In many respects, the 1960s constituted a great divide among the left intellectuals. On one side, many have portrayed the events of the last half of that decade in somber terms, as a warning that an entire younger generation had, from the perspective of socialist orthodoxy, lost its affiliation to the traditions of the workers’ movements. For others, 60s radicalism proved the futility of utopian ideas and more generally posed a threat to the achievements of the Enlightenment. But for a third tendency, especially many who were part of the heady days of the Paris (and the Prague) Spring, 1968, what Ernst Bloch called the ‘concrete utopia’ seemed at hand [1]. Even when the promise of a new morning had been betrayed by Communist bureaucrats or, in Prague, Soviet tanks, 1968 transformed the meaning of the object as well as the processes of revolutionary change.

In reply to the perennial cry of the labor movement for social justice, a new educated ‘socialized’ worker [2] (or, in more orthodox formulations, a new middle class) estranged from technocratic, authoritarian society, called for ‘all power to the imagination’ and, more soberly, for self-management of all significant social institutions. The last two years of the ’60s were marked by breakthroughs in thought as well as action which sent tremors through the corridors of power in the East as much as the West. Suddenly politics was no longer concerned with making room for the marginal and the excluded within the framework of the prevailing orders but of creating new social arrangements, the shape of which remained undetermined by the past precisely because the revolution had refused to play by the old rules of protest and confrontation. Rather it groped for new collective forms for the future that would be prefigured in the present - neither trade unions seeking redress without altering the nature of power, nor the old Bolshevik revolution which replaced one dictatorship with another, or the rule by one class by the rule by another.

The generation of 1968 sought liberation from work rather than celebrating its redemptive features, were interested in fashioning utopias rather than ‘realistic’ alternatives, and disdained power rather than contesting it. In Simmel’s terms it privileged ‘life’ over ‘forms’ and therefore tended to relentless critique of practically everything that preceded it [3]. Marxism, still the echt revolutionary doctrine throughout most of the immediate post-war period, did not escape the withering barbs of a movement that was inspired more by millenarian and anarchist impulses than by socialism. For if the future was to be made in the present, but not according to a predestined script, its forms could not be predetermined. Any doctrine that fixed definite forms of social relationships in advance constituted nothing less than a shackle on social agents.

‘1968’ was an overdetermined signifier that called into question all hierarchical authority even when new forms were yet unborn. The interregnum was unsettling because the communards were accustomed to following a set of rules which they, themselves, were in the process of overturning. By their side at the Paris barricades the independent communist left never tired of reminding their anarchic comrades that, without institutional forms such as a party, the movement would be defeated. Needless to say, many of the younger student revolutionaries became quickly disillusioned after the first victories against the established powers were overwhelmed by the combined forces of the state and the official left. Having failed to transform life without the benefits or burdens of institutions of revolutionary power, a fraction of these intellectuals discovered the previously discredited liberal doctrine [4]. However, others drew different conclusions from the events.

The second major tendency, closely identified with academic discourse, fashioned a radical post-marxism which, however, remained hostile to liberal politics. The leading French figures of this movement — Derrida, Lyotard, and above all Deleuze and Foucault — retained the geist of best traditions of marxism (the search for social and political agents, the insistence upon the specificity of historical forms, their refusal to accommodate to the existing order despite attacks from the official left and so forth). But their key categories were no longer derived from the marxist tradition, not even Marx himself, but from Nietzsche and Heidegger, both of whom had been excoriated by marxist critics (notably Georg Lukacs) as representatives of irrationalist tendencies that fed fascist and other rightist ideologies [5].

‘Post-structuralist’ theory does depart from the quest for certainty that marks scientificity. It challenges all of the givens of realist epistemology, and both analytic and dialectical logic as the sure foundations of apodictic, universally valid knowledge. Derrida rejects logocentricity and Foucault insists that all knowledge is local, all intellectuals specific. Lyotard calls this deconstruction of the antinomies of western philosophy part of the post-modern condition, the other side of which is that the aesthetic distinction between high and low culture is sundered [6].
The small industry that has arisen in Anglo-American countries in the wake of the dissemination of this rich body of work has, given its academic location, ignored if not remained ignorant of all but the specifically intellectual context that produced this outpouring. Neither the hegemony of the post-war Communist Party of France among intellectuals nor the dominance of its particular version of marxism (which, if possible, was a slightly more dogmatic version of Soviet marxism) rates more than a footnote in most of the many accounts of this ‘revolution’ in social and cultural thought. But the breakup of the PCF’s intellectual and moral leadership on the left in the 1960s resulted in the demise of French marxism in proportion to the demise of its most articulate gatekeeper.

