Homo Alludens: Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire

Author(s): Martin Harries

Source: New German Critique, No. 66, Special Issue on the Nineteenth Century (Autumn,
1995), pp. 35-64
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488587
Accessed: 13-05-2016 18:27 UTC

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/488587?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

New German Critique, Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to New German Critique

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Homo Alludens: Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire

Martin Harries

Smells Like World Spirit: Revision, Farce, Quotation Marx

In his 1869 preface to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire
ofLouis Bonaparte, Marx writes:

A revision of the present work would have robbed it of its peculiar

colouring. Accordingly I have confined myself to mere correction of
printer's errors and to striking out allusions now no longer intelligible
[nicht mehr verstdndlicher Anspielungen].1

Marx's preface in many ways recapitulates the concerns of the text it

introduces. In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx already declares that the
coup d'etat of Louis Bonaparte has formed "the second edition [die zweite
Auflage] of the eighteenth Brumaire," that is, that it has been a repetition
of the coup of Napoleon I.2 This 1869 publication is then the second edi-
tion of a study of a second edition. The emphasis on revision is important
to the Eighteenth Brumaire. The preface introduces the notion of a certain
confinement in revision that is crucial to Marx's text; the text investigates
material, linguistic, and historical barriers to thorough revision. Marx con-
fines his revision in order not to rob his work of its "peculiar colouring";
revision, it seems, would be a kind of stylistic theft. In fact, Marx sug-
gests that he has not revised the Eighteenth Brumaire at all. Correction
and striking out allusions must then be something other than revision.

1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: Interna-
tional, 1963) 8; and Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, Marx/Engels: Aus-
gewiihlte Werke II (Berlin: Dietz, 1986) 304. Further citations will give page numbers first
for the English and then for the German edition.
2. Marx 15,308.

35

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
36 Homo Alludens

The question of what has fallen out of Marx's account, the matter of
those "allusions now no longer intelligible," remains. How is "striking
out allusions" not revision? Is to strike out what can no longer be
understood not revision? Doesn't this open an abyss of revision in
which the text potentially vanishes into a few words, a few "phrases,"
to use a word for which Marx reserves a special contempt? These ques-
tions mark some of the ambiguities around Marx's employment of allu-
sion in the Eighteenth Brumaire. Around this employment, one can
sketch a program at once historical, critical, and linguistic. On the one
hand, allusion should be an intelligible kind of repetition. A tactic in a
work of historical analysis, allusion in the Eighteenth Brumaire forces
awareness of the repetitive structure of a phrase; this awareness of repe-
tition can itself become a crucial historical tool. Awareness of the prov-
enance of the phrase can figure awareness of the genealogies that
inform the historical record. On the other hand, allusion is an aspect of
the nightmare of repetitive history. Part of the revolutionary project of
the Eighteenth Brumaire is to imagine a history that seizes the future,
and this project involves escaping allusion and its repetitive confines.
Allusion is part of the "tradition of all the dead generations" that
"weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."3 Joyce echoes
Marx: "_ History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am try-
ing to awaken."4 Striking out allusion would be part of the project of
waking up from this nightmare.
However much it is part of the project of the Eighteenth Brumaire to
raise the prospect of a revolutionary break with nightmarish, allusive
language, allusion nevertheless marks this contradictory text from the
outset. Even its title works by installing the historical events the text
analyzes into the space of allusive repetition. From the start, repetition
figures, at the very least, the disappointment of hopes, if not nightmare
itself. The promise Marx and others saw in the break of the revolutions
of 1848 dissolves in the disillusioning repetition that is Bonaparte's
coup. The moment of the Eighteenth Brumaire, first published in 1852,
is that of the dissolution of the revolutions of 1848 and its subject is
the political history of the successful coup d'etat of Louis Bonaparte,
nephew of Napoleon I, in 1851. The date of Marx's title, however, is
not the date of Louis Bonaparte's coup (2 December 1851), but that of

3. Marx 15, 308.

4. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946) 35.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 37

the coup d'etat of his uncle, Napoleon I, on the eighteenth Brumaire in

the year VIII of the French revolutionary calendar (9 November 1799,
according to the Gregorian calendar).5 This superimposition of the revo-
lutionary calendar over the reactionary coup d'6tat of Louis Bonaparte
serves many functions. Marx is able to represent Louis Bonaparte's sei-
zure of power as archaic, belated by half a century, belonging to a time
whose calendar, even, is defunct. It also ironically and unflatteringly
compares Louis Bonaparte, whom Marx will characterize in the most
disparaging terms, with his uncle. The disparity between the events of
Napoleon I's eighteenth Brumaire and the coup d'etat of his nephew
makes the title's allusion a strong form of parody.
Yet the title also anticipates some of the more complicated, less
resolved concerns of the Eighteenth Brumaire as a whole. By inscribing
Louis Bonaparte in a calendar that sets itself off as revolutionary, Marx
suggests that Bonaparte has himself seized a revolutionary past, even if
only belatedly or in parodic form. Marx will certainly analyze this seizure
of the past as reactionary, as farcical historical revision, but Bonaparte's
appropriation of the past raises questions deeply connected to those sur-
rounding Marx's discussions of revolutionary praxis. In the Eighteenth
Brumaire, Marx faces the difficulty of an odd homology between revolu-
tions, which often attempt to seize history in parodic form, and
Bonaparte's regressive coup d'6tat, which does the same. The fear that
such allusive seizure of history may always lead to regressive delusions is
part of the reason Marx insists that the "social revolution of the nineteenth
century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future."6
Despite Marx's insistence on the obsolescence of "poetry from the
past," scores of allusions remain in the Eighteenth Brumaire. The title is
not an isolated instance but emblematic of a text both teeming with allu-
sions and deeply concerned with allusive structures, historical no less than
linguistic. To ask whether this tissue of allusion implicates the Eighteenth
Brumaire itself in farcical revision is to ask a question suggested by the
text's famous opening itself: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and
personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice.
He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."7 This

5. For a compelling but less polemical account of some of the events Marx dis-
cusses, see Priscilla Robertson Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1960) 11-103.
6. Marx 18, 311.
7. Marx 15, 308.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
38 Homo Alludens

invocation of Hegel suggests some of the critical work allusion performs

in the Eighteenth Brumaire. Attribution here takes the form of a fractured
quotation. The word "somewhere" dislocates the heavy authority of
Hegel's name; its vagueness seems to undo the importance of the attribu-
tion. In Hegel, history repeats; in Marx, repeating Hegel, history repeats,
but historical repetition takes the form of generic difference. What is the
difference that theatrical genre makes? How can one identify repetition
beneath generic extremes? Marx, too, is engaging in a sort of repetitive
action, the repetition of Hegel's dictum. The difference there, it would
seem, is one of correction or completion. Where Hegel "forgot" to men-
tion that repetition has its tragic and farcical extremes, Marx repeats
Hegel with the difference that he remembers to mention this generic dis-
tinction in the repetitions of history.
Bruce Mazlish has convincingly shown that Marx alludes in his off-
hand way to a passage from Hegel's The Philosophy of History. This pas-
sage is a reflection on Caesar's putting an end to the Roman Republic:

But it became immediately manifest that only a single will could guide
the Roman state, and now the Romans were compelled to adopt that
opinion; since in all periods of the world a political revolution is sanc-
tioned in men's opinions, when it repeats itself. Thus, Napoleon was
twice defeated, and the Bourbons twice expelled. By repetition that
which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency
becomes a real and ratified existence.8

In the Eighteenth Brumaire, what repeats does not attain a "real and rati-
fied existence"; "we are," as Mazlish notes, "in the presence of another
of Marx's famous inversions."9 The mention of Hegel - it would seem
is among Marx's intelligible allusions; the attribution to Hegel
reverses Hegel. Where Hegel invokes the sanction of repetition to jus-
tify one dictatorship, Marx turns this sanction topsy-turvy to attack
another. Where repetition in Hegel produces a "real and ratified exist-
ence," in Marx it produces an unreal, questionable, and theatrical one.
The 1869 preface to the Eighteenth Brumaire also anticipates the
body of the text in suggesting a relationship between theater and allu-
sion. When Marx writes of those discarded "allusions now no longer

8. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York, 1900)

312-13, quoted in Bruce Mazlish, "The Tragic Farce of Marx, Hegel, and Engels: A
Note," History and Theory 11.3 (1972): 335.
9. Mazlish 336.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 39

intelligible," the German term is "Anspielungen." (The sense of play

latent in the Latinate English term, allusion - whose root is the Latin,
"ludere," or to play - is clearer in German, where "Spiel" is the gen-
eral term for play, and Anspielung is clearly a variety of play). Marx
emphasizes this notion of allusion as play by using another form of
Spiel in the preceding sentence, where he distinguishes his efforts in the
Eighteenth Brumaire from those of Hugo in Napoleon le Petit and
Proudhon in Coup d'itat. Marx writes:

I ... demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circum-

stances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque medioc-
rity to play a hero's part [einer mittelmissigen und grotesken
Personage das Spiel der Heldenrolle ermoglichten].10

In distinguishing his work from that of Hugo and Proudhon, Marx

emphasizes how an accurate depiction of historical forces shows what
made possible "play" of a particular kind, namely theatrical representa-
tion. And Marx's interest is not "theatrical representation" as such, but
theater that sounds like farce: the elevation of the grotesque.
Mazlish notes that Marx was hardly alone in seeing farce in the
events following the revolutions of 1848.11 Engels, he shows, may
have provided a catalyst for the opening of the Eighteenth Brumaire in
a letter to Marx dated 3 December 1851:

It really seems as if old Hegel in his grave were acting as World Spirit and
directing history, ordaining most conscientiously that it should all be unrolled
twice over, once as a great tragedy and once as a wretched farce .. .12

Part of the supposed intelligibility of Marx's reversal of Hegel lies in

10. Marx 8, 304.

11. Mazlish provides a similar theatrical description of the events of 1848, which,
however, does not mention farce, from de Tocqueville's Recollections. See Mazlish, 336.
Proudhon, whose account of the coup d'6tat Marx criticizes in his 1869 preface, strikes a
similar note when he writes in a letter dated 25 February 1848: "Drunk on historical nov-
els, we have given a repeat performance of the 10th of August and the 29th of July. With-
out noticing it, we have all become characters from some farce." Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
Selected Writings, trans. Elizabeth Fraser (Garden City, NJ: Anchor, 1969) 154. Alexander
Herzen writes of a crowd gathered before a massive demonstration in 1849: "Had those
people found real leaders the day would not have ended in a farce." Alexander Herzen, My
Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett, rev.
Humphrey Higgens (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982) 354.
12. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow, n.d.) 75,
quoted in Mazlish 336.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 40 Homo Alludens

the assumption that, despite his predilection for inversion, Marx retains
a traditional generic hierarchy, where debased farce is the unequal part-
ner to grand tragedy. The assumption is questionable. Part of the work
of the Eighteenth Brumaire is the disruption of forms of play. Farce and
the play of allusion become strategies of historical analysis. Marx not
only revises Hegel in his opening, but he simultaneously borrows from
and alters Engels's suggestive passage. Engels qualifies the genres in
ways Marx does not: "great tragedy" and "wretched farce" are not nec-
essarily Marx's categories. If Marx retains tragedy as the supreme theat-
rical genre, he has turned Hegel the political theorist upside down only
to repeat without difference Hegel's valorization of tragedy.
Certainly there are reasons for ascribing to Marx the prejudice that
denigrates farce and exalts tragedy, among them the indisputable fact
that Marx hoped to ridicule Louis Bonaparte, to cast him, so to speak,
as the lead player in a farce, to reveal the "grotesque mediocrity"
beneath the heroic, Napoleonic facade. Yet the very possibility of the
generic reconfiguration of history suggests the power of farce as a tool
not only of denigration but also of criticism. The worth of farce as
genre does not assume the worth of figures represented in farce; the
critical value of farce in the Brumaire may be precisely that its force as
a representational tactic is independent of the "value" of the characters
it represents. Marxist farce is distinguishable from tragedy, which, clas-
sically, assumes tragic consciousness on the part of figures in it. Farci-
cal consciousness, instead, belongs outside farce; it is the product of a
critical distance from the action of farce itself.13
Marx had critical support for a less dismissive characterization of farce,
if he needed it. Walter Benjamin quotes Franz Horn, who wrote in 1823
of a (specifically German) taste for mixed genres: "Love of so-called
pure tragedy was never common, but the inherent romantic impulse
demanded rich sustenance, as did the delight in farce, which is usually
most alive in thoughtful dispositions."l4 Horn's formulation is distinctly
at odds with Hegel, who mentions farce, it seems, only when working to

13. After I drafted most of this section, Stephen Tifft's "Dr6le de Guerre: Renoir,
Farce, and the Fall of France," appeared in Representations 38 (Spring, 1992): 131-65. A
section of that article is a compelling reading of the Eighteenth Brumaire (147-53). Espe-
cially relevant here is Tifit's reevaluation of farce as "a matter of ill-tuned ideology" (15 1)
and his emphasis on its critical potential and force.
14. Horn, quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans.
John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977) 123.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 41

save comedy from its taint. While Hegel has little to say about farce, his
thought on comedy has some bearing on the Eighteenth Brumaire. For
Marx, the first occurrence of the facts and persons of history is tragedy,
and the second farce. For Hegel, on the contrary, comedy begins where
tragedy ends. Comedy "possesses ... for its basis and point of departure
that with which it is possible for tragedy to terminate... ." Reconcilia-
tion, which is for Hegel the final result of the collisions of tragedy, is
present at the onset of comedy. "The true course of dramatic develop-
ment consists in the annulment of contradictions viewed as such, in the
reconciliation of the forces of human action, which alternately strive to
negate each other in their conflict," writes Hegel. For him, the "true
course" of dramatic development is to some extent an allegory for that of
historical development: "in a work of art the matter of exclusive impor-
tance should be the display of that which is conformable with the reason
and truth of Spirit .. ."15 The value of genres such as tragedy and com-
edy lies, for Hegel, in their accurate "display" of the substantial content
of history. Tragedy and comedy are, so to speak, the masks of Geist. For
Hegel, then, the collisions of tragedy are the crises of history.
The Hegelian equivalence between the content of theatrical represen-
tation and the content of Spirit-directed history is not totally alien to
the use of theater in the Eighteenth Brumaire. Yet the Eighteenth Bru-
maire marks a crucial break. Just as, for Marx, Hegel's reconciliation
would harmonize too easily with resignation, cooptation, or submis-
sion, the notion that theatrical and historical content coincide would
signal a suspension of critique. In the Eighteenth Brumaire, farce is
equivalent to an evasion of history. Bonaparte's farce is the mask of
what stalls history. The famous crisis of political representation in the
Brumaire finds its apogee when Marx discusses Bonaparte's ruling
despite his lack of class affiliation. As David Fernbach writes, Marx
"confronts the paradox of a state power that appears not to express
the rule of a social class at all, but to dominate civil society com-
pletely and to arbitrate class struggles from above."16 Marx explains

15. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On Tragedy, eds. Anne and Henry Paolucci
(New York: Harper, 1962) 76, 71, 50.
16. David Fernbach, intro. Surveys from Exile, Political Writings II, by Karl Marx,
trans. Ben Fowkes and Paul Jackson (New York: Random House, 1973) 9. See Terry
Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981)
162-70, for an especially rigorous discussion of this problem of representation in the Eigh-
teenth Brumaire.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
42 Homo Alludens

this contradiction by demonstrating, among other things, Bonaparte's

problematic representation of a class that is not a class - the lumpen
proletariat, "the only class upon which he can base himself uncondi-
tionally."17 The notorious catalogue Marx offers to describe this class
- "vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped gal-
ley slaves,"18 etc. - has drawn more attention than what follows; this
seems to me important in following through the implications for theat-
rical discourse in Marx's text.19
Theater in the Eighteenth Brumaire often figures political self-con-
sciousness. Discernment of dramatic genre figures discernment of the
political. This is nowhere clearer than in the passages following Marx's
description of the Lumpenproletariat:

