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INTRODUCTION
9
historical structure of “production” of social relations the determinate conditions of the historical repetition of violence. At the same time, however, the anthropological thesis of essence (the alienation of essence) inexorably drives Marxism toward new absolutes, especially a new indeterminacy of history and nature—perhaps nothing but the two metaphysical names for the idea of structure between which the “materialist theory of history” never ceases to waver. The result is, in some sort, a “transcendental deduction” of revolutionary politics as the violent abolition of violence as such.13 We might say that the denegation of the self-destructive effects of revolutionary violence and their transposition into the terms of an antinomic eschatology are, paradoxically, all the more insistent the more determinate the conditions of oppressive violence are and the more sharply they are distinguished from the fantasy of the oppressors’ malign will or innate iniquity. Similar conclusions may be drawn from Marx’s other formula, the one that sums up the way “violence” and “law” are intertwined in the conditions of exploitation. Their close association, dating from the beginnings of “primitive accumulation” and the process of expropriating the producers (in “mud and blood,” in Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase), has been perpetuated throughout the political history of capital and its sway over social relations in the guise of the “industrial reserve army” (mass unemployment) and the “despotism of the factory system,” the two poles, as it were—the Charybdis and Scylla—of the proletarian condition. Marx never thought that capitalist domination was a functional process; more exactly, he shows throughout his work that capitalism simultaneously develops economic functionality and the excess of repression over the functional demands of the economy as one of the very conditions of its form: an excess of superexploitation over exploitation, without which there would be no exploitation; an excess of the class struggle (beginning with the dominant class’s preventive or repressive struggle14) over the state itself, without which there would be no state; an excess of “physical” violence over law, without which there would be no law; but also an excess of law, which codifies and legitimizes violence over “naked” violence.15 One possible consequence of such an analysis is that the “revolutionary class struggle” may appear as a liberation of/from violence (in every sense), considered as the latent “truth” of the forms of law themselves. At the limit, we again have the antinomic