Reading Marx

Abstract

Reading Marx consists of a co-written introduction and conclusion, plus an unsigned essay by each of the authors, Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza, in that order. The introduction, ‘Unexpected Reunions’, sets forth the aim of the book: to give distinct philosophical readings of Marx. The authors take this to mean that they will not celebrate Marx, defend him unconditionally, or dissect the living and dead elements of Marx’s corpus, but ‘read and thus think with Marx as a contemporary’ (p. 3). This is a distinction without a difference, since to take the living elements of Marx’s work is to treat his ideas as of contemporary significance. More significantly, the authors ground the need for a contemporary philosophical treatment of Marx in the closure of emancipatory possibilities engendered by the rise of authoritarian political and capitalist forms, which have severed the putative link between capitalism and democracy posited by Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis (p. 4). I do not think that the authors have really said very much about these emancipatory possibilities, although they say a little about how the sphere of possibility has been reinterpreted to exclude alternatives to capitalism. On their account, Marxist philosophy can intervene in this history by demonstrating the modal conversion of specific historical impossibilities of radical political and economic transformation ‘into a new possibility (of emancipation)’ (p. 2). To demonstrate this capability, it is necessary first to recognize that Marxism is multivalent and that without its revolutionary force, it can become canonized, sacralized, and thereby disconnected from the present concrete situation (p. 5). Each of these aims is salutary but its promise unfulfilled. In fact, a great deal of the work of the text actually involves reading Marxist thought in(to) Hegel. The first essay, ‘Marx Reads Object-Oriented Ontology’, is by Žižek, Professor at the Institute of Sociology, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and perhaps the most famous living philosopher. Žižek is particularly notable for his unexpected juxtapositions of Marxist–Hegelian philosophy with Lacan and popular culture. Here, he brings in Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (a term coined by Levi Bryant), a recent neo-Heideggerian movement that overturns the primacy of subjects over