An old crafty rout, he [Bonaparte] conceives the historical life of the

nation and their performances of state [Haupt- und Staatsaktionen] as
comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade where the grand
costumes, words and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knav-
ery [Lumperei].20

Marx's admiration for Bonaparte's political acumen here is clear. He

appreciates the craftiness of Bonaparte's manipulation of a masquerade
that sounds very much like a debased conception of farce. Bonaparte's
savvy takes the form of an ability to discriminate between genres; he
sees the Haupt- und Staatsaktionen of politics as comedy. The Haupt-
und Staatsaktion is itself a neglected genre of German drama; the trans-
lation's vague "performances of state" misses Marx's use of a specific
form. Horn's comment on farce, quoted above, is an aside in a discus-
sion of this genre in which he describes its most notable features:

The kings and princes appear with their crowns of gilt paper, very mel-
ancholy and mournful, and they assure the sympathetic public that noth-
ing is more difficult than to rule, and that a wood-cutter sleeps much
more soundly at night; the generals and officers hold fine speeches, and
recount their great deeds.... The ministers are correspondingly less
popular with these authors, and are usually portrayed as evil-intentioned

17. Marx 75, 362.

18. Marx 75, 362.
19. For an important discussion of that list and other issues surrounding Marx's rep-
resentation of the Lumpenproletariat, see Peter Stallybrass, "Marx and Heterogeneity:
Thinking the Lumpenproletariat," Representations 31 (Summer, 1990): 69-95.
20. Marx 75-76, 363.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 43

and with a black, or at least a grey, character.... The clown and fool is
often a nuisance to the dramatis personae; but they simply cannot Aet
rid of this incarnation of parody who, as such, is of course immortal.

Excepting the claim to immortality, one might do worse than to describe

Marx's Bonaparte as such an "incarnation of parody." Marx's analysis
collapses the prominent roles of the Haupt- und Staatsaktionen:
Bonaparte is at once sovereign, "evil-intentioned" courtier, and clown.
More importantly, Bonaparte has the perspicacity to analyze "the histori-
cal life of the nation" as a form of theater. In discussing Bonaparte, who
is able to conceive of "the historical life of the nation and their perfor-
mances of state" as something that sounds like farce - "comedy in the
most vulgar sense" - Marx seems to repeat his own opening to the
Eighteenth Brumaire, where he conceives of events and persons in his-
tory as farce. The Eighteenth Brumaire presents the dilemma of a homol-
ogy between the historical critic, Marx, and his putative subject,
Bonaparte. Bonaparte, it seems, has already mastered and put into prac-
tice the generic criticism of history which Marx uses against him.22
The "Lumperei" masked by masquerade clearly links Bonaparte's the-
atrical escapades to the Lumpenproletariat Marx has just discussed.
Bonaparte's success lies in his lack of self-delusion:

The Society of December 10 belonged to him, it was his work, his very
own idea. Whatever else he appropriates is put into his hands by the
force of circumstances; whatever else he does, the circumstances do for

21. Horn, quoted in Benjamin, Origin 123-24.

22. Jeffrey Mehlman's reading in Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1977) suggests that Marx is not only a theorist of farce but
also a victim of farce. For Mehlman, farce, aligned with the Lumpenproletariat, is a destabi-
lizing third term in Marx's text that disrupts the classical opposition of comedy and tragedy;
the "specular - or reversible - relation" of tragedy and comedy "is exceeded by a hetero-
geneous, negatively charged instance whose situation is one of deviation or displacement in
relation to one of the poles of the initial opposition" (14), exceeded, that is, by farce. Farce,
for Mehlman, is typical of the "'third terms' active in the text" in uncannily breaking "with
the philosopheme of representation" upon which Marx's text relies (20). Farce is an
uncanny blockage in Marx's system, according to Mehlman, and Bonapartism is the farci-
cal, uncanny crisis that undoes Marx's dialectic. Mehlman's classically deconstructive read-
ing has generated much debate. See especially Eagleton for a concentrated critique of
Mehlman's argument, a critique that I find convincing. In addition to those already cited,
other readings of the Eighteenth Brumaire include Paul Bov6, "The Metaphysics of Textu-
ality: Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire and Nietzsche's Use and Abuse of History," Dalhousie
Review 64.2 (Summer, 1984): 401-22, and Sandy Petey's excellent "The Reality of Repre-
sentation: Between Marx and Balzac," Critical Inquiry 14 (Spring 1988): 448-68.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
44 Homo Alludens

him or he is content to copy from the deeds of others. But Bonaparte

with official phrases about order, religion, family and property in public,
before the citizens [offentlich vor den Biirgern], and with the secret soci-
ety of the Schufterles and Spiegelbergs, the society of disorder, prostitu-
tion and theft, behind him - that is Bonaparte himself as original author,
and the history of the Society of December 10 is his own history.23

For the moment, Bonaparte, to paraphrase the opening of the Eigh-

teenth Brumaire's second paragraph, makes his own history, and just as
he pleases, under circumstances chosen by himself. He accomplishes
this by manipulating the difference between what is open and public,
"6ffentlich," and what is "behind him," the "secret society" of Decem-
ber 10. Political and theatrical representation work by inversion here;
"the secret society of the Schufterles and Spiegelbergs" expresses itself
as the open society of "order, religion, family and property." Yet this
inversion is by no means simple. The "Schufterles and Spiegelbergs"
are characters from Schiller's Die Rdiuber. Bonaparte's inversion works
by putting the theatrical backstage; his Die Rduber is "behind him," off-
stage, while "phrases" do the work of drama.
Bonaparte is author simultaneously of what is backstage and what is
onstage, of what is open to the public and what is hidden from view. In
Bonaparte's

society of December 10, he assembles ten thousand rascally fellows

[Lumpenkerls], who are to play the part of the people, as Nick Bottom
that of the lion. At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself played the
most complete comedy [Kom6die], but in the most serious manner in
the world, without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French
dramatic etiquette, and was itself half deceived, half convinced of the
solemnity of its own performances of state [ihrer eignen Haupt- und
Staatsaktionen], the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy
[der die Kom6dieplatt als Komddie nahm], was bound to win.24

French comedy, played "in the most serious manner in the world,"
becomes a German dramatic genre, the Haupt- und Staatsaktionen.
The mention of Bottom, chief among the "rude mechanicals" in A Mid-
summer Night s Dream, is the first of the significant Shakespearean
interventions in the Eighteenth Brumaire. Bottom never plays the lion,
though at one point he asks for the role and has much to say about how

23. Marx 76-77, 363-64.

24. Marx 76, 363.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 45

it should be played. The mechanicals' comic dilemma is how to play

their drama without having it mistaken for reality. Bottom's solution for
the lion is for Snug, who has been cast in the role, to give a speech in
which he says: "If you think I am come hither as a lion, it were pity on
my life. No! I am no such thing, I am a man as other men are."25
Such a strategy of distancing oneself from the role one plays is pre-
cisely what the savvy Bonaparte forgets. Bonaparte's political and theat-
rical acumen, his generic cunning, is not infinite:

Only when he has eliminated his solemn opponent, when he himself

now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask
imagines he is the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his
own conception of the world, the serious buffoon [der ernsthafte Han-
swurst] who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his com-
edy for world history.26

The Hanswurst is a stock character of the Haupt- und Staatsaktionen;

for analogous characters in better-known plays, one can think of Iago,
or Edmund in King Lear. A particular type of court intriguer in a genre
intrigued by the court, the Hanswurst, according to a certain Weiss,
"armed with the weapons and irony and scorn, usually got the better of
his fellows ... and did not even have any inhibitions about taking over
the task of directing the intrigue of the play. . . "27 It is in the figure of
the Hanswurst that the "ill-intentioned" minister and the clown meet.
Benjamin comments: "The comic figure is a raisonneur; in reflection
he appears to himself as a marionette."28 It is a similar process of rea-
soning and reflection that makes Marx's Bonaparte superior to his bour-
geois rivals; he is aware of himself as an actor and is aware of the
value of manipulating others' conceptions of drama. It is precisely
when he becomes aware of himself as "marionette," as subject to con-
flicting generic and political constraints, that he attains a position from
which he can manipulate the theatrical arrangements of society,
becomes "original author." As the "ernsthafte Hanswurst," however, he
becomes an unaware stock figure in the sort of historical drama for
which the bourgeoisie has mistaken its comedy.

