In the Paris manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx pens a section titled the “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole.” Marx accuses Hegel of having wrongly posited self-consciousness as the essence of human beings and thus having misconstrued the motion of history. As he writes, “For Hegel the essence of man—man—equals self-consciousness. All estrangement of the human essence is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness.”[i] According to Marx, estrangement is misdiagnosed by Hegel and must be set back straight by locating the true essence of man in what Marx calls “species being.”[ii]

The Paris Manuscripts have generated a wide-ranging debate over the concept of human self-alienation. In this segment, we will explore Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as an exemplar of the political productivity of inversion.

Core Readings

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) (Cambridge Hegel Translations)

Karl Marx, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” in Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in Karl Marx-Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 3 (Marx and Engels 1843-1844), trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1975), available on-line at https://archive.org/details/economicphilosophicmanuscripts1844/page/n1/mode/2up

Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books 2019)

Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith, ed. Frederick Neuhouser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

Additional Readings

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986 [1959]), discussion around p. 251.

Bruno Bosteels, chapter 1 of The State and Insurrection: New Interventions in Latin American Marxist Theory (forthcoming).

Jean Hyppolite, Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel, ed. Giuseppe Bianco (Paris: Classigues Garnier, 2022 [1947]); Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974).

Jean Hyppolite, Études sur Marx et Hegel (Paris: Marcel Rivière et Cie, 2eme edition, 1965).

Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976)

Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality (Polity Press, 2010).

Notes

[i] Marx, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” in Paris Manuscripts, Tucker at 113.

[ii] Marx, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” in Paris Manuscripts, Tucker at 116 (“But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species being, and has to confirm and manifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing.”).