Secondary literature 2018

Reading Marx

Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza

by Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda, Agon Hamza (2018)

→ Concept index for this source → Author profile

Synopsis

Reading Marx (Polity, 2018), co-authored by Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza, advances the argument that Marx can only be productively read today through a rigorous philosophical mediation — specifically through Hegel's dialectics and Lacanian theory — rather than through positivist science, Althusserian epistemology, or the humanist recovery of an unalienated essence. The book intervenes in three distinct but interlocking registers: Žižek mounts a defence of Hegelian-Marxist dialectical totality against object-oriented ontology and assemblage theory, arguing that universality is not a neutral container but the very antagonism immanent to every particular; Ruda reads Marx's early manuscripts and Capital through the Platonic cave allegory and Hegel's Logic, showing that capitalism's "reduction" of the worker to an animal is not a regression but a productive operation of surplus abstraction that naturalizes itself by concealing its own constructive work; and Hamza traces how Hegel's theory of abstract labour, automation, and the master/slave dialectic both anticipates and complicates Marx's critique of political economy, arguing against both humanist dis-alienation and Althusserian anti-Hegelianism that alienation is constitutive of labour rather than an external distortion. Together the three essays resist encyclopaedic comprehensiveness in favour of what the introduction calls "partial, particular, or concrete" readings that excavate repressed or unexpected universal dimensions in seemingly marginal Marxian passages. The book's overarching wager is that capitalism's contradictions become fully visible only at the moment of capitalism's total realisation, making a return to Marx — read philosophically, not sociologically — politically urgent precisely now, when the dominant doxa presents capitalism as without exterior and without alternative.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes Reading Marx within the Lacanian-Marxist corpus is its deployment of Lacanian concepts not as an interpretive overlay applied to Marx from outside but as the structural logic that Marx's own texts already enact, once read through Hegel with sufficient rigour. Where most Lacano-Marxist work (including much of Žižek's own earlier output) tends to move from a given Lacanian concept outward to social critique, this book reverses the vector: the concepts of suture, objet a, sexuation, jouissance, and the barred subject are shown to be necessitated by the inner tensions of the Marxian corpus itself — by the contradictions in political economy's theory of the worker, by the dialectic of mechanism and chemism in Capital, by the way commodity fetishism structurally mirrors the cave allegory. Ruda's chapter in particular develops a genuinely novel Hegelian-Lacanian reading of capitalist abstraction as "surplus abstraction" — an operation that particularizes the particular, essentializes one bodily function, and renders the resulting entity simultaneously less than animal and the condition of possibility for political economy's entire self-naturalisation — a move that has no precise parallel in the existing literature.

The book also makes a distinctive intervention against the contemporary theoretical field of object-oriented ontology and new materialism. By reading OOO's "flat ontology" through the lens of Lacanian sexuation formulae, Žižek shows that the "democracy of objects" is only possible from the standpoint of the barred subject — the very subject that OOO declares superfluous. This reframing of the OOO debate as a symptomatic disavowal of antagonism and universality is more systematically worked out here than elsewhere in the corpus. Finally, Hamza's engagement with Moishe Postone's historicist reading of dialectics — conceding Postone's insight that dialectics is co-extensive with capitalism while insisting that its retroactive logic is transhistorical — produces a carefully argued position on the Hegel-Marx relation that goes beyond the usual alternatives of Althusserian rupture and continuist readings.

Main themes

Philosophical reading of Marx against both positivism and humanist Marxism
Dialectical totality as antagonism rather than organic wholeness
Capitalism's self-naturalisation through surplus abstraction and fetishism
The Platonic cave allegory as the structural template for ideology critique
Reduction of the worker to animality as a productive operation, not a regression
Hegel's theory of abstract labour, mechanism, and chemism as anticipation of and resource for Marx
Alienation as constitutive of labour, not an external distortion to be overcome
Object-oriented ontology and assemblage theory as symptomatic disavowal of universality and subject
Retroactive and transhistorical logic of dialectics against Postone's historicism
Lacanian subjectivity (suture, objet a, sexuation) as the structure of social antagonism

Chapter outline

Unexpected Reunions (Introduction) — p.1-16
Marx Reads Object-Oriented Ontology (Chapter 1, Slavoj Žižek) — p.17-61
Marx in the Cave (Chapter 2, Frank Ruda) — p.62-100
Imprinting Negativity: Hegel Reads Marx (Chapter 3, Agon Hamza) — p.101-139
To Resume (and not Conclude) — p.140-168

Chapter summaries

Unexpected Reunions (Introduction) (p.1-16)

The co-authored introduction situates the project within what the authors describe as a peculiar historical conjuncture: the 150th anniversary of Capital, the collapse of actually-existing socialism, and the closure of political imagination under global capitalism. The key claim is modal: historical impossibilities are not ontological but contingent, determined by specific articulations of historical conditions, and Marxism has repeatedly converted such impossibilities into new possibilities. But the authors refuse the optimistic corollary — that capitalism is its own gravedigger — insisting that its immanent limit is not socialism but barbarism, making any reliance on capitalism's internal dynamics for emancipation untenable.

