Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 3
Gans as an Assimilated Form of Thought
Gans is barely present in Marx’s published writings. Anyone who reads only the printed works would never guess that here stands the most important academic teacher — the one who taught Hegel’s philosophy of right with greater effect than Hegel himself, who methodically pushed further the passage on the rabble where Hegel hesitated, and who coined a formula about class antagonisms that recurs in the Communist Manifesto.
The silence has the same reason as the silence about Hegel. What Marx takes from the lectures is not a doctrine one could cite, but a procedure. A procedure is not cited, it is applied. A method that has truly been absorbed no longer needs to be named as a method; it is at work in the execution of the matter itself, and it is there — not in the bibliography — that it is to be recognized.
This also indicates how Marx’s relation to Hegel should be described, once one sets aside the polemical self-presentation. It is neither a refutation nor a succession. It is what Hegel calls sublation [Aufhebung, Hegel’s dialectical triad of negation, preservation, and elevation]: passed through and retained, without what has been passed through still appearing as an object in its own right. Someone who has learned a language no longer talks about its grammar. That he has learned it shows in how he speaks.
For the use at stake here, a rule of reading follows from this. Where Marx distances himself from Hegel, one must first ask whether the distancing concerns a matter or a self-description. And where he appears to manage without Hegel, one must ask what means he is working with there. Both questions lead to the same place: to what the text does, as distinct from what it says about itself.