular effects of an economic policy, or the particular economic conditions of social conflicts (The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right). But in 1844 Marx was confronted with political economy as such. Engels had prepared the way with his ‘brilliant sketch’ of England. But Marx had been impelled in this direction, as had Engels himself, by the need to look beyond politics for the reasons for its insoluble internal conflicts. It is difficult to understand the Manuscripts without taking into account this encounter, this first encounter. In his Parisian period (February to May, 1844), decisive in this respect, Marx gave himself over to the classical economists (Say, Skarbek, Smith, Ricardo), he took copious notes which leave their mark in the body of the Manuscripts themselves (the first part contains long quotations) – as if he wanted to take into account a fact. But while recognizing it, he states that this fact rests on nothing, at least in the economists he has read, it is ungrounded and lacks its own principle. So, in one and the same movement, the encounter with political economy is a critical reaction to political economy and a thorough investigation of its foundations.

3 August 2011

This will be an exchange. A record of an exchange. Possibly even a return to the idea of exchange. But without a structure to return to now.