Marx and the philosophy of time
Peter Osborne

What is Marx’s contribution to the philosophy of time? Or, to put it another way, what has a temporal reading of Marx’s writings to contribute to the understanding of the philosophical aspects of his thought? How, for example, might it reconfigure the relationship between the historical, analytical and political dimensions of his work?

These are not merely, or even primarily, historical questions, but constructive and critical issues about the philosophical present: constructive, because with only a couple of notable – and notably partial – exceptions (Antonio Negri and Moishe Postone), the temporal-philosophical side of Marx’s thought has yet to be systematically disinterred; critical, because of the light such a construction promises to throw on a range of issues, not least the specific contemporaneity of Marx’s thought. This is a propitious time for such an investigation, for a number of reasons.

Conjuncture
First, there is an increasing awareness in the European philosophical tradition that – in its non-logicist variants – post-Kantian philosophy is first and foremost a philosophy of time. More specifically, it opposes time to being, most often via a range of quasi-‘subjective’ temporal forms. This is a stance most commonly associated with Heidegger (and more recently, once again, with Bergson), but it traverses the entire tradition, in different ways, from Hegel and Nietzsche, via Dilthey, Whitehead and Husserl, to Lukács and Benjamin, and on to Levinas, Ricoeur, Derrida and Deleuze – to name only the most prominent figures. Indeed, even the logicism of neo-Kantianism, the logico-linguisticism of analytical philosophy, and the mathematical neoclassicism of Badiou are marked by it, in so far as they were constituted, explicitly, as reactions against it. The place of Marx’s thought within the philosophy of time is thus, to a large extent, the key to the relationship of his thought to the modern European philosophical tradition more generally.

This tradition has long been conceived as essentially that of philosophies of the subject. The establishment of the priority of time over being both consummates the triumph of the principle of subjectivity and, in the very same act, throws that principle into doubt, by dissolving the boundaries of the subject into – or fracturing it by – time. The philosophy of the subject has thus come increasingly to appear, retrospectively, in large part, as a form of philosophical management of the disruptive force of time, and thereby, for some, as a kind of intellectual policing of insurgent singularities. This is the terrain on which the recent Deleuzean revival of a Bergsonian philosophy of time has entered into alliance with Negri’s post-Marxian philosophy of revolution.

This is a second reason for the timeliness of an investigation of the temporal dimension of Marx’s thought: for all Deleuze’s ‘Marxism’, Marx’s work nonetheless stands as the main polemical other to Deleuze’s neo-Bergsonism in the philosophy of time. This is because the ontological monism underlying Bergson’s account of temporality and multiplicity denies any ontological significance to the category of the social and hence any fundamental distinctiveness to historical time. Such a monism cannot sustain any philosophical concept of history.

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