The introduction explicitly distinguishes the book from Althusser's Reading Capital: it is neither the product of a university seminar nor a claim to a new scientific terrain. Instead, the approach is declared partial, engaged, and non-encyclopaedic — each chapter performing a 'concrete reading' that attempts to produce something unexpected from within Marx, drawing out repressed or obscured universal dimensions from apparently marginal passages. The framing metaphor is Ernst Bloch and Kafka's favourite story by J.P. Hebel, 'Unexpected Reunion,' in which the perfectly preserved corpse of a young miner is recognised by his aged bride-to-be fifty years after his death: the book aspires to that quality of reunion with Marx — not a burial, not a canonisation, but a recognition across historical distance that something has been perfectly preserved and remains to be interred properly, or rather, put back to work.

Key concepts: Ideology, Dialectics, Universality, Immanent Critique, Alienation, Subject Notable examples: J.P. Hebel, 'Unexpected Reunion'; Paris Commune; Arab Spring

Marx Reads Object-Oriented Ontology (Chapter 1, Slavoj Žižek) (p.17-61)

Žižek opens by proposing an anachronistic 'imagined reading': how would Marx respond to object-oriented ontology (OOO), assemblage theory, and new materialism — the latest theoretical formations whose implicit target, he argues, is the specter of Marxism? He focuses on Graham Harman as the most philosophically rigorous OOO thinker, and uses Harman's 'immaterialism' (the thesis that objects pre-exist their interactions) as an unlikely ally against the pure-flux relationism of actor-network theory. The chapter's first major move is to situate the five ontological categories — mechanism, organism, structure, totality, assemblage — on a non-flat hierarchy: totality is not simply another category alongside assemblage but is differential structure 'thought to the end,' that is, including subjectivity and constitutive antagonism. This immediately reframes the OOO/Marxism debate: the real opposition is not between flat assemblage and organic Whole, but between a theory that grasps antagonism as the principle of structuration and one that systematically avoids it.

The chapter's second movement develops Žižek's claim that 'dialectical materialism is paradoxically immaterialist': every actually existing material interaction must be sustained by a virtual background (quantum vacuum fluctuations, the Lacanian big Other, normative structures), and purely virtual entities — though they have no substantial existence of their own — are nonetheless real agents irreducible to any ensemble of material practices. The concept of 'diagram' (drawn from DeLanda/Deleuze) is critically refined: the surplus of identity over interaction is not a stable inner core but the surplus of virtual potentiality, and within this virtual space one must distinguish contingent non-actualisations from essentially impossible ones — the 'impossible-real' that functions as the barred One and triggers incessant activity. This logic is applied politically: capitalism's particular malfunctions are structurally necessary rather than accidental symptoms amenable to reform.

The chapter then addresses universality and postcolonial 'fluid ontology' frameworks directly. Against the vision of a world of multiple creative differences contributing to a united whole, Žižek argues that universality is not a neutral container for particular cultural identities but the antagonism inscribed within each of them as their inner contradiction. Drawing on the Lacanian concept of jouissance, he defines a 'way of life' as the way a community organises its enjoyment — which is why integration provokes not merely cultural resistance but libidinal panic. Totality is then redefined in Hegelian-Lacanian terms: not a seamless Whole but a 'Whole plus its symptoms,' where antagonism is not what disrupts the totality but what holds it together. The point of suture — where the lack that defines a structure is reflexively inscribed into it as a positive determination — is simultaneously the point of subjectivisation. The chapter concludes by arguing, against OOO's 'democracy of objects,' that a flat inhuman view of assemblages is only possible from the standpoint of the barred subject: the very subject that OOO has declared obsolete.

Key concepts: Dialectics, Universality, Totality, Antagonism, Suture, Jouissance, Symbolic Order, Real, Subject, Sexuation Notable examples: Graham Harman and OOO; Ramon Zurcher's The Strange Little Cat; Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio; Tibet/China case; Quantum entanglement (SPDC); Jorge Luis Borges's classification of dogs

Marx in the Cave (Chapter 2, Frank Ruda) (p.62-100)

Ruda's chapter opens with the thesis that emancipatory thought is structurally indebted to Plato's cave allegory — that the history of critical philosophy is a series of footnotes to the problem Plato poses. The crucial interpretive move is Ruda's reading of Socrates' own formulation: to counter mythical embeddedness, one must 'mythologise the myth' (en mythō mythologountes), producing a counter-myth or emancipatory fiction of second degree. Emancipation has the structure of a fiction, and capitalism functions as a modern cave whose ideological enchainment is not an epistemological error (correctable by better theory) but a structural feature of everyday practical life. Ruda traces this structure through Descartes, Rousseau, Marx, and Badiou, before arguing that Marx's reading of political economy's categories as the constitutive 'shadows' of capitalist social reality — not misrepresentations of a pre-given objective reality, but generators of a reality of their own — is precisely a cave-critique that avoids both cynical detachment and naïve return to 'unalienated' concrete life.

The chapter's central philosophical contribution is the theory of 'surplus abstraction.' Ruda reads Marx's claim that political economy knows the worker 'only as a beast of burden' (from the 1843/44 manuscripts) not as humanist complaint but as a structural analysis: capitalism's reduction of the worker to an animal is not regressive but productive — capitalism produces the very nature it imposes. The mechanism is abstraction, which does not strip away particular features to reveal an essence but rather essentialises one particular aspect of the particular, hypostatising it into the sole universal determination of its bearer. This 'surplus abstraction' (abstraction squared: an abstraction that posits itself as nature) generates the figure of the 'worker-animal' — an entity that is actually less than an animal, the 'un-animal' (Untier), since animals do not know their limits while the worker's capacity for limitless self-reduction is specifically human.

Ruda elaborates this through the Hegelian-Lacanian topology of sense-certainty: the worker under surplus abstraction becomes a 'divided animal' (dividual), fragmented into isolated bodily functions — now a stomach, now a penis, now a throat — corresponding precisely to the contradictions of Hegel's 'sense-certainty' (the 'now' that is always already past). The worker's freedom is structurally identified with the passing 'now' of leisure — always already in the past when it arrives — so that capitalism generates a peculiar 'economy of time' in which freedom is the permanently vanishing delay of the return to labour. The chapter then develops the concept of habit (second nature) through Hegel's anthropology, showing that mechanism — unconscious repetition — is the precondition of freedom, but capitalism colonises this mechanism so thoroughly that the precondition becomes the totality, reducing the subject to a 'dead' second nature. The final section reads Hegel's mechanism/chemism dialectic from the Science of Logic to show that capitalism is a composite of external mechanical causality and immanent chemical necessity, a 'realm of shadows' in which no genuine subject or world can exist — and that the only path out is a materialist appropriation of Hegel's logic of shadows that passes back through abstraction to a Real immanent to the shadows themselves.

Key concepts: Ideology, Abstract, Alienation, Fetish, Appearance, Sublation, Negation, Real, Jouissance, Surplus-jouissance Notable examples: Plato's cave allegory; Marx's 1843/44 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts; Hegel's Science of Logic (mechanism and chemism); Hegel's Anthropology (habit and second nature); Badiou on body/individuality; Freud on infantile sexuality

Imprinting Negativity: Hegel Reads Marx (Chapter 3, Agon Hamza) (p.101-139)

Hamza opens by locating the philosophical stakes: capitalism generates antagonisms it cannot resolve, and the question is whether its end will also be the end of the world. Against both orthodox Marxist teleology and post-Marxist resignation, Hamza follows Žižek's enumeration of the 'four riders of apocalypse' (ecological catastrophe, intellectual property, biogenetics, new forms of apartheid/exclusion) to argue that communism retains urgency only if these antagonisms are philosophically located within historical reality. The chapter then rehabilitates Hegel's dictum 'the rational is actual' against its conservative misreading: Hegel is arguing not for reconciliation with the present but for the immanence of contingency and decay within actuality — a formulation that makes immanent critique (systems criticising themselves from within rather than from an exterior standpoint) the only adequate form of critique. This is precisely why Marx, as a materialist, could only adopt the Hegelian method.

Hamza's engagement with Moishe Postone is the chapter's philosophical centrepiece. Postone's historicist thesis — that dialectics is co-extensive with capitalism, arises with commodity production, and will disappear with it — is accepted as a partial insight but criticised for failing to grasp the transhistorical retroactive logic of the dialectic. Against Postone, Hamza argues that the dialectical method does not unfold things in the order of their historical appearance; rather, the present 'creates' its own past retroactively, as Marx famously formulates in the Grundrisse (human anatomy contains the key to the anatomy of the ape). Capital functions as Hegelian Subject-Substance: its value is nominally produced in production but only actualised through the completed circuit of circulation, exemplifying the retroactive structure of Hegelian totality.

The chapter then mounts a defence of Hegel against the standard Althusserian-French critique of idealist abstraction. Hamza argues that Hegel operates as a 'contemplative materialist' whose method of inquiry reconstructs reality in thought rather than deriving concrete from pure concept, and that Hegel's system contains immanent antagonisms — civil society, the rabble, property — that exceed his conscious theoretical intentions and make him a resource for communist theory. The discussion of Hegel's theory of abstract labour in the Philosophy of Right (and System of Ethical Life) shows how abstraction mechanises and alienates labour, ultimately making the worker the appendage of the machine — a move that Marx's analysis of automation in the Grundrisse and Capital explicitly inherits. Finally, revisiting the master/slave dialectic, Hamza argues that its 'resolution' is not the slave's positive self-recognition in products but a deepened alienation: mastery passes from the lord to labour itself, so that emancipation cannot mean reappropriation of alienated substance. Against the humanist-Marxist 'dis-alienation' thesis of the early manuscripts, Hamza insists, following the Hegelian reading, that reconciliation means accepting the subject's constitutive loss of control over its own production — a position he aligns with Lacanian subjectivity rather than with any ontology of generic being.

Key concepts: Dialectics, Alienation, Abstract, Contradiction, Sublation, Universality, Master Signifier, Symbolic Order, Negation, Totality Notable examples: Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination; Hegel, Philosophy of Right (abstract labour); Hegel, System of Ethical Life; Marx, Grundrisse (human anatomy/ape anatomy); Marx, Capital (commodity fetishism); Žižek's 'four riders of apocalypse'

To Resume (and not Conclude) (p.140-168)

The co-authored conclusion sketches consequences of the three readings rather than synthesising them into a unified thesis, deliberately refusing the form of a conclusion in favour of 'sketches for work that still needs to be done.' Three nodes stand out. First, reading Marx 'in reverse' — imagining Marx answering his contemporary critics rather than defending him from within his own historical moment — is proposed as the proper method for contemporising his critique, grounded in the Hegelian insight that a notion's limits and inconsistencies become visible only at the moment of its full realisation. Since capitalism now faces no exterior threat, its contradictions emerge purely from within, making internal critique both more necessary and more visible.

Second, the conclusion returns to OOO's disavowal of the subject, arguing that by identifying the human with just another object, OOO loses what Hegel, psychoanalysis, and Descartes all preserved: the 'inhuman core of subjectivity' that is not an agent among others but a gesture of passivisation — constitutive of but excluded from any structure. Third, the 'master/volunteer' distinction is introduced as a corrective to both workerist Marxism and OOO: liberation requires a master-function that constitutes volunteers as such, a formulation that aligns with Lacan's theory of the master signifier as the condition of possibility for collective subjectivation. The conclusion thus reaffirms that a communist politics today requires both the Hegelian-Marxist theory of labour as negativity and the Lacanian theory of the subject as structurally constituted through exclusion.

Key concepts: Dialectics, Subject, Master Signifier, Universality, Alienation, Contradiction Notable examples: OOO critique revisited; Descartes on the cogito; Hegel and psychoanalysis on the inhuman core of subjectivity

Main interlocutors

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel, Science of Logic
Hegel, Philosophy of Right
Hegel, System of Ethical Life
Marx, Capital
Marx, Grundrisse
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
Marx, Communist Manifesto
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination
Louis Althusser, For Marx
Louis Althusser, Reading Capital
Plato, Republic
Lacan, Seminar XX
Graham Harman (OOO)
Alain Badiou
Fredric Jameson
Michael Heinrich
Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth
Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity
Gilles Deleuze
Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

Position in the corpus

Reading Marx occupies an unusual position in the Lacanian-secondary corpus as a collaborative volume that fuses three quite distinct philosophical styles — Žižek's dialectical-materialist ontology, Ruda's phenomenological close-reading of abstraction, and Hamza's history-of-philosophy approach to the Hegel-Marx relation — under a shared commitment to philosophical rigour over sociological or political-economic analysis. It should be read after Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Parallax View, both of which establish the Hegelian-Lacanian framework that is here applied more narrowly and technically to Marx. It is also productively read alongside Žižek's Living in the End Times (cited within) and Ruda's Hegel's Rabble (not cited but closely related) for the theory of the excluded particular as the bearer of universality. For readers approaching from the Lacanian-theory side, familiarity with Seminar XX (on sexuation) and with Miller's work on suture is necessary to follow Žižek's argument in Chapter 1.\n\nWithin the broader landscape of Hegel-Marx scholarship, the book's most distinctive neighbour is Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination, which it explicitly engages, accepts in part, and then argues against on the question of whether the dialectic has a transhistorical retroactive logic. It diverges from Althusserian structuralist Marxism (critiqued as 'economist deviation' and as suffering from 'organised allergy against Hegel') and from humanist-Marxist readings of alienation (critiqued for treating alienation as an external distortion rather than constitutive of labour). Readers seeking a more systematic Lacanian-Marxist political theory should follow this book with Žižek's Less Than Nothing for the full elaboration of the Hegelian dialectic, and with Badiou's Logics of Worlds for the competing account of the subject of emancipation that the book implicitly contests.