IN 1843 KARL MARX MOVED to Paris to begin his life as a political exile. His plan was to establish with his fellow Left Hegelian exile Arnold Ruge a new journal that would unite the best of German radical thought with the political savvy of the French left. Shortly after his arrival in Paris, Marx wrote to Ludwig Feuerbach soliciting a contribution for the first issue of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. Unlike many editors seeking to win an article from a prominent author, Marx did not leave the choice of subject open. Rather, he urged Feuerbach to do a “great service to our enterprise” by contributing a “characterization of [F. W. J.] Schelling to the very first issue.”1 Marx’s motive stemmed from his disappointing encounters with the Parisian socialists. Not only were they far too religious, but some of them were enthusiastic for Schelling. “How cunningly Herr von Schelling enticed the French,” wrote Marx, “first of all the weak, eclectic Cousin, then even the gifted Leroux. For Pierre Leroux and his like still regard Schelling as the man who replaced transcendental idealism by rational realism, abstract thought with flesh and blood, specialized philosophy by world philosophy!” As it turned out, Feuerbach declined to write the article, the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher did not survive beyond its first issue, and Marx’s hoped-for alliance with French socialists never developed momentum. Although he interacted with the French leftists, read their works, and likely drew ideas from them, he ultimately found many of them too religious for his taste.
The various currents of leftist thought in early nineteenth-century France did not fare well in the hands of Marx and Engels. Granted, The Communist Manifesto praised “Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism” for providing “the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class.”2 Yet the Manifesto’s overall assessment of the political effects of these currents was unequivocally negative; and this was a judgment given canonical form decades later in Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. As for Pierre Leroux, Marx nominated him for membership in the Central Council of the International Working Men’s Association and hoped to include “all working-class Socialists”—“Proudhonists, Pierre-Lerouxists and even the more advanced sections of the English Trades Unions”—in the First International. Nonetheless, Marx’s serious engagement with Leroux was very limited. Undoubtedly, Leroux’s decision in 1841 to publish a French translation of Schelling’s 1841 inaugural lecture at the University of Berlin along with his own lengthy essay defending Schelling against the Hegelians produced ripples through the ranks of the Hegelian left. After all, Schelling had long before abandoned his youthful Romanticism and was known in Germany as an orthodox theist, political conservative, and staunch opponent of dialectical thought. German leftists viewed his call to the chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin once occupied by Hegel as nothing less than the defeat of progressive politics and thought in Prussia. Karl Rosenkranz hastily published his Sendschreiben an Pierre Leroux, intended to neutralize any support Leroux might give to Schelling. Arnold Ruge took Leroux for a stroll in the Tuileries Garden to set him straight. And Marx called upon Schelling’s German critics, like Feuerbach, to correct French leftists’ misunderstanding of Schelling.3 Once the dust settled on this affair, Marx seems not to have concerned himself again with Pierre Leroux.4
In 1843, the “gifted” Pierre Leroux was in mid-career and undoubtedly one of the most prominent of French socialists, having built his reputation through his work as an editor and his writings on politics, literature, aesthetics, philosophy, and religion. Of working-class background and trained as a typographer, he was the quintessential self-made intellectual, known as the most philosophical of proletarians and the most proletarian of philosophers. He had first gained prominence as a founder and editor of Le Globe, which became the main journal of the young French liberals after its creation in 1824.5 In 1831 Leroux broke with liberalism, announced his conversion to Saint-Simonianism, and bequeathed the editorship of Le Globe to the Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier. It was a short-lived alliance, however. Within a year, Leroux broke with the Saint-Simonians and henceforth pursued an independent career as a writer and publisher. He was a founder and coeditor of L’Encylopédie nouvelle (1836–1843), to which he contributed numerous articles, and the founder and editor of the Revue indépendante (1841–1848). From the printing company that he founded in accordance with his ideas about cooperative labor in 1844 in Boussac, he also published work by George Sand, who revered Leroux as her oracle. After the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848, he was elected to the constituent assembly and then to the legislative assembly. Following Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup in 1851, Leroux went into exile in Jersey. When Napoleon III issued a general amnesty of the 1848 revolutionaries in 1869, Leroux returned to Paris, where he died in April 1871.
Like numerous early left-wing theorists and activists, Leroux was eventually eclipsed by Marxism. Why devote discussion to him in a book about the Marxist and post-Marxist engagement with the problem of the symbolic? Very simply, at the moment when the nascent German left was stridently campaigning against Romanticism, Pierre Leroux’s socialism was candidly Romantic. At the time when German leftists excluded symbolic modes from their vision of emancipation, Leroux’s political project rested on a symbolic sensibility. Whereas the Germans construed the symbolic as anathema to the liberation of human beings from all forms of heteronomy, Leroux attempted to construct a democratic politics structured on the relationship of transcendence and immanence and the “opening” that results from the nonidentity of the symbolic and the real. In brief, Leroux offers a fascinating counterexample to the philosophical current that would eventually come to dominate the history of later nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialist thought. The style of Leroux’s thinking was destined to fall out of fashion in the wake of the Revolution of 1848. However, even as Marxism came to dominate the intellectual and political field of the left, the problems that Leroux confronted continued to have resonance in the subsequent history of the European left. Marx, as we shall see, was attentive to the symbolic dimension of social phenomena, but his basic impulse was to seek its cause in an allegedly anterior material reality. Among many twentieth-century Marxist philosophers, Marx’s devaluation of the symbolic and—what many viewed as practically synonymous—the cultural and ideological dimension was the source of misgiving, and it spurred various attempts to augment or correct Marxism’s social ontology by turning to the symbolic. The final sections of the chapter will explore three such efforts within the French context. The chapter thus traces the fate of the symbolic from pre-Marxist Romantic socialism through Marx and twentieth-century philosophical Marxism up to the threshold of French Marxism’s collapse.
In 1833 Leroux neatly summed up his project, in which politics, religion, philosophy, and aesthetics all intersected, when he declared: “We believe in individuality, personality, liberty; but we also believe in society.”6 This statement neatly evokes Leroux’s own history: on the one hand, his affiliation with the Doctrinaire liberals while he served as the editor of Le Globe, on the other hand, his short-lived acceptance of the organic socialism of Saint-Simonianism. Leroux’s declaration of belief thus tied him to two positions that he had already abandoned in their unalloyed form; but this gesture toward his own past served to emphasize that his convictions would find fulfillment only in a future synthesis. For, at present, these two principles were like “two loaded pistols aimed at each other.”7 Having witnessed the failure of the Saint-Simonians to create a synthesis based on an association that subordinated all individuals to the hieratic authority of Père Enfantin, Leroux sought a model of association that reconciled individualism and socialism. Leroux’s search was not merely for harmony between individual and society, but for an association that related the two poles while preserving them in their difference. Undoubtedly, the desire for mediation between individualism and socialism was not uncommon during the years from the July Revolution to 1848. One could even say this desire was one of the unifying elements of French Romantic socialism, the “generous, conciliatory, humanitarian” leftism that enjoyed considerable prominence in the years before the divisive conflicts of 1848.8 Yet, in the context of the French left under the July monarchy, Leroux was remarkable not only for the clarity of his resistance to socialism’s powerful current of anti-individualism but even more so for the complexity and richness of his attempt to theorize a social association based on the interplay of identity and difference. This was an attempt that led Leroux into an engagement with virtually all the intellectual resources of the age and launched him into flights of grandiose speculation, as his contemporaries noted with varying degrees of appreciation.9
Leroux’s undertaking was at once social, political, and religious. But, it was also aesthetic. Indeed, the aesthetic dimension provides a key point of entry into Leroux’s political thought. In a series of extraordinary articles from the late 1820s and 1830s on the history of European literature from Goethe’s Werther to Byron, Lamartine, and Hugo, Leroux identified what he called the style symbolique as the hallmark of the Romantic “revolution.” While Leroux’s writings on literature have been quite thoroughly explored, the relationship between Leroux’s aesthetic ideas and his political philosophy has seldom been probed. This is unfortunate, for the aesthetic and the political stand in close relationship in Leroux’s thought. Indeed, the aesthetic category of the symbol played a vital role in Leroux’s effort to rethink socialism as a reconciliation of individualism and society. It must be stressed that this role did not take the form of a direct and explicit transfer of aesthetic categories into the political realm. Rather, Leroux’s political thought is itself articulated within the style symbolique.
