Umweg, or The Detour: On Marx's Theory of Radical Time

Abstract

The idea of time since the Iranian Zurvanists has been central to the history of philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, each had a rigorous theory of time. At a surface level it seems Marx too ought to have had a theory of time in his materialist conception of history. Time can only be postulated as diachronic time: the time of the physical world, or the world of nature in general. This is the time inherent in the idea of natural history. When Louis Althusser said that Marx discovered the continent of history, it can also be said that he discovered the multiple ideas of time. For besides diachronic time Marx also talks of frozen time. This frozen time is the manifestation of the socially necessary time taken to produce commodities. It is similar to Freud's neurotic eternal recurrence of the self-same and Walter Benjamin's ‘abstract homogeneous time’. It can also be called ‘phantom time’. Just as phantom time is central to Marx, so too is the idea of the phantom or the spectre. One now recalls Lukács's History and Class Consciousness which put the notion of the reification of consciousness at the centre stage of Marxism and the Freudo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School's reading of the ideological superstructure as the repressed unconscious so as to bring out the philosophical meanings in Marx's spectrology. After all one has to understand Marx's writing of the superstructure as the estranged mind (entfremdete Geist). In the meantime 1991 happened and the Soviet bloc of nations disappeared from the face of the world. Socialism, so the imperialists cried out, is dead. Long live liberal democracy and the clash of civilizations! Now Umweg implies a detour, a detour that has occurred since the early 1990s. This Umweg leads to spectres, the most important, as Derrida highlighted, is the problem of Hamlet's encounter with the ghost of his murdered father. Now Hamlet (politically speaking) is liberal democracy. And like liberal democracy, Hamlet recalls his earlier incarnation, God itself, the blunderer creator God who after creation feigns ignorance and existential helplessness—‘To be, or not to be … ’. Yet liberal democracy besides being an existentialist Hamlet becomes a prophet who preaches the biblical end of history. Only the spectre of Hamlet is allowed to walk the nights of the capitalist mode of production. But to the great dismay of the imperialists Marx is also noticed walking the same nights. The owl of the revolution is heard hooting in this dark night. ‘Good night sweet prince’, Horatio's words have turned to, ‘Good morning sweet prince’. Marx murdered by unfortunate fortune was buried. But his spectre has risen up. Like that of Hamlet's father. And like that of Hamlet. 1991 has given way to 1917.