Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 16 页

There are two outcomes which emerge from this practical materialism, one explicit and one implicit, each relying on the other and constituting a tension in relation to the other. First, as an explicit epistemological critique of an epistemological discourse, Marx’s Theses actively dialecticise the subject-object relation, such that sensuous human activity destabilises any selfsufficient barrier between the subject and the object, or between the ‘knower’ and the ‘known’. It is in this context that Wal Suchting contends that subject and object are not pre-constituted before practice, but rather ‘constituted within’ it.¹⁵ Second, Marx’s speculative redefinition of the subject as practice generates a (still implicit and underdetermined) claim on behalf of the ontological basis of this epistemological discourse. In this regard, the subject and the object, be they defined as the representative capacity of the human [Gemüt]¹⁶ and that which stands against it [Gegenstand], or dialectically rendered as sensuous activity on either pole, become in Marx epistemological derivations of an ontologically basic practice. In his transformation of a distinctly epistemological problematic, Marx enables the creation of a concept of practice which moves dialectically and unevenly between epistemology and ontology. If this concept grounds the subject-object relation of modern epistemology, the ‘is’ and the ‘practice’ within Balibar’s formulation ‘the subject is practice’ not only function as the copula and the predicate of a philosophical proposition, but, after Hegel, represent dialectical moments of a speculative absolute identity which is not a substantial but rather, as we will now see, a relational ontology.

¹³ Praxis implicitly stands in as the meaning of ‘practice’ in the Theses. Marx never outlines a concept of ‘practice’ as epistemologically or ontologically distinct from praxis, in the Theses or elsewhere, but it is possible to suggest that the movement from an ontology of praxis to an ontology of production – that is, the movement from the Theses to The German Ideology – marks the development of a historicalontological concept of practice within which the differentiation of practice from praxis, and the inseparability of praxis and poiêsis, is established. After The German Ideology, practice is not just ontologically basic to the subject-object relation of modern epistemology, as is offered by the Theses, but historically-ontologically basic to the praxis-poiêsis relation as well. It is Marx’s specification of practice as labour, as the social production of the means of life, that secures the removal of the separation between praxis and poiêsis.

¹⁴ Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, 25.

¹⁵ W.A. Suchting, Marx and Philosophy: Three Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986), 57. ¹⁶ Gemüt is a notoriously difficult concept to translate. In Kant, as elsewhere, it signifies the human mind, soul, consciousness, spirit, disposition and body. What is evident is that Gemüt is a concept that exceeds the summation of its constituent parts, including the human [Mensch] and the understanding [Verstand]. ‘The representative capacity of the human’ is a clunky placeholder, but preferable to reductive and exclusive translations such as ‘the mind’.

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