Jean-Marie Vincent is among the very few independent intellectuals of this generation to retain a strong affiliation to Marx, if not the tradition he unwittingly inspired, without ignoring the powerful contributions among the radical poststructuralist and postmodern writers who spurn Marx and his accolytes. Drawing from the marxist iconoclasts — particularly Ernst Bloch and the Frankfurt school — themselves inspired by Nietzsche, he nevertheless has forged a unique voice. Although aware of the importance of historical scepticism learned from Nietzsche, he possesses a strong sense of a living past not unlike that of Walter Benjamin for whom the past lives in the present insofar as its tasks remain unfulfilled [7]. From Bloch he draws the powerful strains of a secular spirituality ; with the Frankfurt school, the critique of science and technology as ideology from which marxist ‘science’ is by no means exempt and its understanding of the centrality of culture in the constitution of political constraints and possibilities.

From Marx above all, Vincent grasps the towering idea that production, values, labor and the whole apparatus of bourgeois domination which is hinged to these categories, must be surpassed rather than preserved in the process of social transformation. That is, although standing on Marx’s shoulders while fighting his orthodox interpreters, Vincent is also moving beyond Marx in some crucial respects. For example, the dialectical contradiction between the forces and relations of production, Marx’s core category of social transformation, will not, in Vincent’s reading, lead to a resolution in which labor remains at the center of the new social world, but is displaced to a necessary, but clearly subordinate aspect of life.

During the last years of the 1970s when it had already become crystal clear — even to the diehards — that the major political movements of the 1960s had in most respects definitively ended (or at least entered a period of prolonged eclipse), my colleague, the critic Peter Clecak, remarked in a private conversation that perhaps the ’60s influence would prove most enduring on our culture. Twenty years after the end of that era, this judgement appears eminently sound. For even as the political weight of the various lefts — old and new — have been severely reduced, conservatives have discovered in the cultural shifts of that time, both a ready political target and a seemingly intractable opponent. In the United States and the United Kingdom rightist governments wage unrelenting and often unsuccessful wars on the crucial cultural gains : abortion rights and other aspects of sexual freedom, particularly gay and lesbian rights ; the demand for racial justice, both in its economic aspects and the growing demand by blacks and ethnic minorities for autonomous cultural identity, particularly in schools.

In the West, workers movements, once the undisputed center of the opposition, have, with a few exceptions, suffered slow decline. In the countries of advanced capitalism, the once powerful labor, socialist and communist movements still provide one of the crucial arenas for contesting capitalist hegemony, but, except for Germany and Sweden, the parties and the labor movements have lost much of their will even where their institutions are still formidable, as in the United States and United Kingdom.

One of the crucial markers of postmodernism is its refusals : of universal values, fixed intellectual foundations upon which transhistorical systems of thought (and feeling) are constructed and aesthetic standards against which to measure the new. It is upon these refusals that new modes of thought and feeling and varieties of new political forms are arising. While critical of some of the claims of postmodernism, especially the version that eschews anything that smacks even remotely of historical understanding, Vincent is among the thinkers of the postmodern. Not that this characterization would suit him or self-proclaimed postmodernists to whom he might appear much too appreciative of the achievements of modernism, especially Marx’s social theory. Rather, his marxism depends on a reading of historical materialism that sees it, not as a finished doctrine, as an unfinished project whose subject is an indeterminate human agency.