In the mid-1820s Romanticism was a subject of heavy controversy in France. The “immortals” of the Académie Française expressed the conservative opinion of the cultural and political elites when they denounced Romanticism in 1824. In the pages of Le Globe, the debate was heated. The opinion of the liberal contributors to the journal split between Étienne Delécluze, who defended classicism in a series of articles from 1825, and Stendhal, who championed the new style in the same year. It was only in ensuing years that Romanticism became closely identified with political liberalism, although as with most aspects of the liberalism of the Globe group, “Romantic” liberalism remained a “hazy” matter, oscillating between an individualism that derived its paradigm from the creative artist and a collectivism that regarded the artist as the voice of the zeitgeist or even of God.10 Leroux was not uncritical of Romanticism, but he sided with its “liberal” defenders in the late 1820s. Indeed, Leroux’s initial attachment to French Romanticism’s liberal ideal of free, expressive, and creative individuality remained a tenacious kernel of his thinking even after he renounced his ties to liberalism. So, for example, even during his short-lived alliance with Saint-Simonianism, his conception of the relationship between the artist and the aims of progressive politics was much looser and less doctrinaire than that of Émile Barrault, the main aesthetician of the Saint-Simonians.11
Leroux’s differences with the Saint-Simonians over the artist’s social role were consistent with his understanding of Romanticism, which he articulated in articles spanning his liberal phase in the 1820s and the period after his break with the Saint-Simonians. For Leroux, the heart of the Romantic “revolution” lay in the style symbolique.12 There is some tension here between Leroux’s depiction of the symbol as the defining feature of Romanticism and his description of the symbol as the “very principle of art.”13 Indeed, he viewed the symbol as a dimension of a general epistemological phenomenon, insofar as all human knowledge depends on comparison, metaphor, and processes of substitution. “What does the poet do, in effect, what does every artist do, and what do all humans in general do, if they do not continually substitute pure conceptions with the sensible or in other words seize relations and substitute them with identical relations taken from another order of ideas?” The artistic symbol thus belongs to the larger human reliance upon comparison and analogy whereby abstract ideas acquire substance and intelligibility. The symbol is unique insofar as it is “a figure that permits the continual substitution of abstract terms with images, proper expression with a vague and indeterminate expression.”14 In this sense, Romanticism might be characterized merely by its more frequent use of symbols. Yet Leroux identified a deeper novelty. The general tendency of human knowledge, he argued, is to develop an abstract idea itself; images may serve as valuable illustrations, but the articulation of the abstract idea remains primary. The style symbolique, by contrast, develops uniquely the second idea, that is to say, the image; the symbol thus becomes the vehicle of thought rather than merely its ornament. One would search in vain for this style in French classicism, Leroux asserted, whereas one could infinitely multiply the examples in contemporary literature. “To talk by symbols, to allegorize, voilà, that seems to us to be the great innovation in style during the last fifty years.”15
In a discussion of Madame de Staël’s approach to symbolism, Paul Bénichou emphasizes the tension in Romantic thinking between the poet as an inventor of symbolic language and the poet as a hierophant of the symbolic correspondences of the world itself. Madame de Staël ultimately sided with the artist as inventor, because to give the symbol an ontological ground would separate poetic intuition from scientific rationalism and elevate poetry over science. In Leroux’s case, by contrast, it seems important to remain, as Bénichou puts it, “in the ambiguity that is characteristic to this intellectual theme, and to make of the symbol both a human invention and a characteristic of being itself.”16 For he did not treat symbolism as a mere dimension of rhetoric. Rather, he argued that the symbol gives poetry its expressive power by establishing new relationships between word and world. The symbol connects the human subject to the world because the artist cannot create ex nihilo, but must strive to embody his interior life in what already exists.17 As Leroux wrote in 1831, by opening new channels between the subjective life and the world, the poet “glides at will through the entire world of the spirit.” There the poet encounters manifold phenomena vibrating in tune with certain laws and communicating these vibrations to other regions. The privilege of art is to detect and express these relations, hidden in the unity of life itself. The expression of these relations is the symbol. “Voilà, that’s why art is the expression of life, the sensation of life, and life itself.”18 Through art the entire world becomes symbolic. The invisible finds representation in the visible.
Much of the French debate about Romanticism centered on the alleged foreignness of the Romantic sensibility to a supposedly indigenous French classicism. Given the charged nature of this question of national style, it is not surprising that Leroux equivocated on the origins of the style symbolique. In 1829 he countered Étienne Delécluze’s charge that symbolism is a foreign import by insisting that the style symbolique is not a “puerile imitation” but emerged in France as a response to “the need of poetry, renovation of moral and religious ideas, and the study of nature and its mysterious harmonies.”19 However, immediately following this insistence upon a native origin in the spiritual needs of the French, Leroux acknowledged that the turn to foreign literatures was crucial. And in the 1839 introduction to his translation of Goethe’s Werther, Leroux noted that the initial French response to Goethe was uncomprehending because “in that epoch, the poetry of style, the poetry that lives from figures and symbols, was little known among us.”20 As for the sources of his own thinking, he likewise equivocated. On one hand, he claimed in Réfutation de l’ éclectisme that “we have come to philosophy by the pathway of France and not by the pathway of Germany.”21 On the other hand, his thoughts on the symbol do seem indebted to Germans like Goethe, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, and Schelling, the writers who formulated the Romantic theory of the symbol.
Paul Bénichou has argued that the poetic doctrine of the symbol had become sufficiently rooted in France that it formed “nearly a commonplace in 1830.” The earliest conduits for German Romantic aesthetics were Frédéric Ancillon’s Mélanges de littérature et de philosophie and then, shortly after, Mme. de Staël’s enormously influential De l’Allemagne. Mme. de Staël seized the essence of the German symbolic conception, particularly the intuition of mysterious parallels between the world and the intellect, the notion that every portion of the universe appears to be a mirror in which the whole of creation is represented, and the idea that the infinite can be depicted “only symbolically, in pictures and signs,” to use August Wilhelm Schlegel’s terms. Largely through Madame de Staël, the symbolic idea influenced Cousin and Jouffroy, the royalist Romantics around the Muse Française, and even the Globistes, who were devotees of Staël despite their ambivalence toward the German philosophy she celebrated. As for Leroux, there is no evidence that he had first-hand knowledge of the great German Romantic theorists beyond his brief discussion of Jean-Paul Richter and his many references to Goethe, particularly his Werther, which was, in any case, a product of the Sturm und Drang, not Romanticism. While Leroux’s thinking about symbolism seems to have drawn heavily on the “alliance of the human spirit and of poetic symbolism” that was, as Bénichou puts it, “in the air,” one particular German source may have exercised an influence on him, namely Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, published in four volumes between 1810 and 1812.22
Joseph Guigniaut’s 1825 French translation of the Symbolik provoked controversy, with conservative Catholics echoing German Catholics’ praise for Creuzer’s vision of an ancient hieratic monotheism and liberal opinion ranging from Cousin’s qualified appreciation to Jouffroy’s outright contempt.23 As for the Globe group, a pair of articles by Paul Dubois seems representative. Dubois expanded on Creuzer’s symbolic conception of the world, which he traced to Schelling and a whole “school,” presumably the German Romantics.24 He praised Creuzer’s erudition, but ultimately he shared the concerns of Creuzer’s liberal critics in Germany about the irrationalist tendency of the symbolist doctrine as well as the illiberal implications of Creuzer’s esoteric, hermetic interpretation of religion. In sum, the general tenor of Dubois’s discussion reflected the prejudices of the Globistes, who regarded Schelling and contemporary German philosophy with a mix of respect for the spiritual and philosophical culture flourishing beyond the Rhine and suspicion of the Germans’ tendency toward mysticism and pedantry.
The exception within the Globe circle was Pierre Leroux. Leroux was by no means an adept of mystical orientalism or of the theological camp that found ammunition in Creuzer’s thesis. Like Dubois, he must have known of the political controversies that had enveloped Creuzer’s Symbolik in Germany, and the depiction of a mystery religion guarded by a priestly caste could hardly have appealed to him. Nonetheless, Leroux seems to have taken a number of things from Creuzer, including support for his own emerging conviction that the various religions through the ages are transient and progressive revelations of an eternal truth, as well as for his belief that that eternal truth depends on an aesthetic order, since it finds formulation only in “expressive figures” and “images charged with sense.”25 Creuzer’s emphasis on the simultaneity of symbolic comprehension may have influenced Leroux’s discussion of the symbol’s ability to compress meaning and to communicate at an immediate intuitive level.26 Further, Creuzer emphasized that a symbol is distinguished by an incongruity between essence and form, an “overabundance of content in comparison with its expression.”27 Finally, it is possible that it was through Creuzer that Leroux had his first encounter with Schelling’s thought.
When Heinrich Heine set out to explain recent German intellectual history to a French readership in the early 1830s, he complained that the French had learned little about Germany since Madame de Staël. And, indeed, the processes of transmission whereby German ideas reached a man like Leroux are quite vague. Nonetheless, the extent to which he mirrored the German discourse is quite remarkable. This extends to his repetition of a basic tension within German symbol theory. On the one hand, the symbol seemed to have the power to fuse content and form. On the other hand, the failure of the symbol fully to communicate was intrinsic to its capacity to communicate. The symbol’s possibility as an expressive and communicative form rested in turn on a further tension, between the impossibility of full presence of meaning and the overabundance of meaning in relation to the form of expression. Pierre Leroux fully partook of these paradoxical impulses. Hence he approached the core of Schelling’s idea of symbolic identity of form and content when he spoke of Victor Hugo’s poem “Mazeppa.” Mazeppa, the sixteenth-century Ukrainian who was sent into the wilderness bound naked to a horse as punishment for adultery, only to become the chief of the Cossacks who rescued him, becomes a “perfect symbol” of the artist carried by speeding genius itself. In Mazeppa, waxed Leroux, “the fusion of the moral idea and the physical image takes place; the assimilation is perfect. The genius, his interior torments, the blasphemies that pursue him at first, the adorations that succeed to the blasphemies, all these pure conceptions of the intelligence have become visible. We have a symbol and not a comparison.”28 Yet if Leroux thus echoed the German Romantics in identifying the symbol with fusion and presence of meaning, he also repeated their emphasis on the inexhaustibility of symbolic meaning. To recall a passage cited earlier, the symbol replaces “abstract terms with images, proper expression with a vague and indeterminate expression.” If the advent of the style symbolique marks the disappearance of “abstraction” from the “poetry of the people,” it also heralds the birth of “mystery.”29 This tension in the understanding of symbolism, whereby the symbol embodies a meaning but remains indeterminate precisely because the meaning itself is unmasterable, lies at the heart of Leroux’s thinking about poetic style, and it deeply inflects his political thought.
