|
subjected to ideology can never say for himself 'I am in ideology', he always requires another corpus of doxa in order to distinguish his own 'true' position from it.
The first example here is provided by none other than Plato: philosophical epistēmē versus the confused doxa of the crowd. What about Marx? Although he may appear to fall into this trap (is not the entire German Ideology based on the opposition of ideological chimera and the study of 'actual life'?), things get complicated in his mature critique of political economy. That is to say, why, precisely, does Marx choose the term fetishism in order to designate the 'theological whimsy' of the universe of commodities? What one should bear in mind here is that 'fetishism' is a religious term for (previous) 'false' idolatry as opposed to (present) true belief: for the Jews, the fetish is the Golden Calf; for a partisan of pure spirituality, fetishism designates 'primitive' superstition, the fear of ghosts and other spectral apparitions, and so on. And the point of Marx is that the commodity universe provides the necessary fetishistic supplement to the 'official' spirituality: it may well be that the 'official' ideology of our society is Christian spirituality, but its actual foundation is none the less the idolatry of the Golden Calf, money.
In short, Marx's point is that there is no spirit without spirits-ghosts, no 'pure' spirituality without the obscene spectre of 'spiritualized matter'. 25 The first to accomplish this step 'from spirit to spirits' in the guise of the critique of pure spiritual idealism, of its lifeless 'negative' nihilism, was F. W. J. Schelling, the crucial, unjustly neglected philosopher of German Idealism. In the dialogue Clara ( 1810), he drove a wedge into the simple complementary mirror-relationship between Inside and Outside, between Spirit and Body, between the ideal and the real element that together form the living totality of the Organism, by calling attention to the double surplus that 'sticks out'. On the one hand, there is the spiritual element of corporeality: the presence, in matter itself, of a non-material but physical element, of a subtle corpse, relatively independent of time and space, which provides the material base of our free will (animal magnetism, etc.); on the other hand, there is the corporeal element of spirituality: the materializations of the spirit in a kind of pseudo-stuff, in substanceless apparitions (ghosts, living dead). It is clear how these two surpluses render the logic of commodity fetishism and of the ISA: commodity fetishism involves the uncanny 'spiritualization' of the commodity-body, whereas the ISA materialize the spiritual, substanceless big Other of ideology.
In his recent book on Marx, Jacques Derrida brought into play the term 'spectre' in order to indicate this elusive pseudo-materiality that subverts the classic ontological oppositions of reality and illusion, and
-20- |