For Vincent it is precisely the question of how humans can change their world that is rendered most problematic in Marx’s later work. Having constructed capitalism as a system in which productive forces (science and technology congealed in dead human labor) seem to dominate living labour, that is, appear to overwhelm the working class as a historical agent by its domination over nature, the Marx of the three volumes of Capital seems to claim that capitalism will fall of its own inner contradictions or it will not fall at all. From these remonstrations arose the binaries of twentieth-century marxism : automatic marxism according to which socialism as the determinate negation of capitalism was the inevitable consequence of these internal, but largely extra-human contradictions ; and voluntarism, the ‘marxist’ doctrine that argued that once the basic fissures of capital accumulation are given, politics is everything.

Vincent argues that Marx’s apparently relentless description of the domination of the worker by these reified forces of production was above all critical. Far from holding to the views of his followers, Capital should be read as the view of the system from within, that is, from the epistemological space of capital itself. From this partial view followed the tendency of the marxist tradition, in Vincent’s words ‘to engage itself heavily in the social forms of the same historically situated world that it intends to supersede or destroy’. Thus, ensconced in the bourgeois world, orthodox marxism and indeed the workers’ movement are attached to Victorian conceptions, particularly ‘the very idea of liberation of society through labor’. The labor movement has constructed a veritable ‘cult of labor’ that has manifested itself in Communist countries and parties into a ‘theology’, the most recent version of which is the ‘scientific and technological’ revolution which social democrats as much as communists believe is the key to progress.

In one of his most powerful and provocative readings, Vincent explicates a Marx who problematizes labor, science and technology rather than celebrating them. It is true that Marx envisioned socialism to be the key to the full development of human productive forces, namely the forms of concrete labor as opposed to capital’s drive to render labor abstract so that it can be exchanged and transformed into capital. However, Vincent insists that the end of capitalist social relations, while not abolishing material production, would signify its subordination ‘to other imperatives and orientations’.

Nor can science and technology be separated from the social conditions that produced them and ensure their growth. In short, in contrast to Calvinist theology according to which work is a key to salvation, and knowledge the road to truth, Vincent joins a small but growing tendency in social theory to argue that science and technology, far from being regarded as either neutral instruments of social labour, or optimistically, as crucial elements of human liberation, turn out to ‘belong to a social context’ in which their links to the hierarchical organization of the prevailing order are hidden, especially from themselves.

Vincent’s Marx is engaged in a labor of ‘deconstruction’ of these illusions. Just as in his earlier critique of religion Marx, following Feuerbach, showed that religious illusions were real abstractions from the concrete human experiences of estrangement, his later theological investigations ‘decompose the everyday world of theology of action and valorization in order to open it to new possibilities’.

Of course, Vincent’s reading of Marx as faithful to the principle of historical specificity, refuses the transhistorical interpretations of leading theorists of the second and third internationals. According to this interpretation, historical materialism is constituted as a repertoire of immutable laws of social development that apply equally to different historical periods. Vincent carefully separates Marx from some of his most prominent legatees, a task made difficult by the ponderous reality of the institutionalization of marxism. Marx becomes a precursor of contemporary social theory and philosophy, rather than a figure wholly identified with the key universal claims of modern thought. To be sure, Vincent scrupulously shows the differences ; his work does not willfully bend representation for the purposes of salvaging a bankrupt doctrine. Instead, what he gives us is a way out of the antinomies of post-marxist ideology and, most importantly, he rescues what is living in Marx for a new paradigm that remains to be developed.

This is what separates Vincent from the post-structuralist judgement that Marx must be viewed now as a historical thinker, whose value has been surpassed by the passing of modernity. Recall Foucault’s inaugural lecture where he inquires, somewhat ironically, what we have lost by distancing ourselves from Hegel (and Marx). Vincent provides an answer : we have lost the categories by which to render a trenchant critique of everyday life under late capitalism. For if Marx’s major categories — production, value, commodity form, abstract and concrete labor and so on — are taken not descriptively but critically, we have the basis of inverting the ascribed meanings theorists and scholars have given to them. According to Vincent, we can construct a social theory by negating these categories rather than annointing them with the status of ontological truth. In Vincent’s reading Marx provides a model for the critique of knowledge and by making the model explicit, can contribute to the social theory of the future.

