▶︎ 0:01 In this lecture, we're going to be dealing with the figures of Marx and Wagner. Now, I'm not going to say that these are out-and-out people who were degenerationists, but what I'm going to say is that the kind of metaphoric that the degenerationists introduced into intellectual discourse in Europe got absorbed by many intellectuals, and we'll see it reappearing in interesting ways in both Marx and Wagner.
▶︎ 0:30 Going back, remember, one of the things I said about degenerationists is they configured the degenerates as atavistic, as a reversion to an earlier type, a more primitive type. But then primitive type means an inferior type, which is exactly how it was characterized, and that gives rise to this problem called the survival of the unfittest, that there's this incredible worry about these degenerates, and at the same time, they're seen as inferior who will naturally breed away, and Morel said they tended to be less fertile than normal people. But if less fertile, what's the worry?
▶︎ 1:06 So there's this kind of contradictoriness involved in this literature of degeneration, and as I said, there's also a contradictoriness involved in a lot of anti-Semitic literature, and it's very related. The Jews were seen as primitive, the Christians saw the Jews as primitive in that they didn't accept a new dispensation of Christ. But if they're primitive, then how come they're the ones who have survived, when everyone else is gone? I call that the paradox of the survival of the unfittest.
▶︎ 1:40 Well, there's another paradox I want to make available to you, and that is in the anti-Semitic literature, there's an incredible contradiction or tension between the notion of the Jews just as in the Christian configuration of them as atavistic as representing the past, and the Jews as hyper-modern. Because in a lot of anti-Semites of the 19th century, for instance, the one we all know, that the Jews are financial manipulators is, of course, configured around the notion of modern capitalism being involved not as the agrarian society was with the production of farm goods, but with financial instruments, and the Jews were seen as the masters of this, and this was rejected by a lot of people who felt displaced by this modern world.
▶︎ 2:34 And so the Jews were seen as the masters of this finance, but that makes them hyper-modern. So there's this interesting tension in anti-Semitic literature that sees them as somehow representing the past, but also as hyper-modern. It's a second paradox, the Jews atavistic yet hyper-modern.
▶︎ 2:55 I have to give a bit of background before I talk about Wagner. A little baby course into 19th century anti-Semitism. In 1789, the French National Assembly, as part of the French Revolution, declared the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In 1791, the National Assembly proclaims the emancipation of Jews.
▶︎ 3:23 Why is this important? The late 18th century, the early 19th century is when the Jews get freed from a ghetto isolated existence, and they start to live amongst us, and they're allowed into certain positions like the legal profession. Remember, the Jews, they're the shape-shifters in that he could be a Jew, but you can't tell, it's not a visible marker. So there's these foreigners living amongst us, and they're subverting us.
▶︎ 3:52 In 1806, Napoleon convoked the Council of Jews to discuss this very question of the integration of Jews, and Napoleon was on the side of integration. It was often called the Grand Sanhedrin, who met in 1807, and this is what Napoleon himself said. "I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France, because to me, the Jews are the same as other citizens in our country. It takes weakness to chase them out of the country, but it takes strength to assimilate them."
▶︎ 4:26 Napoleon's a minor figure here, but as I tell the wider story, Napoleon belongs to one of those heroes who believes the secret to health is not the isolation, but the integration. I've already mentioned that with Baudelaire. We will see that much more with Nietzsche. But what's important for us is that this attempt by some to integrate the Jews had a backlash.
▶︎ 4:50 Famously, the Russian secret police, somewhat with awareness of what Napoleon had tried to do a lot earlier, published this notorious book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was originally published in 1903, which claimed that Jewish elders met every year to discuss how they can manipulate financial institutions, manipulate governments, monarchies, the press, et cetera, so that the Jews could rule the world. Actually, the influence for The Protocols of Zion was a book by a guy called Osman Bey called The Conquest of the World by the Jews, published in the 1870s.
▶︎ 5:26 It's interesting to note that Henry Ford, as in the founder of Ford Motors, was a raving anti-Semite, and he actually paid for multiple editions of reprint of this Russian forgery, this Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he distributed it far and wide. He distributed it to all his workers. I will say a little aside about Ford's anti-Semitism. Ford was a notorious anti-Semite, and Hitler read some of his writings, because some of his writings, actually it was done by an editor who he forced to write anti-Semitic things in the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper he owned. They were collected, and they were translated into German, and Hitler read them. So there's a transition from American antisemitism to German antisemitism.