How do these aesthetic ideas relate to Leroux’s political project? In 1833 Leroux proclaimed his faith in both the individual and society. For him, both individualisme and socialisme as they were understood in his time had negative connotations. On one side was the socialisme absolu of the Saint-Simonians, which Leroux attacked because it submerged the individual fully under the weight of collective life. On the other side was an individualité absolue stemming from the eighteenth century that took the atomized, solitary individual for the only reality, thereby ignoring the bonds that tie us to society and, through the mediation of society, to humanity and to God. In opposition to both, Leroux wrote in 1845, “we are socialist if one intends by socialism the doctrine that does not sacrifice any of the terms of the formula, Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité, Unité, but reconciles all of them.”30
Leroux insisted on the right of individual liberty, but his conception of the individual, in contrast to liberalism, rested on the assumption that the human being is formed by social relationships. There is no self-sufficient individual, only a person “tied to an incessant communication with his fellow creatures and with the universe. What he calls his life does not belong entirely to him and is not in him exclusively; it is in him and outside of him.”31 Unlike Marx, who would trace these relations to the processes of production and division of labor, whereby society reproduces itself, Leroux revealed his affiliation with other Romantic socialists by contrasting the antagonistic form of present-day commercial society to the possibility of a society bound together by love and emotional solidarity. Yet Leroux also differed from many of his socialist contemporaries in his vision of the form that this new social bond should take. In the case of the Saint-Simonians, the nouveau christianisme’s bond of love was supposed to move history from antagonism to association, from a critical age to an organic age, and direct all human energies toward common social goals. Even more radically, Abbé Alphonse-Louis Constant preached a gospel of the “unity before which all egoism and personality disappear.”32 Étienne Cabet offered, in his 1840 utopian work Voyage en Icarie, a similar vision of radical egalitarianism and communal property that won many followers among artisans but drew the criticism of more libertarian figures like Victor Considerant and Leroux because of the unrelenting conformism of Icarian communism.33 While Leroux shared the French left’s critique of the fragmented, egoistical society that had emerged in the eighteenth century, he sharply distanced himself from visions of synthesis that achieved social unity at the expense of the person’s individual liberty.
It is with this objection to the fantasy of social fusion in mind that Leroux’s definition of society as a “milieu” is very striking. “It is the new milieu, the true milieu, the only milieu where that new being, who has left behind the animal condition and calls itself man, develops its existence.”34 Society as milieu defines a space in which we live, but it is a temporality as well, insofar as it gathers together a past and a future as the meaning-giving horizons of the present. Hence, his definition of milieu as “tradition”: “Society is a milieu that we organize from generation to generation to live there.”35 The intersecting notions of society as a human milieu that is not reducible to other levels of being and of society as a tradition in which we live and communicate with each other and with the world combine to form a conception of society as a symbolic space.36 In a political context where the terms individual and society had become reified objects, between which the politically engaged felt obliged to choose, it was a bold and creative innovation to displace the social onto a self-consciously symbolic register. In Leroux’s view, society is not something we relate to, but something that enables relation. Hence, he repeatedly stressed, “society is not a being in the same sense that we are beings.”37 Even more strongly, in “De l’individualisme et du socialisme,” Leroux wrote: “do not make of society a great animal of which we will be the molecules, the parts, the members, of which some will be the head, others the stomach, others the feet, the hands, the fingernails or the hair.”38
Leroux thus rejected the metaphor of the body politic, a metaphor with a long history in Western political thought, but one that had become much more literal in Leroux’s time, insofar as the Saint-Simonians conceived the science of social organization on the model of a physiology of organized bodies.39 Yet, having discarded the metaphor, Leroux returned in the same text to qualify himself: “Yes, society is a body, but it is a mystical body [corps mystique], and we are not members of it, but rather, we live in it.”40 The redefinition of the body politic as a corpus mysticum immediately complicates the question of the social bond. For it suggests that the bond is not one of “identity” between the individual and society, but of relation and correspondence because the corpus mysticum is by definition an invisible body. The corpus mysticum thus depends on symbolic mediation if it is to be brought into the visible world. The complicated theological and political history of the idea of the corpus mysticum in Christian culture cannot detain us here.41 The point to emphasize in Leroux’s recourse to this age-old Christian trope is that by redefining society as corpus mysticum he underscored his distance from the tendency of his contemporaries on the left to collapse the gap between the social and their representation of it, between the social totality and its alleged incarnation in any one party, figure, or historical agent. Leroux’s reference to the corpus mysticum accentuates his intention to establish his political project on the tension between, on the one hand, the capacity of symbolic representation to make the intangible thing present and, on the other hand, the excess and inexhaustibility of the intangible in relation to all symbolic presentations.
In an 1841 letter to George Sand, Leroux remarked that he would prefer to replace the increasingly popular word communisme with the word communionisme, which better expresses “a social doctrine founded on fraternity.”42 The evocation of the sacral ritual whereby the mystical body of Christ is made present could not have been unintentional for a thinker who had elsewhere identified society as a corpus mysticum. Leroux himself never detailed the ritualistic dimensions of his vision of socialism as communion.43 However, as the elected deputy from Boussac in the National Assembly in 1848, he proposed a constitutional scheme that followed closely the symbolic logic implied by the idea of the corpus mysticum. In his proposal, the state was to be composed according to an idea of representation that rests firmly on Leroux’s penchant for triadic structures, a habit of mind that has been described as Leroux’s belief in “number symbolism as a clue to reality.”44 From Leroux’s belief that God possesses the divine qualities of force, amour, and intelligence, he argued that man possesses the corresponding qualities of sensation, sentiment, and knowledge. From these qualities, he deduced three groups in society, the industrialists, artists, and savants, and, from there, a state comprised of three bodies, the executive, legislative, and judicial or scientific. Each of these bodies would be formed of three hundred elected citizens, making nine hundred representatives in total. The three bodies would be distinct yet without essential separation, forming together a “body that is one and at the same time triple.”45
There is in this fantasy of the national state as a sort of Trinitarian mystery much that expresses the Romantic quest for fusion and full presence. True to Leroux’s Romanticism, however, this dream of the presentation of the invisible body of society in the visible bodies of the state is complexly related to his awareness of the impossibility of surmounting the gap between the symbol and the thing itself. Society is not a thing that one can seize or know in its full measure; it is, rather, a mystical body, an enveloping milieu that no one or no thing can exhaustively incarnate. The same is true of “humanity,” another lynchpin of Leroux’s thought. For Leroux, the relationship of the individual to humanity is not one of identity, but of latency or virtuality. As Leroux wrote in 1840, “Humanity is virtually in each man, but there are only particular men who have a true existence within eternal Being.” And, he added: “Humanity is a generic or universal being; but universals, as the Schoolmen said, do not have a veritable existence.”46 Nonetheless, at the same time as he denied a certain kind of reality to universal entities such as humanity, he also criticized the eighteenth-century axiom that only individuals exist and that all collective or universal beings are only abstractions. “Those philosophers were in grave error. They did not comprehend anything that was not tangible for the senses; they did not comprehend the invisible.”47 We are back to the language of the symbol, where the intangible exists, but in an unspecifiable mode whose power manifests itself only through symbolic mediation.
Leroux’s repeated recourse to the mediating role of the symbolic points to a complex sense of interplay between the universal and the individual, in which neither is seen to prevail but both are held in a state of relation and correspondence. It is useful to recall Schelling’s definition of the symbol as a figure in which the “finite is at the same time the infinite,” but without the finite simply collapsing its distance from the infinite. This basic orientation guided Leroux’s aesthetic judgments, for example his preference for Victor Hugo, who maintained the “sentiment of finite beings, even when he has the most profound sentiment of the infinite,” over Alphonse de Lamartine, whose poems contemplate only “that vast ocean of Being where everything is engulfed.”48 And it deeply inflected his approach to political problems. For Leroux’s concerns about the threats of both “absolute individualism” and “absolute socialism” led him to reject any politics that either exaggerated or flattened the distinction between the individual and society, the part and the whole; the symbolic style of mind seemed to offer him a way to think both relation and difference simultaneously.
Another way to summarize what this discussion reveals is to say that for Leroux the biggest problem of politics is the tendency to seek an incarnation of political meaning. On the one side, liberalism would incarnate the political in the sovereign individual; on the other side, socialism would incarnate the political in the collective or, as Saint-Simonianism had already demonstrated, in some sort of political avant-garde that claims to embody the essential interests of the class, society, or even the historical process itself. Incarnation was not an obscure or esoteric matter in the time when Leroux wrote; indeed, it had gained a pressing importance in the wake of the French Revolution. After all, the revolutionaries had executed the king, thereby destroying the embodiment of law and power as well as the political logic of incarnation that had governed the ancien régime. In the unsettled decades after the revolution, as Claude Lefort has observed, a wide range of thinkers “all looked to the religious for the means to reconstitute a pole of unity which could ward off the threat of the break up of the social that arose out of the defeat of the Ancien Régime.”49 This turn to religion often expressed itself as the temptation to return to the logic of political incarnation, whether in the form of a restored monarch, the nation, or a social class. Lefort mentions Pierre Leroux as an example of the powerful attraction of religion for early nineteenth-century thinkers; but within that context Leroux was actually something of an exception for his resistance against incarnation.
Not surprisingly, for a Romantic thinker who drew no rigid distinctions between art, society, and religion, this resistance extended to his interpretation of Christianity. Leroux defined his own religiosity as post-Christian, fully convinced as he was that both Catholicism and Protestantism had reached a state of exhaustion. Like many radicals of his age, Leroux found inspiration in the prophecy of Joachim of Fiore, who reimagined the Christian trinity as a historical progression from the age of the Father, to the age of the Son, to the age of the Holy Ghost.50 Saint-Simon’s nouveau christianisme, Moses Hess’s heilige Geschichte of humanity, and August Cieszkowski’s Historiosophie all equated the third age with a social solidarity cemented by pantheistic belief in the ubiquitous presence of divinity in the world. Leroux, by contrast, opposed pantheism and insisted on a transcendent deity. Where Hess and Cieszkowski envisioned the trinity as the immanent process of historical development itself, we have already seen in Leroux’s 1848 proposal for a constitution that his conception of the Trinity rested on a symbolic conjugation of unity and difference. Rather than tie the Holy Ghost to a prophecy of the coming identity of man and God, he emphasized that the Trinity symbolically communicates a true “ontological conception,” namely that there are several “persons” in being.51 As with homme and société or homme and humanité, the relationship between man and God could thus never be one of identity, but only of relation and correspondence, a mirror play between the divine being and created beings.