Nietzsche offered, among other things, a scepticism about history, a narrative of its discontinuities and indeterminism without which ‘openness to possibilities’ in any situation is improbable. Vincent recognizes that Heidegger can be accused of leading a retreat from the social world toward a private realm of sceptical, if not to say nihilistic ruminations. While acknowledging the partial justice in this attack, Vincent takes this move away from social theory as a necessary strategy in the wake of its deterioration into a series of closed systems. Vincent argues that the social sphere remains ‘ambiguously’ present in Heidegger’s thought.

Vincent’s most provocative contribution in this book is his effort to read Marx from Heideggerian lenses and Heidegger in the light of historical materialism. He sees the link between the two in their common attempt to destroy ontology, not ‘in order to find more solid foundations of certainty’ but to ‘make new relations and horizons possible’. One of the presuppositions of this opening is to show the limits, indeed the straitjacket of logical closure. Heidegger’s straightforward attack on logocentrism is well known, but Marx’s contribution is less well understood or, to be more precise, is typically misinterpreted to mean the opposite. Where Vincent demonstrates that the famous fetishism section of the first volume of Capital should be read as an attack against all retrospective historical determinisms many of his followers use this work to demonstrate the reverse.

Even more fundamental is Vincent’s deft explication of the parallels between the two alleged antagonists on the question of representation. Recall the ‘materialist’ appropriation of Marx where, according to Lenin, for example, marxism is a science like any other, whose propositions correspond to an external reality to which it refers [8]. In a brilliant synthesis of contemporary critiques of representation, Vincent convincingly demonstrates that Marx shares with this line of thought a view of a representation as an active process : in Heidegger’s perspective, a manifestation of subjectivism, where objects are appropriated and subjected to human will rather than merely reflected in thought without significant alteration. Following Sohn-Rethel [9] Vincent shows the different path traversed by Marx in his critique of representation. ‘Representations’ follow capital’s logic. That is, capital presents itself as forms of appearance, as a theatre of commodities possessing different characteristics, but also as abstractions subject to exchange relations. Thus, where capital is the subject and object of representation, both of its sides are displayed in different forms.

Vincent’s defense of Heidegger does not end with these ‘marxian’ ruminations. On the contrary, Heidegger, preeminently among contemporary philosophers, has positioned himself outside the social world in order to escape ensnarement by it. Vincent cites Heidegger’s relation to the social in his critiques : of history, of technology, of art and politics. But these are undertaken not from the standpoint of action, but from the perspective of the critique of action-as-forgetting as what Heidegger calls ontic activity, that is, activity that relieves the angst of the world as the ineluctable context for being. More specifically, the sixth chapter of Heidegger’s major work Being and Time is the fundamental critique of everyday life from which Lefebvre, De Certeau, and Axelos, among others, developed their own Marx-Heidegger syntheses.

Vincent’s effort in this direction departs from these writers insofar as he makes one of the first serious efforts to articulate the later work of Marx with the whole range of Heidegger’s thought and, in this work, rewrites both of them. His rewriting gives us a new conception of praxis not as the active side of a theological process, in which the future is prefigured in history and human agents are understood as its instrument, but as an indeterminate relation between action and doing in which structuration is understood as the outcome of the process as much as its condition. While Heidegger adopts a wait-and-see attitude toward politics, Marx refuses this contemplative position.

But although Vincent adopts Marx’s standpoint in this regard, he fully absorbs the Heideggerian critique of politics as ‘the permanent languor of the social’ in the contemporary world. For when political action has become ensnared in the bureaucratic and technical limits within which it is ordinarily practiced in capitalist and state socialist societies, it is a caricature of ‘praxis’. So, while Vincent adopts the standpoint of praxis, we cannot fail to remain sceptical of it, a position that draws him, albeit critically, to Adorno who, notwithstanding his own sharp polemic against Heidegger and Husserl, could not avoid their respective influences [10]. For Husserl and Heidegger stand as the preeminent critics in the twentieth century of the self congratulation of Western scientific culture. And this really realigns intellectual ideology in our time. Clearly, neither the Frankfurt school nor Vincent himself is entirely prepared to abandon Reason as a benchmark against which to spot a new barbarism masked as democratic liberalism. Yet, they do step over the line in enough ways to mark a Great Divide.