▶︎ 6:19 But a little story on Ford. Ford is a very mixed character. This is a bit of a digression, but I can't help it. I love this part. Ford himself, he was very proud that he made things. "I make motorcars. I can point every year to what I produced." But what he felt is, he felt, "I'm producing stuff and I'm having all this trouble with these bloody finances," mainly in New York, who he associated with Jews. So we had this image of Jews as being involved in the non-productive financial world and he became a raving maniac anti-Semite, who as I said, influenced Hitler. Anyhow, that's a digression.
▶︎ 7:00 But basically, I tell that story because this became part of the association, that the Jews as they became enfranchised were allowed, that is, given civil liberties and rights, that they didn't have to be in ghettos, became part of the financial world, became part of the educational world, they could rise to become professors, they could rise to become lawyers, and that this provoked a lot of resentment, because Jews were seen as somehow the winners of modernity. So a lot of people who felt left behind, they caught on to antisemitism, that Jews became a marker of this modern world that deals them in and deals us out.
▶︎ 7:36 Anyhow, that's one version of how antisemitism became much larger in Europe in the 19th century. Later on, Hitler would, just the logic of opposites, the Jews are seen as having a big stake in capitalism. Later on, Hitler would say, "They are the founders of communism." They got blamed both ways. We might come to that beforehand.
▶︎ 8:04 There was this big literature in Germany in the 19th century about the question of Jewish emancipation, that is, how are we to bring Jews in civil society? This is really what Marx was very interested in. There was a question of, do they have to become Christians before they become full citizens? The idea is, they need to give up their backward Jewish faith and maybe first they become Christian, then they become full citizen.
▶︎ 8:28 It's important to see that a lot of antisemitic rhetoric in the 19th century, and you'll see this especially in Marx, he talks about Jews. It's not clear how much he means by Jews, as just a metaphor for modernity and particular for materialism. We see that in a book from Jacob Fries, here's what he says. "We declare war, not against the Jews, our brothers, but against Judaism. Should one we love be stricken by the plague, is it not proper that we wish him deliverance from it? Should we abuse those who're stricken by the plague, lament its horrors, and conjecture how to free themselves from it? In fact, improving the condition of the Jews in society means rooting out Judaism."
▶︎ 9:18 So remember Weininger? Weininger configured Judaism not as a race or a religion, but as a mental type. A lot of the anti-Jewish literature hovers on this distinction. Do they mean literal Jews or do they mean Judaism as a mental type? By Judaism, do they mean a particular religion, or do they mean a psychological configuration or materialism? That's just a prelude.
▶︎ 9:45 I'm now gonna talk about Wagner. This is Richard Wagner. I sometimes say, "Do young people even know about Freud?" I can ask, "Do young people even know about Wagner?" He was one of the preeminent, really the preeminent musicians of the 19th century. He was a reader of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, more influenced by Schopenhauer than Nietzsche. Nietzsche was more a contemporary of his. In fact, they had a very interesting and ambivalent relationship.
▶︎ 10:15 He was also a notorious anti-Semite. In 1850, he published this work, which in English is titled Judaism and Music. He actually published it anonymously because he was so scared of the power of the Jews and he was very striving for a big career, and he thought, "Oh, don't wanna get the Jews on side because they could do things to me," and he actually thought Jews had done things to him throughout his career. But later on it was published after he became successful. It was published under his own name in 1869.
▶︎ 10:46 And you can see how he repeats some of the motifs. On language, he's obsessed with the notion that Jews are torturing our German. Remember earlier I quoted from Christian Wengersdorff, who has this quote about how Jews with their jargon have mutilated and tortured innocent German words, referring to the Christian notion of Jews doing host desecration. One of the things Wagner says about Jews is that they are capable of originality and that they can only parrot others. Remember we had this metaphor of the woman as the parrot?
▶︎ 11:22 So the idea is the Jew, and often this is done in terms of what the Germans called Blut und Boden. Blood and soil. It's because Jews don't have a soil, a country of their own, that they can't have their own language, and language was often seen as a site of creativity. They're also a site of disruption of language.
▶︎ 11:47 So this is what Wagner says. I'll quote. This is from Judaism and Music. "The Jews speak the language of the country in which he has lived from generation to generation, but he always speaks it as a foreigner. The Jews speak modern European language only as learnt, not as a native. It makes it impossible for him to speak colloquially, authoritatively, or from the depth of his being."