25. William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," The Riverside Shakes-
peare, eds. G. Blakemore Evans et. al. (Boston: Houghton, 1974) III.i. 141-44.
26. Marx 76, 363.
27. Weiss, quoted in Benjamin, Origin 126.
28. Benjamin, Origin 127.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
46 Homo Alludens

If in The German Ideology a key figure for ideology is the camera

obscura, in the Eighteenth Brumaire it is not only theater but the dis-
tinction between foreground and background, onstage and offstage that
figures ideology.29 Bonaparte becomes subject to an ideology he has
earlier recognized as false and has manipulated as the public representa-
tive of an entirely different "secret society." It is when Bonaparte, wear-
ing the Napoleonic mask, "imagines he is the real Napoleon," that he
becomes "the victim of his own conception of the world," farcical repe-
tition rather than original author. The theatrical discourse of the Eigh-
teenth Brumaire in the end privileges a position outside of theater; it
has as its project a knowledge that is not theatrical. One of Brecht's the-
ses in "A Short Organum for the Theatre" has particular resonance
here. Brecht writes of the actor: "At no moment must he go so far as to
be wholly transformed into the character played. The verdict: 'he didn't
act Lear, he was Lear' would be an annihilating blow to him."30 For
Marx, the verdict on Bonaparte - he didn't act Napoleon, he was
Napoleon - is an annihilating blow. Partial transformation is a neces-
sity of ideological manipulation. Bonaparte must seem to believe his
"official phrases about order, religion, family and property." But the
ideologue who remains partly outside the theatrical constructs of ideol-
ogy knows that belief in such phrases is error. With belief, the "raison-
neur" becomes marionette.
Engels's letter, which suggested the application of the rubrics of farce
and tragedy to the coup d'etat, may have contributed to Marx's sense
of the theatrical as well. Engels's characterization of the coup d'etat of
1851 - "it really seems as if old Hegel in his grave were acting as
World Spirit and directing history" - contains a similar theatrical dia-
lectic. Acting and directing, performing and controlling, Hegel, like
Bonaparte, seems to manipulate history into a desired shape. Yet
Hegel's historical manipulation is from a position not so much on- or
offstage but under it. As ghost in his grave playing "World Spirit," as
Geist playing Weltgeist, this Hegel recalls nothing so much as another
Shakespearean figure recalled, in turn, in the Eighteenth Brumaire: the
Ghost of Hamlet, beneath the stage, who acts the revenge ghost and

29. W.J.T. Mitchell has a valuable discussion of the figure of the camera obscura in
"The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm: Marxism, Ideology, and Fetishism," Iconology: Image, Text,
Ideology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986) 160-208.
30. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1978) 193.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 47

directs the history of Hamlet.

Ghosts in The German Ideology and the Eighteenth Brumaire
The ghostly Hegel haunts the letter by Engels like the Ghost of Ham-
let. Before turning to this spirit, I will examine the larger background
of supernatural discourse behind the Eighteenth Brumaire. A vocabu-
lary of ghosts, spooks, and specters permeates the text. Evidently, they
are not among those "allusions now no longer intelligible" that Marx
struck struck from his first edition. To recall Engel's letter, however, is
to remember that Marx's attribution to Hegel may also be an allusion
to Engels, however obscured. Marx's opening sentence is both frac-
tured quotation and hidden allusion. The association of ghosts and allu-
sion is not accidental; the allusion, like the ghost, is a revenant partly
unleashed from its historical moorings. Nor is the prominence of this
constellation of allusion and ghosts in the Eighteenth Brumaire an acci-
dent. Allusion and ghosts are aspects of a concern central to the Eigh-
teenth Brumaire: the problem of the tenacity of an oppressive political
and historical inheritance.31
A striking peculiarity of this prominent supernatural rhetoric is that it
seems inconsistent with the thorough materialism one expects from the
Marx of this period. In The German Ideology, for example, a text of
1845-46, Marx and Engels write:

It is self-evident . . . that "spectres," "bonds," "the higher being,"

"concept, "scruple" are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the
conception apparently of the isolated individual, the image of very
empirical fetters and limitations, within which the mode of production
of life and the form of intercourse coupled with it move.32

According to this program, such terms as "spectre," it seems, require

translation from the expressive, imagistic, individual register to one that
reveals what those obfuscating terms tend to conceal: the material cir-
cumstances that have generated them. One impetus behind this campaign
against mystification and the vocabulary that underwrites it is certainly
Marx's political and philosophical campaign to reverse Hegel and his

31. After I completed this article, Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of
Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York:
Routledge, 1994) appeared, which contains readings of the "spectro-politics" of ghosts
and other apparitions in Marx. I hope to respond to these readings in the future.
32. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Part One, ed. C. J.
Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970) 52.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
48 Homo Alludens

master trope, Geist. The critique of "idealistic, spiritual expression" will

call for a critical praxis, and a critical vocabulary, better able to repre-
sent the material circumstances of the social world. Yet it is worth not-
ing that even in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels concede that
those terms in sarcastic quotation marks - in scare quotes - remain
"the image of very empirical fetters and limitations." Supernatural or
conceptual language may be inadequate, a poor translation of the "fet-
ters and limitations" Marx and Engels make their target, but it still
bears a relationship, as "image," to the underlying material conditions.
Later in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels discuss their concep-
tion of history:

It has not, like the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for
a category, but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does
not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas
from material practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that
all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental
criticism, by resolution into "self-consciousness" or transformation into
"apparitions," "specters," "fancies," etc., but only by the practical over-
throw of the actual social relations which give rise to this idealistic
humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history,
also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory.33

Again the critique of Hegel stands out. Marx and Engels seem just barely to
avoid naming their antagonist; "etc." elides Geist. Marx and Engels put the
supernatural terms here among the errors of "mental criticism." But conflict
remains between the new practice of history Marx and Engels claim to
introduce and the dismissal of the mystifying terms of moribund idealist
analysis. If these mystifying terms are images of "actual social relations,"
then there is the problem of lag time. Is there a language for "the real
ground of history"? How can the materialist praxis of Marx and Engels's
attain a language free of ghosts and spooks, especially in the absence of
"the practical overthrow of the actual social relations"? The danger is that,
before the revolution, critique of ideology will become a form of ideology,
an overthrowing in thought of what is not a product of thought but of "mate-
rial practice." The facts of "material practice" will survive. Scare quotes
may be an admirable sign of critical self-consciousness, but in themselves
they do not form a revolution. The passage above goes further: the "forms
and products of consciousness," as well as "material practice," will be trans-

33. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 58-59.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 49

formed only with revolution. The point may be that "'apparitions,' 'spec-
ters,' 'fancies,' etc." are the inadequate transformations of a mental
criticism that believes world history is "a mere abstract act performed by a
"metaphysical specter."34 But a further caveat follows: at this point inade-
quate transformations are what any criticism, "mental" or materialist, must
resort to as a provisional working vocabulary. "Geist"' is bunk, but it bears
witness to "actual social relations," even if only as an evasion of them.
Is there no alternative to a division that would suggest that critical
language is either completely enchanted by or completely liberated
from the fantasies of ideology? Progressive disenchantment may be a
satisfactory alternative model. One could say that the new critical
vocabulary of Marx and Engels provides a progressive step toward the
exorcism of supernatural practice from the arena of critical thought,
even if not a complete break from it. The insistence on a severe break
between fully liberated revolutionary language and enchanted discourse
is, however, partially Marx's. Yet it is Marx who, in the Eighteenth Bru-
maire, uses a supernatural discourse similar in kind, if not in effect, to
that he and Engels excoriate in The German Ideology. Indeed, the Eigh-
teenth Brumaire is a powerful essay on enchantment.
The world's most enchanted nation, according to the Eighteenth Bru-
maire, is the USA Marx analyzes the lessons of the defeat of the Paris
proletariat in the June days of 1848:

It had revealed that here bourgeois republic signifies the unlimited des-
potism of one class over other classes. It had proved that in countries
with an old civilization, with a developed formation of classes, with
modem conditions of production and with an intellectual consciousness
in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved by the work of centu-
ries, the republic signifies in general only the political form of revolu-
tion of bourgeois society, and not its conservative form of life, as, for
example, in the United States of North America, where, though classes
already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but continually change
and interchange their elements in constant flux, where the modem
means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus pop-
ulation, rather compensate for the relative deficiency of heads and
hands, and where, finally, the feverish, youthful movement of material
production, which has to make a new world its own, has left neither
time nor opportunity for abolishing the old spirit world [Geisterwelt].35

34. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 58.