If Leroux thus rejected the inclination to cast socialist arguments as prophesies of the coming identity of God and man, he simultaneously took his distance from the other tendency of contemporary socialism to draw sustenance from an emphatically christocentric reading of Christianity.52 Where figures like Félicité de Lamennais and Étienne Cabet depicted socialism as the true imitation of Christ, Leroux’s theology was based on the idea of a progressive revelation of an eternal truth; hence, Jesus’s incarnation could only be a relative truth. As Leroux claimed in 1840, “Jesus … is God only because all men are from God or because God is immanent in every man.”53 At a first glance, this would seem to align Leroux with the German Young Hegelians. Indeed, it was such statements that led the radical Hegelians to believe Leroux was really one of them and to feel betrayed when he wrote appreciatively of the theologically inflected thought of the elderly F. W. J. Schelling, who had become the bête noire of the Left Hegelians. Yet it was not at all Leroux’s intention to deify human being. As he wrote in an imagined address to Giordano Bruno: “You, like Spinoza, like Schelling and Hegel, who have followed from you, are right to say that in a man you see being, substance, God. But you, and Spinoza, and Schelling, and Hegel, you are wrong to say because of that that [man] is God. He is God in as much as he comes from God, proceeds from God.”54 Two years later, Leroux criticized as “a vague pantheism” the notion that God is incarnated in man; he also insisted more rigorously than he had previously that Jesus cannot be identified with God. Jesus “sensed God in him, without doubt, but he never said as a result: I am God. The name of the son of God that his disciples gave to him does not annul that meaning. Jesus always established an incommensurable distance between himself and God.”55 Once again, Leroux leads us to the borderline between the visible and the invisible where the symbol is the only adequate means of representation. In religion, as in politics, neither the finite nor the infinite, neither the individual nor the collective become absolutely fixed poles; but neither do they become sufficiently fluid as to flow into one. Both humanity and divinity exist virtually in the human person; both humanity and divinity are universal beings that remain radically alterior to every other form of being.
Leroux’s hostility toward the logic of incarnation extended to a critique of Hegel, whom he regarded as the philosopher of incarnation par excellence. He summarized Hegel’s philosophy of religion in the following terms: “All religion consists in the incarnation of God in man,” with Christianity as the “absolute form” of incarnation.56 Like the Hegelian left, Leroux recognized that, for Hegel, it was as a symbolic representation of the identity of humanity and divinity that Christ had philosophical meaning. For the Young Hegelians, this Hegelian formula collapsed when they reimagined Spirit as a collective human essence existing solely in nature and history. Likewise, when the Young Hegelians rejected Hegel’s apparent claim that philosophy had come to its fulfillment in his philosophy, they dismissed the idea that any philosophy could incarnate the absolute. So, for example, in 1838 Ludwig Feuerbach depicted Hegel as a would-be philosophical Christ, but asserted that “it is speculative superstition to believe in an actual incarnation of philosophy in a particular historical appearance.”57 Accordingly, Feuerbach and a host of other progressive Hegelians insisted that the Hegelian dialectic must either describe an open-ended historical process or lapse into a reactionary absurdity. This latter theme emerged in Leroux when he blamed the Hegelian doctrine of incarnation for corrupting the Saint-Simonians and leading them into the grave error of worshipping Henri Saint-Simon as something like a demigod and Père Enfantin as the “Revealer.”58 Like the Young Hegelians, Leroux condemned this fixation on incarnation as an obstacle to the infinite progress of nature and humanity.
Whereas the Young Hegelians sought to reconstitute the absolute as a purely immanent product of human self-consciousness, Leroux, a believer in a transcendent deity, opened the development of human self-consciousness to what Marcel Gauchet calls “the dynamic of transcendence,” namely a paradoxical process whereby human freedom grows precisely through the distancing of the human from the divine source.59 It seems that Leroux’s wager was that a transcendent God is a key to opening the social space as a milieu for free human social interaction, a milieu that sustains people, enables their interactions, but does not engulf them. Operating as a principle of alterity, the horizon of transcendence breaks the hold of deterministic rationalism and opens human beings to their individual and collective possibilities for free action.60
Perhaps the best illustration of this is Leroux’s discussion of revelation. Revelation, he insisted, is permanent and progressive, but it does not lead to the convergence of God and man. The distance between human and divine is permanent, “incommensurable,” even if there is a possibility of relation and communication. God may be in the revealer, but so too is finite human nature. Revelation is divinely inspired, but it is spoken by human mouths and through the intermediary of society. The language of revelation may become authoritative, and it may even create human institutions, but it will always be symbolic, remaining in the tension between the visible and the invisible, the sayable and the unsayable. And, in its inexhaustibility, it should be open to a collective hermeneutical process that aims simultaneously at disclosing the divine truth and constituting the human order. Leroux tried to drive home this point in a book-length refutation of Joseph de Maistre’s authoritarian interpretation of Church history, where Leroux argued that the Catholic Church had democratic origins in the efforts of early Christian councils to interpret and institutionalize Christ’s revelation.61 Leroux could agree with the Young Hegelians’ effort to overcome the idolatry of the conventional Christian understanding of incarnation; he could even endorse their desire to disclose the human agency in biblical revelation. But he could not sanction the Young Hegelians’ reduction of the Word to an immanent order of reality, to a single present dimension of meaning. Hence, he complained, “All the divine and eternal truths that Christianity contains in its symbols elude the disciples of Hegel.”62
In a sharply critical 1844 article titled “La poésie symbolique et socialiste,” the literary critic Paulin Limayrac insisted on an elective affinity between symbolism and socialism, which according to him together comprised a “true kingdom of the vague.”63 This vagueness, for Limayrac, found its epitome in a doctrine that conflates human sociability with man’s communion with God and nature. Limayrac’s critique was directed at the poet Victor de Laprade, but his attack on the alliance of symbolism and socialism might as readily have been aimed at Leroux. Measuring the faddish efflorescence of symbolist poetry against the deep roots of the French classicist tradition, Limayrac forecast a short life for the symbolic style. In light of the long history of French symbolism, stretching from Baudelaire through Verlaine and Mallarmé and into the twentieth century, he was clearly wrong. As to his insistence on an affinity between socialism and symbolism, that had at best a momentary legitimacy in the period of Romantic socialism. If, as we have seen, the style symbolique formed a core component of Leroux’s search for a third way at the very moment when the characteristic modern tension between liberalism and socialism was being born, the direction pointed by the radical German Hegelians was much more indicative of the course that European leftism would take in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The German left viewed the Romantics’ symbolic conception of the world with hostility. This was a tradition of suspicion starting with Hegel’s own critique of symbolism as too ambiguous and polyvalent for philosophical discourse, running through Heine’s critique of major symbolists of the Frühromantik like Novalis and the Schlegel brothers, to Ruge and Echtermeyer’s Der Protestantismus und die Romantik. For the main current of the German left, the way toward emancipation lay in overcoming religion, and for that project the symbolic conception seemed too loaded with theological baggage to be of any use. The Hegelian “hermeneutics of desymbolization,” to use the phrase of Frank Paul Bowman, may even have played a crucial role in moving French intellectuals away from Romanticism. If we follow Bowman’s account, then already Victor Cousin’s 1827 Sorbonne lectures applied Hegelian categories to unpack and dissolve the symbolic form of Christianity; by the late 1830s the French controversy over David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus intensified this French turn toward a desymbolizing intellectual style. In fact, spurred by the original instance of Strauss, who, as Bowman puts it, “desymbolized the most important symbol of Christianity, Jesus himself,” the problem of symbol and desymbolization came to occupy a central place in mid-nineteenth-century French discussions about theology, law, and literature.64
As examples like Strauss and Feuerbach and indeed Hegel himself show, the Hegelian interpretive style typically recognized value in the symbol, but then proceeded to expose the truth that was veiled in the symbolic expression. This strategy characterizes Karl Marx as well.
In his adolescence, Marx seems to have been deeply attracted to the Romantic sensibility. The teenage Marx did not write philosophical prose on Romantic themes, but he did compose poems. In the poem “Creation,” Marx depicts a cosmos animated by creative spirit, while in a companion poem titled “Poetry” he presents the human creation of symbols as a repetition of this demiurgic power.65 Beyond the reasonable supposition that a voracious young reader like Marx would have been familiar with the works of major German writers of the recent past, there is some circumstantial evidence to suggest that he had some knowledge of the theoretical stances of the Romantics. At the University of Bonn, Marx attended August Wilhelm Schlegel’s lectures in the winter semester of 1835–36, and a preparatory note for Marx’s dissertation on ancient atomism refers approvingly to Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of irony.66
By the late 1830s, however, Marx had turned away from Romanticism, largely as a result of the powerful anti-Romantic currents of Hegelianism. Convinced of the reactionary and irretrievably Christian nature of Romanticism, Marx was, by the early 1840s, ready to accept Bruno Bauer’s invitation to write an article that would serve as a companion to Bauer’s own polemic against Romanticism, Hegels Lehre von der Religion und Kunst von dem Standpunkt des Glaubens ausbeurteilt (Hegel’s Teachings on Religion and Art Judged from the Standpoint of Faith). Marx reported that his essay against Romanticism was growing toward book length, but, unfortunately, the manuscript was never finished and became lost.67 Even in the absence of this text, it seems clear that Marx was already launched into the themes that would dominate his discussions of aesthetics throughout his mature period. Like Heine, Ruge, and Bauer, his tastes leaned decisively toward classical Greek and Roman literature; later he and Engels would embrace literary realism. Further, influenced by Feuerbach, he sought to reveal the sensuous materialist base of art.68 This early impulse gained historical concreteness in step with the further development of his thought, and over the years he would return on various occasions to the question of the relationship between art and the dominant social mode of production. While Marx tended to subordinate art to the economic structure, he did not rest with a straightforward deterministic model.69 Nor did he fully abandon the notion that the artwork has its own internal logic, beyond simply reflecting the social world.70 Nor, finally, did he ever fully abandon his early hope that communism would overcome the division of labor whereby certain activities took the form of creative, artistic practice, while most labor was stripped of creative, expressive dimensions. Still, if he thus hoped to reunite labor with its alienated creative side, this was clearly animated by a desire to demystify creativity and not to mystify labor.