▶︎ 12:16 So language for the Jew is always a matter of disguise, not a matter of authenticity. And then Wagner employs these tropes, which he's trying
▶︎ 12:26 To make his readers actually revolted by Jews. There are stories about the genesis of his anti-Semitism, but I don't have fully time to go into them. He did feel that Jewish impresarios were in control of a lot of the opera world. There's something to this. It's an exaggeration, and he felt they weren't interested in performing his opera, so that was part of the genesis of his anti-Semitism.
▶︎ 12:58 He also thought, he was in Paris for a while and there was a very famous composer, Meyerbeer, who was Jewish, and he felt Meyerbeer had hurt his career, which is exactly the opposite. Meyerbeer tried to promote him. But I won't go there.
▶︎ 13:12 So this is how he tries to make us literally revolted by Jewishness. He tries to get us what we call, not a rational, but an affective response. "We are repelled in particular by the purely oral aspect of Jewish speech, this shrill, sibilant buzzing of his voice, unbearably muddled nonsense. When we listen to a Jew talking, we are unconsciously upset by a complete lack of purely human expression in his speech." So he configures the Jew as inhuman, as like an animal, and it's centered around language.
▶︎ 13:47 Remember, I said a lot of the anxiety one has about one's identity can be centered on the notion of language, because language is meant to be where we're at home. But if our language can be subverted, we can be subverted. This theme is particularly repeated in this short lecture called The Modern.
▶︎ 14:05 And I'll quote from Wagner. "Taken strictly then, our world was new to the Jews, and all they undertook to set them straight therein consisted in the appropriation of our ancient heritage. This applies before all to our language, for it would be rude to refer to our money. Never yet has it happened to me to hear the Jews employing their pristine tongue among themselves. On the contrary, it has been the perpetual surprise to me to find in every land of Europe that the Jews understood German, though alas, they mostly speak it in a jargon manufactured by themselves."
▶︎ 14:48 So this notion of jargon goes back to people like Luther, who said that Jews speak a debased form of language, this thing called jargon, which is, Luther thought of it as a language of Jews. Wagner takes up this theme that Jews use German, but cannot speak it properly. In fact, they debase it and pervert it. This was also said about Yiddish too, which was seen, which is not correct, as a debased version of German.
▶︎ 15:17 He says, "The works of Jewish music often produce in us an effect we would derive from hearing a poem by Goethe translated into that jargon, that Jewish jargon we know as Yiddish." And he says this about a Jewish service when he's hearing the singing. "Who has not had the feelings of revulsion, horror, and amusement on hearing the nonsensical gurgling, yodeling, and crackling, which we cannot attempt to caricature to render how absurd it is?"
▶︎ 15:48 So Wagner tries to raise his audience's disgust at the notion of the Jew. It's like they appear to be speaking, they appear to be singing, but it's all a kind of destruction of language.
▶︎ 16:00 There's this destruction of song. And he makes this emphasis that because they don't have authentic language, they are incapable of originality. As he says, "A language's expression and its evolution are not separate elements, but part of a historical community. But the Jew has stood apart from this community, alone with his Jehovah, in a dispersed and barren stock. Incapable of real evolution." So there you see he's picked up on this notion of degeneration that the Jews represent an atavism. They can't progress to later stages. They represent primitive stages. He says this emphasis on them, they cannot be creative. They cannot be originary.
▶︎ 16:47 Wagner also recapitulates in an interesting way some of the themes of Christian anti-Semitism. For one of the things that the Christians had about the Jews is they said, because they've got the new dispensation with Jesus, that the Jews are only concerned with the letter of the law. This notion is that Judaism is really just a legalism, basically, that they're not concerned with the spirit. Like the Jews are obsessed with the Torah observance and their incredibly legalistic observation of the Sabbath, about food, keeping kashrut, the way they deal with their food, what can be eaten and what cannot be eaten, et cetera. And it's all a legalistic notion, and it lacks the spirit.
▶︎ 17:28 So the idea is with Christianity, we have evolved to a deeper spiritual level, but the Jews remain at a merely material level, concerned with everyday practices of the most banal kind, et cetera. And Wagner took this up too. He said the Jews are basically interested in materiality. For him, that was money, and they haven't evolved into spirituality.
