From Marx to Heidegger: Oscar del Barco and the crisis of Marxism

Bruno Bosteels

doi:10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.v6.1.021

Abstract

This article traces the path from Marx to Heidegger along which the Argentine philosopher Oscar del Barco responded to the crisis of Marxism. Interrogating Heidegger’s own suggestion of a ‘fruitful dialogue’ with Marx’s thinking of history and alienation, Del Barco gradually moved to a critique of Marxism as being part and parcel of the twice millenarian tradition of Western metaphysics. If, in an earlier collection such as El otro Marx, he still believed in the possibility of retrieving the ‘other side’ of capitalist reason in the margins of Marx’s texts, starting in the collection El abandono de las palabras this hope gives way to a mystical or messianic expectation to welcome the sheer ‘there is’ of being through an attitude of non-doing that would be neither nihilist nor conformist. In this sense Del Barco’s itinerary can be considered paradigmatic of the way in which a whole school of radical theory and philosophy responded to the crisis of Marxism as part of a much vaster, epochal or civilisational crisis of reason and technology in the West.

Highlights

Sometimes behind the superficial appearance of a simple change in intellectual fashions there lurks a much more profound transformation, rooted in vast social, cultural and political displacements
This article traces the path from Marx to Heidegger along which the Argentine philosopher Oscar del Barco responded to the crisis of Marxism
This is the case of the fate of references to Marx after the most recent in a long series of crises in the chronicle of Marxism’s foretold death, the one that Louis Althusser forcefully declared at the conference of 1977 in Venice organised by the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto on the subject of ‘post-revolutionary society’: ‘We must not be afraid to use the phrase: it is clear from many signs that today Marxism is once again in crisis, and that this crisis is an open one.’[1]. In Latin America, to be sure, we need not wait for Althusser’s oracular word to become aware of the fact that Marxism was at last, or once again, in crisis

Summary

Introduction

Sometimes behind the superficial appearance of a simple change in intellectual fashions there lurks a much more profound transformation, rooted in vast social, cultural and political displacements.

Results

Conclusion