As Alvin Gouldner has pointed out, this move to bring creativity down to earth had broad implications for Marx’s vision of society: “While installing labor and productivity as the uniquely human form of creativity, in contrast to the Romantics’ accent on the symbolic aspects of creativity, Marx, correspondingly, diminishes the significance of symbolic activity in its everyday, prosaic forms as language, speech, symbolic interaction, and culture. Humanity is thus largely viewed as self-produced and defined by labor, rather than its symbolic talents and linguistic heritage. The human ‘essence’ is now work, not language, not the symbolic, not culture.”71 Gouldner is just one of a host of modern commentators to note that Marx downplays the symbolic dimensions of social life. The examples could be multiplied at length. In Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty complained about the “ABC’s of Marxist philosophy, namely, the definition of truth as ‘the harmony of representation with the objects which are outside it.’” This species of epistemological realism, warned Merleau-Ponty, converts Marxism into a “massive positivity.”72 Jürgen Habermas criticizes Marx for reducing “communicative action” to “instrumental action.”73 Pierre Boudieu charges Marx with overemphasizing the material-economic structure, and in his own work Bourdieu shifts to symbolic struggles within culture. Jean-Joseph Goux complains that Marx rejects the “hieroglyphic valence” that Goux believes inhabits every true symbolism.74 In terms that resonate with the Lacanian language we will encounter in the following chapters, Bernard Flynn notes that for Marx the disjunction between the real and the symbolic is socially produced and can be socially overcome; in denigrating the symbolic order, Flynn writes, Marx aims at the “total appropriation of society by itself,” a “project of rendering society totally transparent to itself.”75 Indeed, considered in its hard form, historical materialism is an extreme instance of desymbolization, which dissolves the apparent autonomy of the merely symbolic by exposing its genesis and meaning in the material substratum of labor and value.
If Marx’s thought aims at desymbolization, it is nonetheless also true that Marx was keenly aware of the power of the symbolic. One sees this in his analyses of earlier social forms. So, for example, Marx maintained that mythology did not simply veil the real conditions of ancient Greek social life, but in some sense was the ground of that social life: “Greek art,” wrote Marx in 1857, “presupposes the existence of Greek mythology, in other words, nature and even the social forms have already been worked up in an unconsciously artistic manner by the popular imagination.”76 In Capital Marx argued in similar vein that while it is true that in our own time, “in which material interests preponderate,” the economic structure of society is the “real basis on which the juridical and political superstructure is raised,” it is not true for “the middle ages, in which Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics, reigned supreme.” Still, if this remark accords a prominent role to symbolic, cultural, and superstructural dimensions, Marx nonetheless immediately underscored the primacy of the economic base: “This much, however, is clear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part.”77 The capitalist epoch itself is, in a strict sense, an agent of desymbolization, stripping tradition of its halo and bringing people face to face with the true circumstances of their lives, as Marx famously declared in the Communist Manifesto. And as capitalism extends its technological power, the psychological need for a certain kind of symbolic compensation for human impotence weakens: “All mythology subdues, dominates and fashions the forces of nature in the imagination and through the imagination; it therefore disappears when real domination over these forces is established.”78
The demystifying power of capitalist modernity stands in a dialectical relation to the evident power of capitalism to generate new mysteries, new symbolic forms out of the stuff of material life itself. The analysis of the symbolic structures of money, the commodity, value, and class comprise a core dimension of Marx’s mature work. Indeed, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who always acknowledged Marx’s influence, suggested that Marx opened a door toward the analysis of “the symbolic systems which underlie both language and man’s relationship with the universe.”79 This potentiality is reinforced if one considers a famous distinction Marx makes in Capital: “A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect erects his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”80 This remark suggests that Marx recognized constructive and constitutive powers in imagination and cultural representations, even if he placed these idealist elements into an intimate dialectical relationship with practical activity and concrete need.81 Rastko Mocnik has even argued that Marx attempted to conceptualize “the symbolic efficacy of the economic sphere itself.”82 From this perspective, the crucial moment in Marx’s account of capitalism’s symbolic efficacy is the development of the general value form, when the value of all products comes under the one general equivalent of all values, money. Mocnik sees in Marx’s consideration of “intersubjectivity” an attempt to describe a symbolic efficacy, as if it were incumbent on Marx to demonstrate that the structural constraint of the “value-form symbolism” “effectuates the specific type of intersubjectivity dubbed in the sequel ‘commodity fetishism.’”83 In other words, the autonomous logic of this symbolic register constitutes a certain kind of human agent.84
It is worth recalling that Marx explicitly describes the commodity as a symbolic form. Regarded from the perspective of exchange, commodities are symbols of the value generated by labor. Insofar as labor is a social relation, this relation gets condensed into the commodity, making every product a “social hieroglypic.”85 To recall a well-known passage already cited in the introduction, Marx insists that to find an analogy to the process whereby the commodity becomes a hieroglyph, “we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world.” In that world, he continues, “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.”86
Let us consider more closely a specific commodity, money: Marx’s later works are loaded with references to money as a symbol of value. In one of the most detailed recent discussions of Marx’s theory of money, Anitra Nelson argues that although Marx describes money as a symbol, ultimately a nominalistic or symbol theory of money is much less important to Marx than is a commodity theory of money.87 Yet this is true only if one employs a limited notion of symbol, whereby money would be considered a conventional sign that is valueless in itself. This limited symbolic view certainly belongs to the intellectual history of money. In her history of money in early modern British thought and life, Deborah Valenze speaks of the recurrent notion that money is an ideal instrument of cognition because of its abstract, symbolic character. Thomas Hobbes described money as the “sufficient measure of value of all things else,” and recognized the ability of money to represent “all commodities moveable and immoveable.”88 Roughly a century later, David Hume described money as the product of a conventional agreement in which a symbol would function as a guarantor of exchange.89 In the 1810s, writes Nelson, “Hegel discussed money as a ‘symbol’ of value, as the ‘abstract’ expression of ‘another universal,’ value”;90 Moses Hess wrote that “money is for the practical world what God is for the theoretical world. … It constitutes the alienation of the idea of social value. … In other words, money is simply the inorganic symbol of our present social production that has broken free from our rational control and therefore dominates us.”91 Marx’s earliest writings on money draw heavily on this theory of money as a symbol of value; and even in Capital he concludes that, just as all commodities symbolize value or social relations, so too is money a symbol.92
Marx’s more mature work supplements this with a view of money as itself a commodity. As he reasoned, because the value of a commodity cannot be directly expressed, a “third commodity” is necessary to express the value relation between any two commodities being exchanged.93 Nelson and various other analysts distinguish sharply between this commodity theory of money and the symbol theory. However, it seems more accurate to say that Marx’s theory of money as a commodity reinterprets money through the matrix of the theory of the symbol forged by German idealism and Romanticism.
After all, the notion of money as an abstract sign, a conventional marker, would be an instance of what Immanuel Kant considered a misuse of the word symbol. As we recall from chapter 1, Kant complained that logicians had come to use the word symbolic in contrast to intuitive presentation, whereas symbolic presentation is “only a kind of intuitive presentation.”94 Marx echoed Kant’s idea that a symbol makes the invisible visible when he wrote, “Exchange value as such, of course, can exist only symbolically, although this symbol, in order to be usable as a thing—not only as imaginary form—possesses an objective existence; is not only an ideal notion, but actually represented in an objective way.”95 In chapter 1 we saw further that the Romantics who followed after Kant insisted on a synecdochical relation between the object of intuition and the concept, a manner of participation between sign and thing.96 Marx’s theory of money operates within the horizon of this conception of the symbol. Money can become a symbol of value because it too has value. “Hence,” wrote Marx in the Grundrisse,
in order to realize the commodity at a stroke as exchange value and to give it the general effect of exchange value, its exchange for a particular commodity is not sufficient. It must be exchanged for a third thing which is not itself a particular commodity but the symbol of the commodity as commodity, of the commodity’s exchange value itself; which therefore represents, say, labour time as such, say, a piece of paper or leather which represents a certain portion of labour time. (Such a symbol presupposes general recognition; it can only be a social symbol; in fact, it only expresses a social relationship.)
“This symbol,” he added, “this material sign of exchange value, is a product of exchange itself, not the execution of a preconceived idea. (IN FACT, the commodity which serves as the mediator of exchange is only transformed into money, into a symbol, gradually …).”97 That is, it emerges not as the result of a convention, but rather in the process of exchange over time. Instead of merely being an abstract sign, money is a concrete particular that comes to serve as a universal symbol, as the general equivalent within the total value form: “As a result of the transformation of the commodity into general exchange value, exchange value becomes a particular commodity. But this is possible only if one particular commodity acquires over all others the privilege of representing, of symbolizing their exchange value, i.e. of becoming money.”98 Like the Romantics, Marx was concerned to demonstrate that this symbol was not the product of an arbitrary convention, but was rather a motivated sign; hence, his investigation into the qualities of various precious metals. Even if a certain kind of object, such as slips of paper that are in themselves devoid of value, may be arbitrarily assigned an exchange value, this comes only when the transformation of a specific commodity into a symbol of exchange is already very far advanced. At that point, a “symbol of the mediating commodity can in turn replace the commodity itself. It now becomes the conscious token of exchange value.”99 Paper money is thus a symbol of the symbol.100 In saying this, one could suggest that Marx moves from one register of the symbolic to another: first, the Romantic synecdoche between the particular and the universal allows him to explain the emergence of the general equivalent and, second, the notion of a conventional sign allows him to explain paper currency.