▶︎ 17:55 As an example of the influence of these Wagnerian ideas, that the Jews are atavistic and only don't know the world of the spirit, you see that in Stirner's very famous 1844 work, The Ego and Its Own. And he says, "To this day, the Jews, those precious children of antiquity, have got no further, and with all the subtlety and strength of their prudence and understanding, which easily becomes master of things and forces them to obey it, it cannot discover spirit, which takes no account whatever of things."
▶︎ 18:29 And though the Jews are configured as being immersed in the material world, that translates later to the financial world, but they can't transcend that to the spiritual world. It mirrors the Kantian distinction between the real world, the transcendent world of things in themself, and the world of mere appearances. The Jews are stuck in the world of experiences. Of appearance, I'm sorry.
▶︎ 18:56 So speaking of the Jews' alleged avariciousness for money, this is what Wagner says in Judaism in Music: "Who bothers to notice that these innocent pieces of money are stained with the blood of countless generations?" So here again, he's in a modern setting saying the Jews are concerned with money, repeating the old Christian blood libel that the Jews are stained with blood.
▶︎ 19:21 He also refers to demons operating at night. Think of what we said about Dracula. "We may hope to wipe the demon from the field," meaning the Jew, "where he's been able to thrive only under the cover of darkness, a darkness that we good-natured humanists ourselves have offered to make his appearance less disgusting." So again, the Jew is... There's this vampiric notion of the Jew as this blood-sucking creature of the night. So on page 36, he actually directly addresses this, someone he refers to as this "widely known musician of our time." That's Meyerbeer, this Jewish
▶︎ 20:01 Opera composer who was moderately successful. Meyerbeer is largely forgotten, Wagner is a superstar. At the early time of Wagner's life, it was quite the opposite. He'd achieved a great success in Paris, which Wagner was jealous of. But he talked about how Meyerbeer has confused our musical taste, and he attacks it public, Wagner.
▶︎ 20:25 "Our places of entertainment are now filled by that section of society which merely seeks diversion from boredom. The whole emptiness of our modern society," I'll come to this, "is complete, it's completely inartistic nature and desires are clearly implied by the fact of that famous Jewish opera composer." So here, he's saying that our society, not the word he uses, but he's configuring it as degenerate. And he's saying it's the influence of Jews like Meyerbeer who take us away from the transcendent spiritual and make us degenerate.
▶︎ 21:05 And finally, he makes explicit that this infection is already there, and in fact, the infection of really of what he thinks of despiritualized materialism is already amongst us in modernity. And I'll quote again from his book, from his essay, Judaism in Music. "As long as the spirit art of music possessed a really organic need for life, up until the time of Mozart and Beethoven," these are two of his big heroes, "there were no Jewish composers to be found. It was impossible for an element completely foreign to this living organism to take any part in its growth. Only when a body's inner death is evident can outside elements gain entry and then only destroy it. The flesh is transformed into a swarming colony of worms. Only in true life, we too can find the spirit or art once again, not within the worm-infested corpse." Very much like some of the images of Baudelaire.
▶︎ 22:15 So the Jew is configured as this infection that can lead to the despiritualization of our society. You have to note this very visceral language, while it's clearly metaphoric, he doesn't literally think Jews are worms, he wants to invoke feelings of disgust. And it's very important for a lot of the metaphoric of Degeneration, where it talks about Jews as parasites or some women as parrots. They don't literally mean women are parrots, and they don't literally mean that Jews are worms, but it hovered for its power between the literal and the metaphorical.
▶︎ 22:53 And one of the things we'll see later on in the 20th century, a lot of these metaphors of worms, of parrots, of infection, it got literalized, and that's what made it extremely dangerous. There was, for Wagner, at the end, a very
▶︎ 23:09 Huge problem to his claim that the Jews, because they have a debased language, cannot be genuinely original and are always derivative. Namely, the poet Heinrich Heine. Because the German high culture, Heine, who was Jewish, was an utter hero. He says of Heine, he says, "He turned our poetry into a lie. He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the defaming consciousness of our time." So it's a crucial claim that we, with our materialism, we have failed to follow the spirit of art. But for him, Heine always remained an enigma.
