The Arcades Project - Operi

holds for law and religion holds for culture even more. It would be absurd for us
to conceive of the classless society, its forms of existence, in the image of cultural
humanity. [N5,4]
""Our election cry must be: Reform of consciousness not through dogmas but
through the analysis of mystical consciousness that is unclear to itse]f whether it
appears in a religious or a political form. Then people will see that the world has
long possessed the dream of a thing-and that it only needs to possess the consciousness
of this thing in order really to possess it." K.arl Marx, Ver historische
Muterialismus: Die Frilhschriften, ed. Landshut and Mayer (Leipzig < 1932» vol.
1, pp. 226-227 (letter from Marx to Ruge; Kreuzenach, September 1843). 14
[N5a,1]
A reconciled humanity will take leave of its past-and one form of reconciliation
is gaiety. "The present German regime . . . , the nullity of the ancien regime
exhibited for all the world to see, ... is only the comedian of a world order whose
real heroes are dead. History is thorough, and passes through many stages when
she carries a worn·out form to burial. The last stage of a world-historical form is
its comedy. The gods of Greece, who had already been mortally wounded in the
Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, had to die yet again-this time a comic death-in
the dialogues of Lucian. Why does history follow this course? So that mankind
may take leave of its past gaily." Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus: Die
Friihschriflen, ed. Landshut and Mayer (Leipzig), vol. 1, pp. 268 ("Zur Kritik del'
Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie")." Surrealism is the death of the nineteenth century
in comedy. [N5a,2]
Marx (Marx und Engels nbe,. Feuerbach: Aus dent Nachlass, Marx-Engels Archiv,
vol. 1 [Frankfurt am Main ], p. 301): 'There is no history of politics, law,
science, etc., of art, religion, etc. '' l(, [N5a,3]
Die heilige Familie, on the subject of Bacon's materialism: '"Matter, surrounded
by a sensuous poetic glamor, seems to attract man's whole entity with winning
smiles."17 [NSa,4]
(.(.1 regret having treated in only a very incomplete manner those facts of daily
existence-food, clothing, shelter, family routines, civil law, recreation, social
relations-which have always been of prime concern in the life of the great majority
of individuals." Charles Seignohos, Histoire sincere de la nation franfSaise
(Paris, 1933), p. xi. [N5a,5]
Ad notam a formula of V;llery's: "What distinguishes a truly general phenomenon
is its fertility:'" [N5a,6]
Barbarism lurks in the very concept of culture-as the concept of a fu nd of values
which is considered independent not, indeed, of the production process in which