Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. Henri Lefebvre

‘grey on grey’. This greyness has what one might call a privileged symbol and symptom: the death of art, an illusion of youth and human folly.³³ After youth and maturity, the third age brings the process to a close, in a final equilibrium.

      Unlike Hegel, Marx did not take as his principle and starting hypothesis the ‘real’, the accomplished, but rather the possible. He developed the reasons for revolutionary possibility and its entry into the real by overturning it. He thus sought to rationally establish faith in the possible. Like the Gallic cock that he celebrated in his youthful writings, he trumpeted the eternal dawn, the immortal youth of the Revolution. What in fact has been ‘realized’? The shadow, the very opposite of the possible proclaimed by Marx, and this with its own signboard, its own vocabulary. Nothing of what proclaimed its end has actually reached this. Not even the old philosophy! Nowhere has the working class conquered the status of political ‘subject’ (collective and revolutionary), carrying society beyond politics. Was Hegel right? Yes, but on all sides there are phenomena of disassociation to be seen, of corruption, of the rottenness of the centralized state; everywhere there is opposition, appeal, differences and decentralizations. Everywhere state structures are shaking and then reconstructed. And yet, if we can see in every part of the world a tendency towards what Marx proclaimed, nowhere has this tendency indicated anything but a poorly traced path, an uncertain horizon. Hence the immense disappointment already sensed by Marx himself: ‘Dixi et salvavi animam meam.’