▶︎ 23:53 What I do want you to take in is that Wagner is influenced by the literature of degeneration to see the Jew as ultimately atavistic, and he sees that atavism as in a crass materialism, and that is part of his rejection of modernity, because Wagner identifies modernity with a kind of despiritualized crass materialism, which he configures as
▶︎ 24:17 ultimately Jewish. And Marx, who wrote a very famous essay called On the Jewish Question, you should all know, of course, that Marx himself was Jewish, but he was decidedly of a irreligious, secular nature. Again, his relation to this idea of degeneration theory, the idea that there's the inferior beings that are infecting us and possibly leading us to go to a lower level of evolution is rather complicated. And Marx configures the Jews as even though he sees them as an exemplification of modernity, he sees them also as a site of a possible kind of de-evolution. We'll come to that later.
▶︎ 25:01 One thing I have to put on the board is, there are some strictly materialist interpretations of Marx. I find them very reductive and extreme, and they see Marx as just really being more interested in an equitable distribution of material goods so that each person, individual's needs and desires are fulfilled. But ever since George Lukács, there's been much more of an emphasis on the early writings of Marx, which stress the notion of alienation. Once you've got the notion of alienation in view, that allows for the idea that we need to critique our very desires and our very needs.
▶︎ 25:40 So simple Marxism, humans have needs, things are distributed unfairly, only some people can meet their needs, we need to figure out an alternative form of distribution so that everyone can satisfy their needs, whatever they are. The more sophisticated version of Marx says, no, Marx says, "Our very needs are debased," "We need a new kind of society which reconfigures our relations to needs." A debased but not formally free, free society can produce individuals whose very needs, for instance, needs for material accumulation are themselves debased. So one Marx, simple Marx just wants to make a better distribution, to satisfy our needs, sophisticated Marx wants to do a critique of the way our very needs are formulated and constructed in society.
▶︎ 26:35 This essay on the Jewish question was published in 1843. It's actually a really complicated essay. And partly the reason it's complicated, it was written in response to a fellow young Hegelian, that is both Hegel. Sorry, both. This other person called Bruno Bauer and Marx were very, very influenced by Hegel, and he published also an essay called On the Jewish Question. Basically, Marx sums up Bauer's general argument, which is concerned about the question about whether there's a need for a special emancipation of the Jews.
▶︎ 27:14 Remember, in German societies, in many different societies, Germany has not been unified by this point, there were like 39 different principalities, states, city-states, whatever, and some, there were very restrictive laws on Jews. What professions they could enter, whether they could enter the cities even. So there's this question about, how can we introduce Jews back into civil society? How can we emancipate them? And Bauer questioned whether this emancipation was coherent, because he said basically, "We're asking a Christian state to emancipate the Jews." But Bauer said, "No, before we can emancipate the Jews, we have to think of a wider emancipation," which he thought of as the emancipation from Christianity, that is, from the notion of the state being a Christian state.
▶︎ 28:08 And this is a quotation I think from Bauer, yeah. No, it's actually Marx's summing up of Bauer. "As long as the state is Christian and the Jew Jewish, the one is incapable of bestowing emancipation as the other is incapable of receiving it." In other words, all these German states, whether Protestant states or Catholic states, this question, "How do we emancipate the Jews?" Bauer says, and Marx is explaining Bauer, expositing him and saying, "Don't think of Jewish emancipation, the Christian state itself needs to be emancipated."
▶︎ 28:43 Marx summarizing Bauer, "The would-be emancipated Jew would still have his own imaginary law and imaginary nationality, and hence, as a matter of principle, takes no part in the movement of history." That's the Jew as atavistic, as outside of history or the past of history, "and waits on a destiny that has nothing in common with humanity." It's all very, very complicated stuff, but what Bauer is trying to say is there are all these people talking about, "How can we emancipate the Jews?" And that is, bring the Jews into the Christian state, and Bauer is saying, "Look, we need a wider emancipation. We need an emancipation from the notion of the state as a Christian entity." By the way, that doesn't mean Bauer was against all practice of religion. He just thought it should not be a state religion.
▶︎ 29:32 So Bauer's claim is really that we can't emancipate the Jews, we must emancipate ourselves. In fact, particularly, we need to emancipate ourselves from religion, that is there should not be a state religion. It doesn't mean we all have to be atheists, but religion should be a private matter. And Marx calls this actually political emancipation. But he faults Bauer for he thinks Bauer misidentifies this political emancipation as genuine emancipation. So that beyond this political emancipation, getting beyond a state religion, there's meant to be a deeper emancipation for Marx.
