Felipe Taufer

This book sets out a new reading of the early Marx. This book argues that, during the period of his first critique of political economy, Marx developed a way of critique that targets social contradictions themselves—by making them explicit—rather than grounding judgment in prior normative principles. What Marx consolidated in this period was an implicit critique of what we now call practical philosophy, and this book spells out the terms on which that critique unfolds. The opening chapters recast Marx’s concept of alienation of labor as an ambiguous one and reframe ideology as what occurs when philosophy detaches from social and historical life process. Building on this, the book traces the young Marx’s move toward a critique of political economy, showing how alienation of labor structure modern society and generate contradictions. It then addresses a central question for critical social theory since the nineteenth century: how should one criticize a social contradiction? The answer advanced here is that compelling critique does not rest on any kind of normative grounding; it exposes and clarifies the contradictory dynamics of social life as contradictory. The concluding chapters revisit Marx’s engagements with Hegel (1843) and with post-Hegelian philosophy (from 1845 onward) to show why practical philosophy are not the right way to criticize contradiction. "Breathing new life into the concepts of alienation and ideology, Taufer argues that Marx's critique of capitalism forgoes the tools of traditional philosophy and justifies revolution instead on the proletariat's empirical needs." – Frederick Neuhouser, Columbia University.

ABSTRACT Some contemporary scholars of Marx and Engels’ works have done well to draw attention to the peculiarity of their use of the concept “ideology” as an “inversion of the relationship between thought process and lived existence”. This use appears with crucial precision in Marx and Engels’ critiques of “post-Hegelianism” and “true socialism”. However, it is often difficult to understand in any level of detail what this supposed “inversion” means. I intend to provide a non-exhaustive, but nevertheless more assertive and specific explanation of the supposed “inversion” in this text. This is merely a reframing of “ideology” in order to situate and contextualize Marx and Engels’ use of the term against the backdrop of their discussions about the limits of philosophical activity. For this reason, my explanation takes the relationship between the terms “philosophy” and “practice” (sections 2, 3 and 4) as the explanatory axis for the use of the concept “ideology”. I also try to distinguish two moments in the appearance of the concept “ideology”: (i) two analytical steps or typical notes that the expression “active conceptual ideologues” contains; (ii) the philosophical, normative and irreflexively acritical nature of the attempt to solve the “real problems of life” implied in “ideology” (sections 5 and 6). The text’s intended contribution is to show that the concept of “ideology” aims to categorize and critique excessively philosophical approaches to both explaining and critiquing social reality. This does not, however, invalidate the use of the term by the Marxist and critical theory traditions.

The argument of this article is as follows: at the very moment we witness the return of “contradiction” to the lexicon of social critique, we also observe its loss of critical potential as a concept. In other words, we are witnessing a complete disconnection from the notion of determinate negation, which, at its most profound moments, characterized “contradiction” as a critical category. This decline, identified as “ideological,” is attributed, as I attempt to argue, to a “phraseological return” present in the uses of the term by Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi. Contradiction as structural dysfunctionality (FRASER) and contradiction as a practical obstacle to self-understanding (JAEGGI) constitute, in line with the original vocabulary of critical theory, an “ideological simulacrum” or a “return to traditional theory.” To develop this argument, the text is divided into five sections: (i) an introduction; (ii and iii) a reconstruction of Nancy Fraser’s and Rahel Jaeggi’s respective conceptions of contradiction; (iv) an attempt to demonstrate that these concepts do not, in fact, qualify as contradictions and, therefore, represent the decline of the critical meaning of the term; and (v) a concluding evaluation of this decline as ideological.

This is a challenge to one of the cen-tral interpretational theses that Cirne-Lima de-fends on Hegel: that we should read “contradic-tion” as “contrariety”. At first, I reconstruct Cirne-Lima’s interpretation and raise two cri-tiques: (I) Cirne-Lima ignores the origin of the concept “contradiction” as applied to statements of conceptual identity; (ii) Cirne-Lima only pays attention to one type of incompatibility involved in the “negation” that constitutes contradiction and forgets Hegel’s thesis on the “bound return to the ground”. In the final parts of my paper, I dis-cuss the consequences of Cirne-Lima’s interpre-tation. The consequence of (i) is the development of an interpretation that doesn’t regard anything beyond what Hegel calls “external reflection” (“isof predication”) and ignores the role of “contra-diction” in “inner reflection” (“is of identity”). That of (ii) is the interpretation of “contradiction” as a mere “play of opposites”. I suggest that this last constraint is analogous to what Brandom calls “material incompatibility” and completely misses one of the main dimensions of Hegel’s “negative”: self-reference. To support my argu-ment (i) I rely on Pippin's remarks on the Logic of Essence and, in the case of (ii), Henrich’s the-sis, which Bordignon followed to criticize Bran-dom, that to be self-referential is a constitutive di-mension of “determinate negation”

A tese principal deste artigo é que se nos perguntarmos pela referência do conceito “alienação”, nos encontraremos na posição de ter que admitir que ela é ambígua. Faço uso do termo ambiguidade referencial para apontar duas fontes de ambiguidade: (i) pode se referir ao trabalho como objeto ou sujeito da alienação; (ii) pode designar ou não uma referência. Argumento a literatura marxista de apoio não explicitou essa ambiguidade, pois está presa no paradigma de uma “leitura genitivo-subjetiva”. Não se trata, porém, de defender uma “leitura genitivo-objetiva”, mas mostrar que a sua plausibilidade ajuda a esclarecer que os textos do “jovem Marx” eram ambíguos. Para isso, procuro mostrar o que uma “leitura genitivo-objetiva” diria sobre três contextos específicos de uso de “alienação” e “estranhamento”: Manuscritos de 1844 (parte 1), A Sagrada Família e A Ideologia Alemã (parte 2). Busco também explicitar como essa leitura só faz sentido sob a pressuposição de um nominalismo semântico.