Marx’s analysis of the commodity form is a compelling example of his dominant attitude toward symbolic forms, namely that they are mystifying knots of meaning that hold people captive. By tracing the symbol back to its origin in social relations, Marx’s aim was not only to release us from its thrall but also to aid people in their struggle to transform social relations from the source of alienation into the condition of human flourishing. This was the strategy already enunciated in Marx’s famous remarks on religion in his 1844 “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” which make clear his profound debt to the Left Hegelians even as he pushes beyond their desymbolizing agenda by insisting that the critique of religion must lead to the critique of law, politics, and society. Marx’s debt to the Left Hegelian strategy of recognizing a human truth veiled in the religious symbol would still be evident years later in his analysis of commodity fetishism. Yet, alongside this predominant desymbolizing impulse, our brief foray into Marx’s analysis of symbolic forms reminds us that his efforts at demystification are coupled with a sophisticated awareness of the complexity of these forms. In Marx we frequently sense that his attempt to create a descriptive language adequate to reality contests with his awareness that he is confronting a reality that continually exceeds the capacity of language to represent it.101 There is thus sufficient ambiguity in Marx to help account for the divergent paths that Marxism took in the twentieth century.
These divergent paths are neatly illustrated if we return to Merleau-Ponty. On the one hand, as we have seen, Merleau-Ponty railed against the vulgar form of epistemological realism that had come to dominate orthodox Marxism, the belief that truth is “‘the harmony of representation with the objects which are outside it.’”102 On the other hand, in countering this orthodoxy by turning to the role of symbolism, Merleau-Ponty believed that this potentiality already resides in Marx himself. At his best, so he argued, Marx exemplifies the richest possibilities of dialectical thought, which in his words is a “paradoxical mode of thought, the discovery of an entangling relationship between the dialectician and his object, the surprise of a spirit which finds itself outdistanced by things and anticipated in them.”103 Admittedly, Merleau-Ponty sees a decline in Marx’s own dialectical nuance as he moved toward the scientific socialism of his later years. In this regard, he does not consider Marx fully innocent of the tendency toward naive realism and positivism that he laments in twentieth-century Marxism. Still, if dominant Marxist currents have forfeited their claim to philosophical legitimacy, he readily defends the countercurrent that he detects even in the early Marx. Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism is strongly influenced by a hermeneutical sensibility that he finds in Max Weber, but he qualifies Weber’s own negative view of historical materialism as a form of reductionism. Indeed, he insists that the “best” Marxists in Weber’s own time—above all Georg Lukács—actually resembled Weber, insofar as they too strove to develop a “theory of historical comprehension, of Vielseitigkeit, and of creative choice.”104 Merleau-Ponty is, of course, here touching on the rich and complex history of Western Marxism, a designation he did not invent but did much to popularize. Alvin Gouldner’s Two Marxisms labels the same current “Critical,” as opposed to “Scientific Marxism”; Gouldner writes that if in Marx “the economic and instrumental side of human and social activity comes to overshadow the symbolic and cultural,” then this “is what the subsequent crystallization of Critical Marxism, in some part, attempts to repair.”105 And indeed, that heterogeneous grouping of thinkers—including Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Sartre—spanning several countries and several generations, strove to supplement classical Marxism with richer theories of culture, ideology, and psychology.106 Above all, in one way or another, these critical Marxist philosophers sought to avoid reductionism of the sort that would treat the cultural and political superstructure as a reflection of the economic base and reduce consciousness to an epiphenomenon of social being.
When Adventures of the Dialectic appeared in 1955, Merleau-Ponty had already traveled a great distance from his postwar investment in the communist cause. In 1947’s Humanism and Terror, he readily defended some of the worst offenses of Stalinism in the name of long-term progressive historical change. In ensuing years the Soviet Union’s obsession with its own security at the expense of support for the western European working class and the North Korean invasion of South Korea and the ensuing proxy war soured his faith that “really existing socialism” was an agent of emancipatory change, while the French Communist Party’s relentless hostility to his work made it impossible to remain a fellow traveler.107 Adventures of the Dialectic excoriates the vulgar Marxism that had come to dominate postwar French communism, but Merleau-Ponty is also not uncritical of the various currents of Western Marxism. Insisting on the opacity of the historical process, he challenges any theoretical position that pretends to master history and reveal its total meaning. This critique touched not only Lukács’s view of the proletariat as the subject and object of history but also Sartre’s revolutionary voluntarism, which Merleau-Ponty denounced as “Ultra-Bolshevism,” as well as Merleau-Ponty’s own confident proclamations about the direction of history in Humanism and Terror. Adventures of the Dialectic ultimately remains receptive to an open, nondogmatic Marxism, but in retrospect it appears as a way station on the road to a much more attenuated relationship to Marxism. Undoubtedly, his own unfolding process of reflection helps to explain this development; but in addition Merleau-Ponty was, like so many leftists, deeply shaken by the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Kruschev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes. By the time he published Signs in 1960, he could assert that “with the events of recent years Marxism has definitely entered a new phase of its history, in which it can inspire and orient analyses and retain a real heuristic value, but is certainly no longer true in the sense it was believed to be true.”108
Adventures of the Dialectic attempts to offset economistic determinism by appealing to an image of the complex symbolic fabric of the social world: “This order of ‘things’ which teaches ‘relations between persons,’ sensitive to all the heavy conditions which bind it to the order of nature, open to all that personal life can invent, is, in modern language, the milieu of symbolism, and Marx’s thought was to find its outlet there.”109 In the face of the “obscurity of historical symbolism,” both social theory and political praxis must become interpretive enterprises. The idea of the symbolic that circulates in Adventures of the Dialectic is decidedly expressivist, in the sense that Merleau-Ponty maintains that symbols give body and meaning to social relations and the experiences of personal life. This theory of the symbol supported his attachment to Weber’s interpretive sociology. Strikingly, however, at the same time as he tried to build a bridge between Marx and Weber based on the expressivity of symbolic mediations, he was in fact becoming increasingly interested in the possibilities suggested by structural linguistics. Already in a 1951 essay, he embraced Ferdinand Saussure’s thesis that language’s “expressive value is not the sum of the expressive values which allegedly belong individually to each element of the ‘verbal chain.’”110 This view of a linguistic whole whose expressive power stems strictly from the relations of its parts suggested to Merleau-Ponty a broader social model, as he wrote in 1953: “Just as language is a system of signs which have meaning only in relation to one another, and each of which has its own usage throughout the whole language, so each institution is a symbolic system that the subject takes over and incorporates as a style of functioning, as a global configuration, without having any need to conceive it at all.”111 Merleau-Ponty’s flirtation with the emerging structuralist paradigm culminated in his 1960 essay on Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss. There, he endorsed Lévi-Strauss’s pathbreaking essay Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (1950), which had argued that Marcel Mauss’s call for anthropology to learn from linguistics was answered by Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology. Closely echoing Lévi-Strauss’s language, Merleau-Ponty wrote that Mauss’s “total social fact,” which is “no longer a massive reality but an efficacious system of symbols or a network of symbolic values, is going to be inserted into the depths of the individual.”112
This observation in fact reveals what really interested Merleau-Ponty in structuralism, namely its potential as an ally in his long-running critique of the modern philosophy of the subject. It is not incidental that his friendship with Claude Lévi-Strauss strengthened after Merleau-Ponty broke with Jean-Paul Sartre.113 Whereas Sartre emerges in Merleau-Ponty’s work as the culmination of modern subjectivism—whether we speak of his criticism of Sartre’s concept of freedom in the closing pages of Phenomenology of Perception or his attack on Sartre’s “ultra-Bolshevism” in Adventures of the Dialectic—Lévi-Strauss seemed to offer a radically new departure. Hence, toward the end of his essay on Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty steered the discussion back to the fundamental question of the human subject: “For the philosopher, the presence of structure outside us in natural and social systems and within us as symbolic function points to a way beyond the subject-object correlation which has dominated philosophy from Descartes to Hegel.”114