35. Marx 24-25, 317.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
50 Homo Alludens

The United States, here, is the place where "traditional ideas" have
not yet been "dissolved by the work of centuries"; an antiquated
"intellectual consciousness," Marx implies, rules its "conservative
form of life." With unfixed classes and "modem means of produc-
tion," means that are a substitute for scarce human labor, there is no
time in the United States for the dissolution of "traditional ideas," a
process for which French history provides such a fine example. So
there is no discrepancy between "the feverish, youthful movement of
material production" in the United States and the overpowering world
of ghosts that rules it and keeps it locked in tradition. Rather, it is pre-
cisely the absolute rule of production, in a nation with no "surplus
population," to use Marx's disturbing phrase, which will determine
the tenacity of "the old spirit world." The United States here is part
of the world that has not yet experienced the contradictions of capital
and is, therefore, pre-political.36
France, on the other hand, political nation of the first order, has had
some "opportunity for abolishing the old spirit world." Such abolition,
however, does not happen all at once. Marx criticizes certain "Demo-
crats" who, in anticipation of "the second Sunday in May 1852" -
the day appointed for Bonaparte to step down as President of France
- performed mental revolutions not unlike those of the Hegelians
who are a target of The German Ideology. "As ever," writes Marx,
"weakness had taken refuge in a belief in miracles, fancied the enemy
overcome when he was only conjured away in imagination [in der
Phantasie weghexte], and it lost all understanding of the present in a
passive glorification of the future that was in store for it. . . ."37 The
French may have more time than their hyper-productive American
counterparts for demolition of "the old spirit world," but here that
demolition happens only in fantasy.
The Democrats in this passage are a group that mistakenly imagines
itself to have a sorcerer's power; as with the Hegelians, their apotro-
paic overturnings in the world of spirit have no equivalent in the social
world. Magic, in fact, returns where they least expect it. Enter Louis
Bonaparte, "Hexenmeister":

36. A small irony attending the Eighteenth Brumaire is that it was first printed in
New York. For a somewhat bathetic account of the circumstances of this publication, see
Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (New York:
Covici, Friede, 1935) 240-44.
37. Marx 20, 313.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 51

The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue
and red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the plat-
form, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the
political names and the intellectual [geistigen] reputations, the civil
law and the penal code, the libertg, igalite, fraternitg and the second
Sunday in May 1852 - all has vanished like a phantasmagoria before
the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a sor-
cerer [Hexenmeister].38

The text clearly contrasts the ineffective hexing of the Democrats with
the strong "spell" of Bonaparte. The Democrats, who conjured away
["weghexte"] Bonaparte in imagination, encounter their antagonist as the
unacknowledged master - "Hexenmeister" - of the tricks they would
themselves use. All the trappings of bourgeois Democratic resistance,
under Bonaparte's counter-hexing, vanish "like a phantasmagoria." If the
United States in the Eighteenth Brumaire is the place where industrializa-
tion and "the old spirit world" co-exist, the Democrats are like those
"industrialists of philosophy" Marx and Engels describe in The German
Ideology, who experiment with a whole range of "new combinations"
and "new substances."39 The phantasmagoria, both a mechanical ghost
machine and the illusions produced by it, figures the material basis of
the ideological production of the Democrats; Bonaparte is able to spirit it
away, it seems, in part because he recognizes the phantasmagoria for
what it is - an ideological factory. The Democrats have no defense
against Bonaparte's "spell"; they cannot disenchant the political arena
when they have no notion of where the magic comes from.
By using the phantasmagoria as a central trope, argues Margaret
Cohen, Benjamin sought "to free Marxist analysis from its overwhelm-
ing valorization of rational forms of representation."40 The ghosts in
the Eighteenth Brumaire suggest that, even if "Marxist" analysis did, or
still does, valorize such forms, the case of Marx's own work is differ-
ent. It is true that in The German Ideology Marx and Engels seem
intent on ridding their critical vocabulary of any suggestion of the
supernatural; even the vocabulary of "'apparitions,' 'specters,' 'fan-
cies,' etc." seems suspect there. It may be valuable at this point to re-
examine the American example. The paradox of the USA, as presented

38. Marx 20, 313.

39. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 39.
40. Margaret Cohen, "Walter Benjamin's Phantasmagoria," New German Critique
48 (Fall 1989): 87.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
52 Homo Alludens

by Marx, is in the lack of correspondence between modem productive

forces and "the old spirit world." In those most rational of marxist
terms for figuring the relationship between production and ideology,
one could say that the case of the United States offers an example of a
lag between base and superstructure: the workers on the ground floor
have not yet caught up with the ghosts in the attic. So overwhelming
are the imperatives of the base, so irresistible the mandate of produc-
tion, that there is "neither time nor opportunity for abolishing the old
spirit world." The defunct superstructural apparatus is doomed; Ameri-
cans simply have no time, it seems, to demolish it. So the use of super-
natural discourse here names an archaic phantom, residue of an out-
dated ideological formation that is still dominant because those subject
to it have no basic imperative to revise it. The "Geisterwelt" is just
that: a world of ghosts that co-exists with the world of the living with-
out getting in its way, a dead but not yet dismissed ideological inherit-
ance. The supernatural in Marx's discussion of the United States
encodes a superfluous superstructure.
The promise of the example of the United States seems to be that one
will be able to enact similar translations of other of Marx's supernatural
terms, decoding ghosts as remnants of outdated ideologies. But it may
be that Marx's supernatural discourse also figures the recalcitrance of
such ideologies. There is a certain resistance to such translation even in
the American example. The term "Geisterwelt" revises Hegel's "Welt-
geist," and the simplest aspect of this revision is perhaps also its most
crucial. "Geister" is plural, "Geist" singular. The world of plural ghosts
confronts the world of unified Spirit. The United States in the Eigh-
teenth Brumaire is a unitary example to put beside the variegated politi-
cal world of France. But the dissolution of ideological totality in the
American example, where "Geisterwelt" revises "Weltgeist," suggests
that even in the United States the ideological terrain is more varied than
unified, more contested and fluid than single and solid. In many ways,
the Eighteenth Brumaire anticipates later discussions of the complexity
of hegemony. Raymond Williams, for instance, stresses that the process
of hegemony "isn't just the past, the dry husks of ideology which we
can more easily discard."41 There is certainly an aspect of the Eigh-
teenth Brumaire that suggests that Marx imagines the cultural critic as

41. Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,"

Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: NLB, 1980) 39.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 53

"Hexenmeister," able to cast spells that scare off ideological ghosts. The
supernatural rhetoric of the Eighteenth Brumaire, however, marks a rec-
ognition that the enchantment of the world is deep, and that "the real
ground of history" is harder to survey than the authors of The German
Ideology may have imagined.