▶︎ 30:12 So he criticizes Bauer for not really considering what real emancipation amounts to, he wants what he calls human emancipation. Marx then goes on in this essay, I'll try not to make it too complicated, he considers various states. For instance, France has a constitutional state where there's a post-Napoleon, Jews are tolerated but there's still a reference to the religion of the majority, namely Catholicism. America, for instance, explicitly rejects the notion of state religion. Nevertheless, Americans, as people like Beaumont and Tocqueville and Hamilton observed, is a land of deep religiosity. Think of America today.
▶︎ 30:57 For Bauer, once a political emancipation has been achieved, that is no state religion, it is allowed that there could be an overwhelming number of people who are still religious. For Marx, this shows the limits of political emancipation and how it falls short of full emancipation. A state can liberate itself from a limitation without man himself being truly free. So he says Bauer isn't really addressing what is needed for genuine human freedom.
▶︎ 31:28 And he makes an analogy with property. The state can have the political annulment of private property in the sense that citizenship voting rights are not tied to property. So for a lot of time in the 19th century only a few, when there was voting was introduced, it was only allowed for a very few people, those who owned property. So there's a notion of emancipation of the citizens from the notion of property, only meaning that we can give rights, for instance, voting rights to humans, well, actually men, by stopping to tie voting to property rights. And that's a kind of emancipation, for instance, that Bauer favored. But that still allows the notion of private property, which Marx was inimical to the notion of genuine full emancipation.
▶︎ 32:23 Marx tied the inability for genuine emancipation, full emancipation, full freedom, to what he called egoism. He says, "In the emancipated state that Bauer wanted," for instance, any extreme form of it, the development of it, no state religion, people can privately practice and voting rights are not tied to property rights, they can still be private property. He says, "All the presuppositions of the egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside of the state." So he introduces the notion of egoism. And he says, "The political state as envisaged by Bauer still gives man a double nature, a dual existence as a communal being and as a private individuals." So he makes these oppositions between private and general interest, the political state and civil society and he says, "These are left intact by Bauer."
▶︎ 33:24 Marx says that political emancipation is in fact a form of progress. So he's not denying what Bauer wants, abolition of state religion, is a form of progress. But he says Bauer treats it as a final emancipation and it's actually the beginnings of full emancipation. Marx claims it's not in fact a Christian state with its state religion that is a perfected Christian state, but rather the atheist state or the democratic state. The idea here is that the Christian notion that we all have individual souls and are children of God is better expressed in a state which doesn't officially make religious discriminations which negates that egalitarian premise.
▶︎ 34:08 These ideas are pretty complicated. I'll try to come to the point here. Marx says, "Look, what this modern state that is evolving is, it allows us to act as mere individuals." And so it makes what he calls a separation between individuals and their species' life, and that he's against. He says, I'll quote again from On the Jewish Question, "The fantasy, dream and postulate of Christianity, the sovereignty of man, but man as an alien being, separate from actual man, is present in democracies as tangible reality and its secular motto."
▶︎ 34:48 It's hard to parse this, but what he wants to do is, he's relying on a Hegelian background that man is essentially a social animal and men exist, humans exist in each other, and he's postulating that what this modern capitalist emancipated society does is allow us to act as sole individuals. And that denies what he calls our species or our group life. So it's this Hegelian notion that man is essentially determined by his social relations and we need full and free social relations. And all that capitalism and modernity in the world envisaged by Bauer is allowing us to act as sole
▶︎ 35:30 individuals in an egoistic manner. Marx looks at various declarations of human rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which I've referred to before, and to show that these rights, freedom of worship, liberty, security, property, it's man treated in an atomistic way. He says, "The freedom in question is that of a man treated as an isolated monad and withdrawn into himself." It's interesting because Vaihinger valorized the notion of being a freestanding monad, but for Marx, with his Hegelian background, he thinks that of as an isolated, alienated form of existence. None of the so-called rights of man go beyond egoistic man.
▶︎ 36:19 For Marx, Bauer's kind of political emancipation is really the final dissolution of feudal society. It's progress, but it's not real emancipation. "Man was therefore not freed from religion, he received freedom of religion. He was not free from property, he received freedom of property. He has not been freed from the egoism of trade, he received freedom to trade." You can imagine how this metamorphosizes into a critique of Jews once one mentions trade. Political emancipation for Marx is a reduction of man to an egoistic, independent individual. These are all negative terms for him.