Merleau-Ponty’s enthusiasm for Saussure and Lévi-Strauss seems to have played an important role in helping structuralism rise to dominance in French intellectual life in the 1960s. Yet Merleau-Ponty was not a structuralist. For one thing, he consistently insisted that the tasks of the philosopher were not identical to those of a linguist or social scientist.115 For another, he tried to integrate the insights of structuralism into his own philosophical agenda. Hence his abiding concern for a phenomenology of lived experience meant that for him the notion that meaning resides in a symbolic domain outside individual consciousness does not preclude the possibility that the individual receives and alters meaning in singular ways. Along the same track, Merleau-Ponty warned that an excessive emphasis on structure threatened to obscure the role of agency. Far from embracing structuralism’s antihumanist potential, he insisted that the philosopher’s task is to disclose the “dimension of coexistence—not as a fait accompli and an object of contemplation, but as the milieu and perpetual event of the universal praxis.” Then, in a formulation that seeks to describe a nonreductive reciprocity between agency and structure, individual and collective, he asserts that “philosophy is irreplaceable because it reveals to us both the movement by which lives become truths, and the circularity of that singular being who in a certain sense already is everything he happens to think.”116 In short, structuralism gave Merleau-Ponty a further tool for decentering human subjectivity, for conceptualizing it as eccentrically situated within society and nature. But he likely underestimated the extremism of the structuralist break with subjectivity, seeing it as a critique rather than an erasure of the subject.117 Even in praising Lévi-Strauss’s reading of Mauss, he optimistically believed that recognition of the impersonal power of the symbolic order neither eliminated the individual nor forced a choice between the individual and the collective. In this sense, he remained true to the vision of Vielseitigkeit, to the many-sided view of history that he had praised in Adventures of the Dialectic. At the same time, his tempered approach to structuralism also fit with his evolving politics, which had taken him from the communism of the immediate postwar era, to a defense of undogmatic Marxism, to a pluralistic left-leaning liberalism at the time of his death in 1961. His untimely death meant that he never witnessed the more extreme antisubjectivist claims that characterized the structuralism of the 1960s or the displacement of his own brand of phenomenology by structuralist analysis.118
The same confluence of events that had contributed to Merleau-Ponty’s increasingly distant relationship to Marxism had similar effects for many left-wing intellectuals. For many leftists in France, and, indeed, western Europe and North America, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 brought an end to their attachment to the respective communist parties and initiated the birth of the New Left, that fragmented international cadre of leftists who distanced themselves categorically from the Soviet Union and embraced less dogmatic and less statist forms of socialism. In France, Socialisme ou Barbarie, founded in 1948 by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, witnessed a marked rise in membership after the Hungarian invasion, although the group’s historian, Philippe Gottraux, gives equal weight to the radicalizing effects of the Algerian War.119 Other anti-Stalinist groups like the Situationist International and the Arguments circle emerged as direct responses to the Soviet aggression. However prescient these groups might look from our present vantage point, it was, ironically, Louis Althusser and structural Marxism that benefited most from the disenchantment of leftist intellectuals with the Parti communiste français. François Furet suggested in an important article of 1967 that the triumph of structuralism in the 1960s stemmed directly from “the dislocation of Marxist dogmatism.”120 It is a curious fact that structuralism served as an exit strategy for many disillusioned leftists who turned to anthropology and the eternal verities of peoples without history, or to psychoanalysis and the timeless unconscious, yet, at the same time, in Althusser, structuralism served as a way of rescuing Marxism. On this point the historian François Dosse writes that structural Marxism “was one response to the need to abandon an official, dogma-bound, post-Stalinist Marxism with an onerous past. … [Althusser] offered the exciting challenge to a militant generation that had cut its teeth in anticolonial combats of resuscitating a scientific Marxism freed of the scoria of regimes that had ruled in the name of Marxism.”121 Or, from Furet’s closer and more jaundiced view, “the structuralist ‘deideologizing’ of Marxism undoubtedly offers a way of living through the end of the ideologies inside the Communist world.”122
Althusser’s structuralism possesses numerous qualities that exceed the linguistic model dominating Lévi-Strauss’s thought. Nowhere is this more evident than in his effort to steer Marxism away from an expressive idea of the social totality. According to Althusser, the critical Marxism of the twentieth century had been enthralled by a Hegelian conception of totality in which the whole is unified by a core principle that is both the essence and the cause of all the parts. Against this conception of expressive totality, Althusser argued that society is a “structured whole containing what can be called levels or instances which are distinct and ‘relatively autonomous,’ and co-exist within this complex structural unity, articulated within one another according to specific determinations, fixed in the last instance by the level or instance of the economy.”123 Consistent with this understanding, Althusser proposed that the parts of the whole are not determined by an underlying essence, or within a hierarchy of cause and effect, as in the classic Marxist model of base and superstructure. Rather, the “levels” or “instances” are overdetermined through “structural causality.” As he wrote, “structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which comes and alters their aspect, forms, and relations and which is effective on them as an absent cause. … Effects are not outside the structure, are not a preexisting object, element, or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark. The structure, which is merely a specific combination of its elements, is nothing outside its effects.”124 Except for Althusser’s heavy emphasis on the synchronic operation of elements upon one another, this conception of structure arguably has more to do with Spinoza’s idea of natura naturans than with Saussurean linguistics.
Nonetheless, Althusser drew upon the argot of structuralism when he tried to develop a new theory of ideology. In essays like “Freud and Lacan” (1964) he develops a theory of ideology leaning heavily on Lacanian psychoanalysis. Yet where Lacan continually balances tensions between the three registers of the real, symbolic, and imaginary, Althusser subordinates everything to the symbolic. The “real,” that unmasterable domain beyond the symbolic, is fully absent from the account. The symbolic is, by Althusser’s definition, nothing less than the “law of culture”; the imaginary, which for Lacan precedes the symbolic in the infant stage of individual human development and persists throughout adult life, disappears into the “Law of the Symbolic.” So, writes Althusser, “Even the moment of the imaginary, which, for clarity’s sake, I have just presented as preceding the symbolic, as distinct from it—hence as the first moment in which the child lives its immediate intercourse with a human being (its mother) without recognizing it practically as the symbolic intercourse it is …—is marked and structured in its dialectic by the dialectic of the Symbolic Order itself, i.e., by the dialectic of human Order, of the human norm … in the form of the Order of the signifier itself, i.e., in the form of an Order formally identical with the order of language.”125 The formulations in this and other essays empty the individual human subject of any dimension of self-constitution or agency; the subject is a product of structural causality. In the 1969 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser borrowed from Lacan to define ideology as the “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”126 This would seem to allow no room for the role of the symbolic, but in fact, Althusser’s formulation subordinates the imaginary entirely to the symbolic.127 That is, in Althusser’s account of ideology, the imaginary is structured by the “big Other,” that point or place where the authority of the symbolic order is assumed to lie, that ultimate “quilting point” that stabilizes the entire system of signification. Further, insofar as Althusser believes that the human being is formed in and by language, he argues the human individual is always tied to a signifier that represents him for the other, thus loading him with a symbolic mandate and assigning him a position in the network of symbolic relations. Hence Althusser’s notion of “interpellation,” or hailing, as a constitutive moment of subjectivity, as when a policeman shouts “hey you!” and “I” turn in response.
Merleau-Ponty, as we saw, had straddled two conceptions of the symbolic in his critical engagement with Marxism, on one side, the expressive theory that underlies interpretive models such as Max Weber’s and, on the other, the structuralist theory of symbolic order, wherein meaning emerges from synchronic operations within a relational field of signs. The tension between these two understandings of the symbolic would likely have become fully evident to Merleau-Ponty had he lived long enough to read Althusser’s work in the 1960s. For, in presenting an “utterly consistent symbolic,”128 a symbolic order with no outside and no disruption, Althusser pushed to an extreme the structuralist tendency to view the symbolic as an algebraic order. Excluded from Althusser’s symbolic order is recognition of the polysemy that prevents a stable, unified theory of the symbolic: the “fecund uncertainty” of symbols,129 the symbol’s “irreducible duplicity” between the algebraic and the sacred,130 the equivocal oscillation between “abstract operational symbolization” and “cryptophoric symbolization.”131 Yet, in the death throes of French intellectual Marxism, this dimension of symbolic polysemy did make a spectacular, if short-lived return in the work of Jean Baudrillard in the years immediately after 1968. It is impossible to close this chapter without mentioning this final twist in the entwined stories of Marxism’s weakening hold and the vagaries of the symbolic.
We recall, from the introduction, Camille Tarot’s suggestion that Marcel Mauss developed a “Romantic” version of Durkheimianism. Tarot is unable to account fully for Mauss’s divergence from the sociology of Émile Durkheim, but he speculates that the German idealist and Romantic theory of the symbol may have influenced Mauss through his training as a philologist. For Tarot, Mauss’s more supple, polysemic approach to meaning explains why his symbolic sociology had a double posterity, on the one hand, the hyperrationality of the structuralists and, on the other hand, the irrationalism of Georges Bataille and the Collège de Sociologie, with their fascination for excess, transgression, and what commentators have called the impure or transgressive sacred.132 If Louis Althusser’s attempt to wrest Marxism out of the hands of Hegelian humanists and put it on solid scientific ground exemplifies the one current, then Jean Baudrillard’s work in the early 1970s represents the resurgence of the “Romantic” possibilities of the symbolic within a Marxism in extremis.