Translations of the Mole

The underground of history also concerns Marx, and it is in his repre-
sentation of it that the Ghost of Hamlet makes its appearance. In the
seventh and last section of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx describes
the progress of the revolution in a paragraph that begins: "But the revo-
lution is thoroughgoing [griindlich]. It is still journeying through purga-
tory."42 With the solidification of Bonaparte's executive power, and the
steady dissolution of any opposition, there is little evidence of revolu-
tion, which, it seems, must undergo an underground rite of purification.
Marx's description of the revolution continues:

It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851, it had completed

one half of its preparatory work; it is now completing the other half. First
it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it.
Now that it has attained this, it perfects the executive power, reduces it to
its purest expression, isolates it, sets it up against itself as the sole target,
in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it
has done the second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from
its seat and exultantly exclaim: Well grubbed, old mole!43

Purification and destruction are a pair; with the reduction of executive

power to its purest form - presumably the absolute dictatorship of
Louis Bonaparte - the revolution will find an easy target. Revolution
itself should embody a dialectic of purification and destruction. On the
one hand, Marx suggests that the revolution is undergoing a purifying
journey through purgatory; on the other, revolution itself is the unseen,
underground agent that purifies executive power in order to destroy it.
The grand description of the heroic revolution above ends in what
sounds like an anticlimactic joke. Europe, Marx writes, will greet the out-
come of the revolution with the victorious cry, "Well grubbed, old mole!
[Brav gewiihlt, alter Maulwurf]'44 The purifying revolution suddenly

42. Marx 121,404.

43. Marx 121,404-05.
44. Marx 121, 405.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
54 Homo Alludens

takes the shape of the unheroic mole. That Marx has called the revolution
"griindlich" ["thoroughgoing"] now appears as something of a pun. It is
not only thorough, as one definition of the word would suggest, but thor-
oughly of the earth, of the ground. "Brav gewiihlt, alter Maulwurfl" Well
subverted, old mole! Well undermined, old mole! It is difficult to know
how to translate this phrase: "wiihlen" can mean to burrow, to dig, to
undermine, or to grub; a "Wiihler" may be an agitator or subversive.45
The old mole is not, however, only this revolutionary animal. Marx
alludes to a phrase from Schlegel's translation of Hamlet: "Bray, alter
Maulwurfl Wiihlst so hurtig fort?''46 Schlegel translates Shakespeare:
"Well said, old mole! Canst work i' th'earth so fast?'"47 One could leave it
at that: Marx means to demystify a picture of revolution that threatened to
make it a mythical, heroic figure like so many, slogging through purgatory
towards an unearthly future. So, he calls it a mole. A tag from Schlegel,
slightly askew, serves him well. The grand purgatorial voyage becomes
the burrowing of a plain old mole. But burrowing to the Shakespearean
source of the quotation suggests that Marx's allusion here is not casual.
Marx borrows from Hamlet's first encounter with the Ghost of his
father. The words are Prince Hamlet's, directed to the Ghost of King
Hamlet. Hamlet arranges a ritual by which his friends of the nightwatch,
Horatio and Marcellus, will swear that they "never make known" what
they "have seen to-night.'48 "Ghost cries under the stage," punctuating
the ritual three times with the word "Swear'"49 and once with "Swear by
his sword."50 It is to this last command of the ghost that Hamlet
responds with the line at hand: "Well said, old mole!" One crucial detail
completes the synopsis. The second time the ghost cries, "Swear," Ham-
let responds, "Hic et ubique? Then we'll shift our ground."51 Hamlet, it
seems, tries to evade the Ghost while arranging his oath, shifting the
position of his more or less impromptu ritual. But this evasive maneuver

45. Grimm's dictionary counts a passage from an 1848 letter of Engels to Marx
among its examples for "Wiihlerei," or subversive political activity. See the Deutsches
Wdrterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1960): '"fir den
(vater) ist schon die kiilner zeitung ein ausbund von wiihlerei [for him (father) the
Cologne newspaper is already the height of subversion]."
46. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prinz von Danemark, trans. August Wilhelm von
Schlegel (Leipzig: Der Tempel, [n.d.]) 40.
47. Shakespeare, Hamlet I.v. 162.
48. Shakespeare, Hamlet I.v. 144.
49. Shakespeare, Hamlet I.v.149, 155, 181.
50. Shakespeare, Hamlet I.v. 161.
51. Shakespeare, Hamlet I.v. 156.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 55

fails; the Ghost is able to move agilely beneath the stage, and follows
Hamlet and his companions. It is after they shift their ground that the
Ghost delivers the climactic command, "Swear by his sword," which
inspires Hamlet's invocation of the mole.
In a text so concerned with the future of the revolution, a description
of the moment of revolutionary eruption is bound to be of significance.
That the climax of this description of revolution should take the form of
an allusion is all the more striking. Allusion, always doubled, counters
the "purest expression" of executive power. The suggestion of a linguis-
tic aspect to the purification of executive power - the suggestion that
the revolution's underground task is to reduce executive power to its pur-
est "expression" ["Ausdruck"] - is consistent with other moments in
this text. Revolution, opposed to executive power, never finds pure
expression; its forms are parodic or allusive. Marx describes a paradoxi-
cal revolution that has no visible features yet nevertheless does its invisi-
ble, subterranean work. Marx analyzes a historical formation -
Bonaparte's coup d'6tat - that seems, on the surface, to spell the revo-
lution's doom; the historian's analysis discovers what that formation
represses and finds that the symptoms of the surface, properly consid-
ered, reveal a depth, a tunneling, a burrowing, a mole. The linguistic tac-
tic of allusion, then, may figure the disjunction between surface and
depth that is the historian's subject. The moment in Hamlet to which
Marx alludes offers an exemplary instance of such a disruption in the
field of theatrical action. It draws attention to an unsuspected representa-
tional space beneath the stage. Marx, similarly, draws attention to an
unsuspected field of historical action. Allusion figures not only the farce
that is Bonaparte's recapitulation of Napoleonic history, but the material-
ist analysis of history that insists on reading contradictions not simply as
conflict on the surface but as symptoms of what that conflict represses.
In alluding to Hamlet, Marx engages with a play whose concerns are
in many ways those of the Brumaire: legitimacy, usurpation, ghostly
intervention, ghostly agency, theatrical and historical repetition. In
Shakespeare's scenario, the son must avenge his father's death by murder-
ing his uncle and claiming his father's place. In Marx's scenario, the
nephew has displaced his father by claiming a false lineage. Louis
Bonaparte claims to be the nephew of and rightful successor to Napoleon
I. A convenient law - "Enquiry into paternity is forbidden"52 - assures

52. Marx 124, 408.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
56 Homo Alludens

that no one can question that claim; no one can legally give evidence to
the contrary.53 One needs to conjure the ghost of the father in order to
reveal the illegitimacy of the nephew. Accurate genealogy becomes a rev-
olutionary act. In Hamlet, the critical genealogist is also the wronged
party; the murdered father brings the story of his murder to light. Marx,
then, is like the ghost in uncovering the genealogical lie. Both Marx and
the Ghost offer competing narratives of the genealogy of their antago-
nists' coming to power, narratives whose political impact would be to
erase that power's legitimacy.
I suggested earlier that Engels's letter, with its phantasmatic scene of
Hegel "in his grave ... acting as World Spirit and directing history,"
may have suggested the usefulness of Hamlet to Marx. Indeed, in
alluding to the mole in Hamlet, Marx again slyly reworks Hegel, who
had himself alluded to the mole in his Lectures on the History of Phi-
losophy. Hegel writes:

It goes ever on and on, because spirit is progress alone. Spirit often
seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself,
it is inwardly working ever forward as Hamlet says of the ghost of his
father, "Well done, old mole" [Brav gearbeitet, wackerer Maulwurfj
- until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which
divided it from its sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away.54

Hegel, Ned Lukacher writes, uses "the 'old mole' as a figure for phi-
losophy's attainment of absolute knowledge." Indeed, according to
Lukacher, "Shakespeare's enigmatic 'old mole' is Hegel's figure for
the overcoming of figure itself, for the end of deferrals, for the end of

