Hermeneutics and Politics: Rereading the Political Unconscious

As Karl Marx (1978) famously put it in the eleventh of his "Theses on Feuerbach," "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." (p. 145). The urgency, as well as the truth of this statement, is undoubtedly as powerful today as when Marx first wrote it, but as a popular slogan frequently cited by radical thinkers and activists, Thesis 11 unfortunately has been rendered into a relatively simplistic dismissal of theory in favor of a somewhat anti-intellectual vision of praxis. Such is the danger of wisdom so phrased that it can fit on a bumper-sticker, a fate Marx himself likely never imagined for this trenchant observation. Marxism, after all, involves the dialectical unity of theory and practice, and Marx himself, of course, spent his life engaged in the critical analysis or interpretation of modern capitalist societies while also remaining committed to the movement devoted to changing the world. The crux of Thesis 11, in fact, lies not so much in the opposition between theory and practice, as in the connection Marx makes between interpreting the world and changing it. Interpretation, while not an end in itself, is absolutely critical to any project for imagining alternatives to and transforming the status quo. In this situation, hermeneutics inevitably takes on political and critical import. Arguably, it always bore such weight, but it has become more pressing in our time, perhaps, that the very act of interpretation is itself also a political act, one that is intimately connected to the project of critique.