Baudrillard’s two major works of his early career, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972) and The Mirror of Production (1973), mark a rapid turn away from Marx. The essays collected in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign offer an amalgam of structuralist interest in the functioning of codes, Marx’s discussion of money as the general equivalent of all value, and Guy Debord’s description of an advanced stage of capitalism where capital has “accumulated to the point where it becomes image.”133 In Debord’s account the reign of the commodity form has flattened all qualitative distinctions in a society of infinite exchangeability, and fetishism has grown so extensive that the lived reality of social relations has receded into an autonomous pseudoworld of representations, a system of signs that has coagulated into a mesmerizing and deceptive spectacle. Baudrillard accepts many elements of this depiction, as well as Debord’s recognition that consumption has become a form of domination; but he views the commodity as just one instance of modern society’s tendency to suppress qualitative differences beneath a logic of infinite sameness and abstract exchangability. Here, as Steven Best writes, Baudrillard “understood contemporary society not in terms of spectacle, but ‘sign-exchange-value,’ rooting the development of the commodity in the structural logic of the sign.”134
Even as Baudrillard leans on structuralism in drawing this parallel between the logic of the commodity and the logic of the sign, he departs from structuralist nomenclature. Where the structuralist equates the symbolic order with the system of signs, Baudrillard pits the sign against the symbolic:
The rationality of the sign is rooted in its exclusion and annihilation of all symbolic ambivalence on behalf of a fixed and equational structure. The sign is a discriminant: it structures itself through exclusion. Once crystallized on this exclusive structure, the sign aligns its fixed field, resigns the differential, and assigns [Signifier] and [Signified] each its sphere of systemic control. Thus, the sign proffers itself as full value: positive, rational, exchangeable value. All virtualities of meaning are shorn in the cut of structure.135
Baudrillard pointedly rejects the “classic semio-linguistic” definition of the term symbol as an “analogical variant of the sign.”136 Instead, the symbolic emerges as the radical other of the sign and, thus, a vital source of potential disruption: “Only ambivalence (as a rupture of value, of another side or beyond of sign value, and as the emergence of the symbolic) sustains a challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign; only ambivalence questions the evidence of the use value of the sign (rational decoding) and of its exchange value (the discourse of communication).”137 At one level, this disruptive force seems to reside as an ever present dialectical contradiction within the order of the sign itself. Hence, Baudrillard writes, “It is the symbolic that continues to haunt the sign, for in its total exclusion it never ceases to dismantle the formal correlation of [Signifier] and [Signified].”138 Yet, at another level, the symbolic seems to belong to a historical destiny, as if the struggle of the sign to deny and repress openness will eventually generate its dialectical opposite. Accordingly, the main essay of the volume ends with a call for a revolutionary bonfire to consume both capitalism and semiotics:
As the functional and terrorist organization of the control of meaning under the sign of the positivity of value, signification is in some ways kin to the notion of reification. It is the locus of an elemental objectification that reverberates through the amplified systems of signs up to the level of the social and political terrorism of the bracketing (encadrement) of meaning. All the repressive and reductive strategies of power systems are already present in the internal logic of the sign, as well as those of exchange value and political economy. Only total revolution, theoretical and practical, can restore the symbolic in the demise of the sign and of value. Even signs must burn.139
In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Baudrillard believes that his analysis remains within a Marxist framework. By contrast, The Mirror of Production strikes a much more ambivalent stance: Baudrillard still leans heavily on Marxist categories, but at times he aggressively criticizes Marx. One aspect of this shift can be seen in his greater readiness to distinguish himself from Guy Debord and the situationists. They emerge as more or less conventional Marxists who ultimately operate within an orthodox social model, insofar as they speak of “the ‘infrastructural’ logic of the commodity” and believe that the “exploitation of labor power is still determinant.”140 In Baudrillard’s more extreme challenge to that model, the autonomization of the sign, its detachment from reference to the real, and its capacity to oppress have become more or less absolute. “It is,” he writes, “a matter of the passage of all values to exchange-sign value, under the hegemony of the code. That is, of a structure of control and of power much more subtle and more totalitarian than that of exploitation. For the sign is much more than a connotation of the commodity, than a semiological supplement to exchange value. It is an operational structure that lends itself to a structural manipulation compared with which the quantitative mystery of surplus value appears inoffensive” (121–122). Thus we see in The Mirror of Production the unmooring of the sign system, of signifiers from signifieds. Any meaningful notion of reality melts into air. This move would only gain in momentum in Baudrillard’s subsequent work on simulacra and would eventually ensure his status as the most extreme and notorious representative of postmodernism.
Baudrillard’s relentlessly bleak insistence that modern society stands fully under the dominion of the “super-ideology of the sign” (122) has invited comparisons with the Frankfurt school’s idea of a “totally reified” society, but it must also remind us of Althusser’s depiction of a fully consistent symbolic order. Yet, unlike Althusser, Baudrillard vacillates between this depiction of an entirely closed hegemonic order and a radically utopian leap beyond it. And once again, the notion of the symbolic plays the key role. But the register has shifted. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, the issue of the symbol remains tied to questions of language—sign and symbol are dialectically entwined as two unsurpassable dimensions of communication. In The Mirror of Production, Baudrillard has shifted emphasis from semiotics to anthropology. His guiding lights are now Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille, and his interest in the symbolic now centers on the contrast between primitive “gift” economies and modern capitalism. In the primitive economy, exchange is symbolic. It is expressive, it discharges energy and meaning, and it opens relations of reciprocity. In the modern economy the exchange of commodities ties us ever more tightly to the process of abstraction and the ever greater accumulation of capital.
Here, we encounter the second dimension of Baudrillard’s sharpening critical distance from Marx. For he insists that Marx never managed to transcend the presuppositions of the era. That is, he failed to develop a critique of the two orders that Baudrillard believes act in total unison to dominate modern society: the “order of production and political economy” and the “form representation (the status of the sign, of the language that directs all Western thought).” The form production and the form representation, Baudrillard continues, “are the two great unanalyzed forms of the imaginary of political economy that imposed their limits on [Marx]” (20). Regarding production, Baudrillard takes Marx to task for failing to recognize the historical specificity of modern capitalism. Marx uncritically projected capitalism’s productionist ideology onto all earlier epochs and thereby overlooked the radically different nature of symbolic exchange and its potentially disruptive effects within a commodity culture. Regarding representation, Baudrillard specifically attacks historical materialism for its realist epistemology, in short, its failure to recognize itself in the order of representation. Hence, he exposes the “‘self-verification’ of a model that is achieved through the adequacy of the rational (itself) and the real.” Historical materialism is “an arbitrary model that verifies itself, like any self-respecting model, by its own circularity” (117). Such a perspective cannot think the symbolic: “If there was one thing Marx did not think about, it was discharge, waste, sacrifice, prodigality, play, and symbolism” (42). Within the productivist cosmos embraced by Marx, discharge of energy gets immediately translated into value, thus excluding “all symbolic putting into play as in the gift or the discharge” (44). “Labor,” continues Baudrillard, “is defined … as what disinvests the body and social exchange of all ambivalent and symbolic qualities, reducing them to a rational, positive, unilateral investment. The productive Eros represses all the alternative qualities of meaning and exchange in symbolic discharge” (46).
The Mirror of Production posits an understanding of history in which the epoch of symbolic economy has been superseded by an epoch of political economy that fully represses the symbolic. Yet Baudrillard intimates that this repression cannot be fully successful. Even in the midst of the “triumphant abstraction” of the capitalist system, he writes, “the demand arises that nothing can be given without being returned, nothing is ever won without something being lost, nothing is ever produced without something being destroyed, nothing is ever spoken without being answered. In short, what haunts the system is the symbolic demand” (147). And so, at the end of a book about “coding, super-coding, universalization of the code,” Baudrillard indulges a vision of radical alterity, a resurgence of the symbolic, as the utopian alternative to rational mastery and the dominance of the abstract code. Yet he insists that this must take the form of “revolt,” not of “revolution,” because the latter is far too entangled in a dialectical story of reality on its way toward completion. Hence, he seeks inspiration not in the Marxist yearning for proletarian revolution, but in “the cursed poet, non-official art, and utopian writings in general.” Such figures of revolt, he writes, “are the equivalent, at the level of discourse, of the savage social movements that were born in a symbolic situation of rupture (symbolic—which means non-universalized, non-dialectical, non-rationalized in the mirror of an imaginary objective history). This is why poetry (not Art) was fundamentally connected only with the utopian socialist movements, with ‘revolutionary romanticism,’ and never with Marxism as such” (164).
Uncannily, at the extreme edge of Marxism’s hold on the imagination of French leftist intellectuals, we find a summons to the Romantic socialists of the early nineteenth century. It is as if, in Marxism’s implosion, history runs backward or, to be truer to Baudrillard’s simulacral sensibility, as if history is a film playing in rewind. Passing back through Bataille and Mauss, Baudrillard tries to mobilize the Romantic recognition of the unmasterability of symbolic form as a weapon of revolt against the closed, rational order of late capitalism. This vision is, of course, mediated by Baudrillard’s twentieth-century provenance and, more immediately, by the fresh memory of the heady days of May 1968, when stalwarts dreaming of communist revolution uncomfortably shared the Parisian streets with revelers in a carnivalesque revolt. And, among the various contemporaries who surface in The Mirror of Production—Kristeva, Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze, Althusser, Derrida, Marcuse—is one whose presence has scarcely been remarked in the sizable literature on Baudrillard. I am speaking of Cornelius Castoriadis, whose pseudonym Cardan appears at various pivotal moments in Baudrillard’s book. It is from Castoriadis—not Lacan—that Baudrillard takes his notion of the “imaginary” of political economy, from Castoriadis that he draws his criticism of Marx’s unwarranted projection of capitalist categories onto the universal history of earlier epochs. Indeed, it is through Castoriadis that Baudrillard arrives at the “radical hypothesis that not only have the categories of historical materialism no meaning outside of our society, but that perhaps in a fundamental way they no longer have any meaning for us” (108).
The striking disconnect between the evident impact of Castoriadis upon Baudrillard and Castoriadis’s nearly total absence from scholarship on Baudrillard is emblematic of the fate of this Greek philosopher, who made his way to Paris in 1945 and there fashioned a singular political and intellectual career. If Castoriadis’s influence on Baudrillard is palpable, nonetheless their thought and sensibility are in fact profoundly different. Baudrillard swings between sharply contrasting polar opposites: a despairing image of a totally ordered, dominated world and fantasies of breakthrough into an unimaginable plenitude. This oscillation is the first portent of what Martin Jay has diagnosed as the manic-depressive temperament of postmodernism, which mixes celebration of excess with apocalyptic visions of obliteration and dispersal.141 Castoriadis never succumbed to this malady. Instead, when he abandoned Marxism as his guiding thread, he sought to detect the tension between openness and closure as present and active within the lived experience of social and political action. He rejected the binary opposition between an absolute oppression and an absolute freedom. Rather, he emphasized the extent of autonomy already won by historical actors in modernity, while also remaining unequivocal in his critique of the forms of domination at work in contemporary society. And, above all, he tried to conceptualize creativity in its full potency, not as an extraordinary visitation in moments of effervescent transgression, but as the truly distinctive feature of human society. The stridency of Baudrillard’s insistence on the simulacral and his dualistic vision of freedom and oppression suggest that, even if only negatively, he remained captured by the moment of Marxism’s implosion. He is a post-Marxist in the biographical sense only. Castoriadis, by contrast, leads us onto terrain where we recognize landmarks of a specific intellectual style and political vision that we may, with ample awareness of the perils of generalization, identify as post-Marxism.