53. Petrey explains the problem in this way: "Marx's reference above to the Napole-
onic Code alludes to the widespread rumor that Napoleon III was not in fact the son of
Napoleon's brother but was the offspring of his mother's adultery. The jibe is petty, but its
dissociation of the name of Napoleon from any connection with the reality of Napoleon
emphasizes that the social fimunction of a name in no way depends on material reality. Like
the referent, paternity is not a physical fact but a social performance." Petrey 464. A British
observer of the turmoil of 1848, Walter Bagehot, whose account is for the most part a
defense of the coup as Bonaparte's making France safe for capitalism, had heard these
rumors. In a parenthetical aside, he notes, "if you believe the people in the salons, the Pres-
ident is not the son of his father, and everybody else is the son of his mother. .. ." William
Bagehot, Letters on the French Coup d'Itat of 1851, The Impact of the 18th Brumaire, ed.
J. P. Mayer (New York: Arno Press, 1979) 42.
54. Georg W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III, trans. E. S.
Haldane and Frances H. Simpson, 3 vols. (New York: Humanities, 1974) 546-47, quoted
in Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1986) 198. Lukacher has modified the translation.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 57

representation."55 This seems to me doubtful. The passage does not war-

rant associating the mole with breaking through the earth; rather than
being a figure for the "attainment of absolute knowledge," the "old mole"
is more the emblem of that subterranean, self-contradictory stage before
Spirit's attainment of any "absolute knowledge." The Ghost is, pointedly,
underground when Hamlet calls to it. Doubtless, the "progress" of Spirit
as old mole is a necessary preliminary stage in the attainment of any
"end" to this progress, but the mole does not figure this end.
Lukacher's reading of the old mole, by the very hastiness with which
it assigns to the mole a value Hegel withholds from it, helps one under-
stand the way in which Marx rewrote Hegel. Marx criticizes the too
rapid assumption of attainment in Hegel's thought; it is an aspect of that
pretended dissolution of the "products of consciousness . .. by mental
criticism" which Marx and Engels target in The German Ideology.56 Put
beside Hegel's passage, one of Marx's discussions of proletarian revolu-
tions earlier in the Eighteenth Brumaire shows both clear signs of its
Hegelian underpinnings and marks of Marx's divergence from Hegel:

proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticize

themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own
course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it
afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weak-
nesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down
their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the
earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon
from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation
has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the
conditions themselves cry out:
Hic rhodus, hic salta!
Here is the rose, here dance!57

Again, a passage in which Marx describes the process of revolution ends

in an allusion, this time to Aesop's fable of the Swaggerer, and, again,
this allusion is at the same time an allusion to Hegel. Hegel, explaining
in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right that the "endeavour" of his

55. See Lukacher 202, 198. For a more playful though equally instructive tracing of
the tracks of the mole in German thought, see David Farrell Krell, "Der Maulwurf: Die phil-
osophische Wiihlarbeit bei Kant, Hegel und Nietzsche" ["The Mole: Philosophic Burrowing
in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche"], Why Nietzsche Now?, ed. Daniel O'Hara (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1985) 155-85. Thanks to Henry Pickford for referring me to Krell's article.
56. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 58.
57. Marx 19, 312.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 58 Homo Alludens

work is "to apprehend and portray the state as something inherently

rational," himself translates the imperative from Aesop (Here is Rhodes,
jump here!): "Here is the rose, dance thou here."58 Hegel criticizes those
who substitute utopias for political analysis: "To comprehend what is,
this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason."--
Clearly Marx found a model for his stuttering, self-interrupting revolu-
tion in Hegel's self-contradictory Spirit, which "seems to have forgotten
and lost itself." Yet, it would seem just as clear that Marx has no inter-
est in borrowing Hegelian notions wholesale. The task Marx set for his
philosophy was anything but "to comprehend what is;" the Marxist task,
according to the last and best known of the theses on Feuerbach, is to
change it. Why then does Marx borrow Hegel's borrowings? Why does
Marx repeat Hegel's allusions, phrases which are already repetitions?
The question of Marx's revision of Hegel is clearly far too huge for me
to do any justice to it here. I will therefore focus on that element of it
that is most germane to my project and concentrate on the intersection
in the Eighteenth Brumaire between translation and allusion.
In the English edition of Marx I am using, "Brav gewiihlt, alter Maul-
wurf!" becomes "Well grubbed, old mole!"60 This translation of the
phrase - perhaps any translation - would have been of interest to
Marx, who is in the Eighteenth Brumaire nothing if not a theorist of
translation. In a passage early in the text, Marx compares the parodies
that litter revolutions to a radical model of language acquisition:

In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always trans-
lates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit
[Geist] of the new language and can freely express himself in it only
when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his
native tongue in the use of the new.61

By allusion, Marx offers an example for the art of translation and for-
getting. "Brav gewiihlt, alter Maulwurfl" does not suggest, exactly,

58. Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy ofRight, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford
UP, 1967) 11. Knox explains that the Greek word for Rhodes also means "a rose. Saltus
means a jump, but salta is the imperative of the verb 'to dance'. The rose is the symbol of
joy, and the philosopher's task is to find joy in the present by discovering reason within it.
In other words, philosophy may 'dance' for joy in this world; it need not postpone its
'dancing' until it builds an ideal world elsewhere" (303, 33n.).
59. Hegel, Philosophy of Right 11.
60. Marx 124, 405.
61. Marx 15-16, 308-309.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 59

"Well said, old mole!" As this translation suggests, there is no way to

reproduce the Shakespearian English from the German. Nor does Marx
simply use Schlegel's translation; his slight alteration makes a past par-
ticiple ("gewiihlt") of Schlegel's present tense verb ("wiihlst"), and
moves it from the beginning of the second phrase of Schlegel's line to
the second position in the first phrase. There is a strange restoration
here. A parallel to Shakespeare not found in Schlegel appears in Marx:
Marx "translates" Shakespeare's "said" with "gewiihlt," it is true, but
there is at least some word that takes the place of "said." Has Marx's
revision of Shakespeare acted in the revolutionary manner Marx
describes? Has some old language been forgotten? Allusion's intersec-
tion with translation further vexes this question. Allusion invites one to
consider precisely those instances where discourse refutes its own pre-
tensions toward closure, towards a pure state untainted by historical dif-
ference. If amnesia is the model for the revolutionary language that
Marx imagines, allusion is the model for that language that can never
be fully severed from the past.
Marx's gesture to Hegel here, his allusion to Hegel's allusion, is at
once citation, translation, and revision. It may be useful to have the
four crucial passages here side by side:

Well said, old mole! Canst work i' th'earth so fast? (Shakespeare)
Brav, alter Maulwurfl Wiihlst so hurtigfort? (Schlegel)
Brav gearbeitet, wackerer Maulwurfl (Hegel)
Brav gewuihlt, alter Maulwurfl (Marx)

Schlegel, in his translation, has no room for speech. Shakespeare's

"said" disappears, to resurface in the varieties of action imagined by
Hegel and Marx. For Hegel, the "valiant" mole ("wackerer Maulwurf")
works bravely; Marx restores Schlegel's old mole while upending
Hegel's sense of work. "Arbeiten" becomes "wiihlen"; work becomes
subversion. The mole's emergence, only potential in Hegel, is fulfilled
in Marx. Marx's alteration of the present tense in Schlegel's translation
into his own past participle is then, in miniature, a way of rehearsing his
conception of his own subversive work, his "Wiihlerei," as at once the
completion and the overturning of Hegel's work.
Marx's revision of Hegel here suggests that the work of allusion
may be read as an allegory for Marx's revolutionary reversal of
Hegel. This reversal, in turn, serves the text as an allegory for the

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
60 Homo Alludens

work of revolution itself. Yet the allusions that jostle the margins of
the Eighteenth Brumaire make it clear that Marx did not conceive of
the seizing of such a post-revolutionary language as something easily
achieved. Marx, like the parodists of historical actions he describes,
appropriates ghosts, foremost among them the Ghost of Hamlet. The
model of production without recollection that characterizes Marx's
discussion of revolutionary translation belongs to an impossible world
or, perhaps, to the future. In another important passage near the open-
ing of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx uses another linguistic model
for the revolution:

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry
from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself
before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past. Earlier
revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to
drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its
content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead
bury the dead. There the phrase went beyond the content; here the
content goes beyond the phrase.62

The last phrase would seem to imply that "here," where content sur-
passes phrase, there will be no need for the poetry of the past. The
future will be the subject and the subject will take its substance, its
phrase, from the future. This would be the antithesis of allusion, which
takes its substance from the past. But in a passage where Marx posits
the radical dumping of roots and "recollections of past world history,"
he borrows a key phrase from one of the most influential "world-histori-
cal" myths of the West. In stressing the absolute fissure with the past
and the "superstitions" attached to it, Marx locates his work squarely in
the New Testament. It is at the moment that Marx stresses the need for
the revolution to come to its own content that he borrows from the New
Testament: may one say that "here the content goes beyond the phrase"?
It seems that it is not so much that content goes beyond the phrase but
that the phrase suggests a superstitious reminder of the difficulty of even
imagining any place stripped of superstition and the poetry of the past.
The passage to which Marx alludes presents a detail in Christ's gath-
ering of disciples:

62. Marx 18, 311.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 61

And another of his disciples said unto him, Lord, suffer me first to go
and bury my father.

But Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.
(Matt. 8:21-22)

Another inadequately buried father emerges in the text. The Ghost of

Hamlet, figure of the emergence of the revolution, closes his colloquy
with his son with the commandment, "Remember me."63 This father in
Matthew is the figure for forgetfulness, even for the commandment to
forget. It should not then come as a surprise that what survives of the dia-
logue as usually remembered is the commandment that Jesus delivers to
his disciple. The phrase goes beyond the content, erases it. One could
say that Marx finds in this Christian slogan a model for his own condem-
nation of old superstitions and the attachment to dead poetry. One remem-
bers the phrase about the dead burying the dead as a phrase of some
obscure but powerful religious import, forgetting or never knowing that
there was ever a question of a corpse that one of the disciples wanted to
bury. But to use the phrase invites the kind of genealogical research
Marx practices in the Eighteenth Brumaire. Allusion in the Eighteenth
Brumaire is a technique opposite to that of Louis Bonaparte's strategy of
eradicating the maintenance of accurate ties to the past. Marx installs a
commandment to forget the past at a point where the borrowed language
of that commandment provides an indirect inducement to excavate a his-
torical source for that language. Allusion forces one to recognize the uses
a discourse finds in the past, even the genealogy of a phrase.
One could argue that Marx uses these phrases casually and means for
them to be read in that manner, as clich6s without history, as nothing
more than sequences of words that have meaning as words have mean-
ing, by repetition and the disappearance of etymology in repeated utter-
ance. One does not need to know the origin of the phrase about the
dead's burial of the dead in order for it to have some power any more
than one needs to know the etymology of "Maulwurf' to think of a mole
when one hears it. But then one could forward this suspect model of
casual, "everyday" speech as a version of that revolutionary language
that abolishes its origins, stamps out its ghosts, and lets the dead bury
their dead. The Eighteenth Brumaire does not suggest or champion such
a notion of language, nor does it offer a sanguine prospect for the

63. Shakespeare, Hamlet I.v.90.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
62 Homo Alludens

achievement of revolution in the material world that the linguistic so

often figures. It does not exhibit much confidence in the ease with which
one may jerry-build a revolutionary language or find it ready-made in
everyday conversation. One must conclude that Marx never claims to
have discovered the revolutionary language of the nineteenth century:
"It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition in
regard to the past.'64 If Marx describes his own practice in the text, it
is here, as stripping off of superstition, preliminary preparation for a
revolution in progress that he can predict but never anticipate in a lan-
guage similar to that the revolution will use. The Eighteenth Brumaire
can only allude to the future.

Ghosts and Contradiction

Why, if the Eighteenth Brumaire is at work stripping off superstition,
is it so marked by the constellation of ghosts and politics? This constel-
lation, which is never far from the text's surface, resurfaces again
around the question of Bonapart's coup d'etat. It is at the point of the
purification of "executive power" that the familiar spirits of the
haunted pre-revolutionary times come out in force:

The shadow of the coup d'Xtat had become so familiar to the Parisians
as a spectre that they were not willing to believe in it when it finally
appeared in the flesh. [Der Schatten des Staatsstreiches war den
Parisern als Gespenst so familidr geworden, dass sie nicht an ihn
glauben wollten, als er endlich in Fleisch und Blut erschien.]65

The familiar ghost becomes the unbelievable "real" appearance. The

National Assembly falls victim to this shadow: "It had nothing better to
do than to recapitulate in a short, succinct form [in einem kurzen biindi-
gen Repetitorium] the course it had gone through and to prove that it
was buried only after it had died."66 In the paragraph where Marx
alludes to the mole, he writes that the revolution reduces executive
power "to its purest expression."67 Part of this reduction will entail the
shedding of the obsolete National Assembly. Marx here suggests that
the assembly itself will provide an "Ausdruck," an expression of its

64. Marx 18, 311.

65. Marx 112, 396.
66. Marx 112, 397.
67. Marx 121, 404.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Martin Harries 63

own demise. The assembly repeats its death in the form of a summary
in a "Repetitorium," or exercise book, like a penitent student. Marx
describes the assembly's demise as a kind of writing, of a rote, and per-
haps childish, kind. The Ghost of Hamlet famously reports the death of
King Hamlet; the assembly, unable to cope with the incarnation of the
spirit of the coup d'6tat, performs a dialectical reversal and makes
itself a ghost, delivering its own obituary notice not as an inspiration to
revenge but as a careful school assignment written to please the master.
In what comes closest to a theoretical description of the role of
ghosts in the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx writes:

One sees: all "idWes napoleoniennes" are ideas of the undeveloped

small holding in the freshness of its youth; for the small holding that
has outlived its day they are an absurdity. They are only the hallucina-
tions of its death struggle, words that are transformed into phrases,
spirits transformed into ghosts. But the parody of the empire ... was
necessary to free the mass of the French nation from the weight of tra-
dition and to work out in pure form the opposition between the state
power and society.68

In perhaps the best-known formulation from the Eighteenth Brumaire,

Marx writes: "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a
nightmare on the brain of the living."69 There, Marx argues that it is this
nightmare that inspires people to create something that has never been.
This creative effort, however, often takes its forms from history; this sei-
zure of the past degenerates into parody or farce. In Marx's discussion of
"idWes napolkoniennes," the parody of imperialism that follows the coup
d'6tat of Louis Napoleon becomes a liberating force. Having recognized
the incompatibility of Napoleonic ideas with the contemporary state of
society, it seems the mass of French society will begin to understand the
contradiction between the power of state and society. Indeed they will be
able to see this contradiction in its pure form.
Once more, purity is a preparation for a revolutionary dismantling of
oppressive conditions. It is clear, however, that there is nothing singular
about this purity. Purity here is a state of contradiction that suddenly
becomes easily recognizable. In the passage about the journey of the
revolution through purgatory that culminates in the praise of the mole,

68. Marx 130-31, 413.

69. Marx 15, 308.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
64 Homo Alludens

Marx writes that the revolution brings executive power to an end,

"reduces it to its purest expression, isolates it, sets it up against itself as
the sole target, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction
against it." Reduction to purity prepares for destruction. Attendant
upon such violent preparations will be the crowds of ghosts that accom-
pany historical parody. Similarly, in discussing the "parody of the
empire," he analyzes Napoleonic ideas and "words [Worte] that are
transformed into phrases [Phrasen], spirits [Geister] transformed into
ghosts [Gespenster]." Words and spirits, phrases and ghosts; the second
terms are among the "hallucinations of [the] death struggle" of Napole-
onic ideas. Marx here reserves the term "Geist" to characterize ideas
that belong to their time. It is as remnants of an archaic system, as sur-
viving expressions of a defunct stage of development, that "Geister"
become "Gespenster." One may usefully consider these phrases and
ghosts aspects of what Raymond Williams calls "residual" culture:

By 'residual' I mean that some experiences, meanings and values,

which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the domi-
nant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the resi-
due - cultural as well as social - of some previous social formation.71

The peculiar sort of politics practiced by Bonaparte may have exactly

its power and its appeal in achieving present domination in the name of
the residual. Bonaparte's phrases conjure ghosts of an outmoded agrar-
ian "social formation" and establish rule in their name, only to usher in
the triumphant capitalism of the Second Empire. Where the "Geist," or
spirit, at least has the virtue of being an expression of its culture, the
"Gespenst," or ghost, camouflages the operations of the dominant
group. The ghost, then, is a figure for a contradiction between a soci-
ety's archaic conception of itself and the actual dominant forces within
it. Marx's demonology, his supernatural lexicon, is, however, not sus-
ceptible to easy translation. To name a ghost is not to exorcise it.72

70. Marx 121,404.

71. Williams 40.
72. Thanks to Michael Levine, David Marshall, Jennifer Wicke, and Laurie Edel-
steir for thier help with this article.

This content downloaded from 193.145.118.251 on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:27:58 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms