Marx ante (y antes) de la literatura

This essay deals with Marx’s relation to literature. It seeks to give account of several Marxs: 1) the Marx who is obsessed with literature as we generally understand it, who everywhere evokes the literature of classical antiquity, the literature from the middle ages to the age of Goethe and the writings of Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Defoe, Balzac, to name only a few of his favorite references; 2) the Marx who so often used literature to analyze historical-political life —who used Balzac to analyze and condemn royalist politics, who mobilized Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to speak of economic processes that otherwise would remain obscure, and who used Cervantes’ Don Quixote to criticize the young Hegelians; 3) the Marx who, despite his recourse to literature, nevertheless tells us that literature as such does not exist, since it is inscribed within an unevenly determined system of socio-historical and political practices and relations of production —the Marx, in other words, whose materialist analyses renounce to the notion of literary work (of a work, that is, that would be solely literary), even as he helps us understand how something like an institution of literature emerges, historically, politically, and ideologically; and 4) the Marx who mourns literature, even as he writes it —who perhaps returns to literature most when he tells us it can never exist by itself, when he demonstrates that it is an essential element of every mode of representation, every technical media, and every technique of language. This is why I will argue that Marx’s interest in literature is perhaps most legible when he no longer speaks of what we call novels, poetry, fiction, and fables, but rather when he instead refers to the illusions, hallucinations, phantoms, virtualities, and simulacra that increasingly compose our everyday existence. We could even say that what makes literature literature is at the same time what prevents it from remaining simply literature, what makes it historical and political