A student wrote this afternoon expressing doubts over the misplaced hope the student had placed in the working class and wondering whether Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach held out any hope.
First things first. Since we too are shaped by the same social formation we are interrogating, we are bound to question the validity of our interpretive categories and we are likely, by default, to take our stand with the “other,” if for no other reason than simply because the other is not us. This is methodological idealism. It takes its point of departure from a place it imagines is beyond constitution, pure, unblemished. Yet, as Marx points out in his Theses this idealism is no better a starting point than the merely oppositional materialism from which this idealism wishes to distinguish itself. Both treat the immanent historical and social condition abstractly and take as their goal an abstract totality.
But the challenge of thought is to maintain Diesseitigkeit, this-sidedness, not only because it cannot think a beyond, but because the other sidedness that thought thinks is always inevitably immanent and must therefore be understood imminently.
Put differently, since thought is immanent, its other sidedness inevitably masks not only its object, but also masks the operation and object of thought itself. Psychoanalysis begins with the presumption of immanence. And it is this presumption (and not sex) that draws the ire of the church.
Beyond this presumption, however, is the demand of thought itself, that it is able to account for the conditions of its own possibility. The hatred that idealism rightly directs at Marx can be explained not only by his refusal to grant thought a place beyond the world, beyond constitution, but also by his unwillingness to free thought from the body. This immanence of thought is both it’s power and it’s weakness, what Benjamin calls its “weak Messianic power,” the only power that thought can claim.
Capital wants to disperse this power, diffuse it, render it inert. And, yet, it cannot do so. Because the condition of thought itself is freedom. Not freedom from constraint (which is still idealism), but the conditions that make for freedom, herein tying thought once again to its body. And herein also lies the weakness of the value form, of disembodied mind. Against itself, it knows that it is dependent upon the body, the body it is busily destroying. This is the heart and soul of Marx’s Thesen. It explains why mind is vacuous without its body.