On the Nature of Marx’s Things

Abstract

“It goes without saying that but little use can be made of Lucretius” [Es versteht sich, dass Lucretius nur wenig benutzt werden kann].1 So, by way of preface or prophylaxis, opens the fourth of Marx’s Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, composed around 1839 as Marx was preparing his doctoral dissertation. A long list of citations from De Rerum Natura (DRN) follows, and then Lucretius is put to use—as Plutarch’s antagonist, in the long battle over the Epicurean tradition. In these early, informal notes by a young dissertator the reception of Lucretius hangs in the balance; what Althusser refers to as an “underground current” of the materialism of the encounter surfaces and is soon, over the course of the next 15 years, rechanneled or resubmerged.2 An account of mediation at odds with the mechanics, the economics, of use presents itself here, to be translated, never entirely successfully, first into the great Hegelian lexicon that the young Marx and his preceptors were unfolding, then into the languages of political economy. What sorts of use can be made of a thing? In what respects is Lucretius something to be used?