▶︎ 37:04 This is what happens in the first part of this essay, On the Jewish Question. It's a discussion of power and this notion of emancipation. Then in the second part of the essay, he begins to talk about the Jews. Marx suggests that we break from this theological conception of the problem that Bauer had been dealing with, this is a question of freedom of religion, by considering the secular Jew. And he says, "Let us look for the secret of the Jew, not in his religion, but let us look for the secret of religion in the actual Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, selfishness. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god? Money."
▶︎ 37:57 The Jew for Marx becomes a marker of this individualism, egoism, of wanting to exist as a self-subsisting monad, and not as seeing that our essential nature is a social nature to be integrated with our fellow man. This is the beginning of a kind of secular anti-Semitism which identifies Jews with the modernity of a shallow egoism. Marx, again, from On the Jewish Question. "We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general antisocial element of the present time." Of course, he identifies it with this individualism. "An element which, through historical development to which this harmful respect that Jews have zealously contributed, has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate." Again, it's a story, the Jew as something atavistic, as something belonging to the past, even though he represents modernity is something that eventually has to disintegrate.
▶︎ 39:00 He says, "The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because through him, and also apart from him, money has become a world power, and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves only insofar as the Christians have become Jews." So he's running this line that, and we'll see this taken up in a really interesting way by Nietzsche later on, that Christianity is itself a form of Judaism, so that we moderns have become infected with Judaism.
▶︎ 39:42 Marx does address this problem of how the atavistic Jews have survived. He doesn't have much of an answer. He says, "Judaism has made itself, not in spite of history but because of history. From its own bowels, civil society constantly begets Jews. What is the implicit and explicit basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism." So he's saying the tenacity of the Jews to survive is the tenacity of a shallow egoism. But of course, this is no real explanation. Presumably Greeks and Romans would have had this same egoism, but they didn't survive.
▶︎ 40:20 Maybe it's a suggestion that the Jews have some kind of super egoism. A lot of writers in this 19th century tried to express this, tried to explain this conundrum of how the Jews, who were allegedly atavistic and furious, survived. Marx doesn't do any better than the rest of them.
▶︎ 40:40 It's also interesting that Marx, like Luther before him, often gets to this scatological element in describing the Jews, and I'll just give you some examples of it. Remember I quoted from that Shem HaMephorash from Luther in an earlier essay, about the Jews collecting shit and piss, to become so sharp-eyed in seeing things? This is Luther. "The monotheism of the Jews, therefore, is in reality the polytheism of the many needs. A polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object of divine law."
▶︎ 41:17 And this is also to do with this idea of the materiality of the Jews, the theme of Jewish formalism attending, that they attended the soulless letter of the law and denying its spirit. And I quote, again, "The baseless and irrational laws of the Jew is only the religious caricature of morality and law in general, the purely formal rights with which the world of selfishness surrounds itself. Here too, the highest relationship of man is the legal relationship, that is law, not spirit. The relationship to the laws that are not valid for him because they are not laws of his own will and essence, but because they are the masters and derivations from them and are avenged." Okay, hard to parse, but what he's
▶︎ 42:01 Saying is the Jews are people who only get the letter of the law and not the spirit. He says, "The Christian was from the beginning, the theorizing Jew, the theorizing Jew. The Jew is therefore the practical Christian," meaning the one who's just concerned with materiality. "Christianity has overcome Judaism only in appearance. Thus, it is not only in the Pentateuch or the Talmud we find the essence of the contemporary Jew. We find in contemporary society, not as the abstract, but as the empirical essence, not as a limitation of the Jew, but as a Jewish limitation of society."
▶︎ 42:40 So what he's saying is, our modern materialism, our modern egoism is the Jewishness of society. We have been infected with Judaism. We have been infected with Judaism. "The social emancipation of the Jews..." And this is his punchline against Bauer, "...implies the emancipation of society from Judaism." What does he mean by that? He doesn't mean that we're all Jews, practicing Jews and religion. He says we have all been infected with Jewish egoism, with Jewish materialism, and we need to be liberated from our Jewishness, from our materialism, from our egoism, to be genuinely emancipated.
▶︎ 43:20 He's against what he thinks of as a shallow materialism and a shallow egoism, which he thinks prevents genuine emancipation. But that is configured of Jew, as Jewish, and you can't help but say that is a form of anti-Semitism. Basically, Judaism has become a marker for Marx of what he sees as a post-feudal world, which has now progressed into a world of egoistic individualism. And it's in rejecting Jewishness and asking for full emancipation, that is what he's seeking to reject. But for all that, it doesn't stop it from being anti-Semitic.