The last half of the book carries the theoretical reflection to a wide range of practical issues ranging from labor and politics to art. Like the first two essays - on Lukacs and Ernst Bloch — they represent Vincent’s coming to terms with his own marxist tradition in the light of Heidegger. These chapters provide a lively discussion of some contemporary themes in social and political theory.

In the first place, Vincent joins the debate concerning the centrality of labor, not only within marxism but in the labor movement as well. To the famous concept of the fetishism of commodities he adds the fetishism of labor. While Vincent agrees with Marx-critics such as Habermas, Axelos and Baudrillard that to posit labor’s generic centrality to human existence is a form of economism, he strongly defends Marx against this accusation. This chapter is perhaps the leading example of a practical consequence of taking the position that Marx intends not only the abolition of the wage system, but the surpassing of labor as the veritable heart of signification and with it the concatenation of production and exchange with value, a cathexis that has thwarted the development of other possibilities for human existence since the industrial revolution.

Vincent extends this argument to some leading tendencies in the labor movement for which the defense of labor as ontological need carries the status of a defining ideology. One cannot avoid Hegel’s critique of the sceptical attitude in the master-slave dialectic of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Lacking the master’s recognition, the servant revels in his/her identity as worker. Being a worker becomes the farthest horizon of life. In one mode the worker proclaims the dignity of labor as a political program as much as a cultural identification. In the second, the worker draws inward to the stoic attitude, and withdraws from the combat, seeking only her or his own counsel.

Both of these modes acknowledge the permanence of the established order ; the sceptic seeks recognition as a worker and all of the perquisites attendant to this accommodation. This is the program of social justice that, as Poulantzas has effectively argued, alters relations of power but does not transform them, Vincent’s critique of the labor movement and the parties to which it is affiliated is a critique of reformism, even its most radical exemplars. In this sense, in the wake of massive shifts by former marxist intellectuals of his generation to prevailing ideologies of ‘socialist’ politics in which the horizon of politics is the defense of civil society married to liberal democratic institutions, an eminently anti-utopian vision, Vincent embraces Bloch’s doctrine of politics as the struggle for the not-yet as a rebellion against existing political as well as social forms. Vincent examines empirical politics and discovers its languor, its imprisonment within the bureaucratically rational structures of state apparatuses.

His refusal to adjust political theory to really existing politics signifies Vincent’s enduring debt to the Frankfurt school whose judgements stand, in the light of the waning of revolutionary energy in Western countries, in brilliant contrast to the orthodoxies of both revolutionary marxism and social reformism. What to Vincent is a just acknowledgement of the power of German critical theory to penetrate the secrets of the late capitalist world is only tacitly remembered by the poststructuralists, whose debt to that tradition is no less crucial. One need only peruse Baudrillard’s later inversion of Critical Theory’s extensions of Lukacs’ critique of the commodity fetish or his earlier fecund work on consumer society, the political economy of the sign or even the anti-politics of his recent essays to see the degree to which this tradition, mediated by his mentor Henri Lefebvre, enframes his work.

The German referent is apparent throughout the text as well as the footnotes in this book. It marks Vincent as a thinker who straddles the divide between modernism and postmodernism. Yet, unlike Habermas, who holds that modernism’s possibilities are not exhausted and, therefore, is palpably shaken by the temerities of postmodern ruptures from the kingdom of Reason, Vincent is eager to explore the not-yet. All except in art where he stands ambiguously between Adorno’s brutal dismissal of popular culture as merely grist for the culture industry, and the postmodern refusal of categorical aesthetic value.

Although Vincent joins Adorno in deploring the transformation of art into a commodity in the culture industry, he refuses the leap to the proposition that high art is reserved for intellectuals. He holds out the hope that the labor movement, which traditionally has instrumentalized all cultural activity in the service of political mobi- lization, can become a source for popular cultural renewal. Vincent tacitly adopts Trotsky’s program, which held out the neces- sity of overcoming labor’s economism by making the treasures of bourgeois high art the property of collective labor.

Needless to say, such a program is, in keeping with the singular character of Vincent’s thought, controversial in an era when traditional labor culture, much less a new art education, is in near total eclipse in the wake of the universalization of the products of the culture industry. However, like other aspects of this book, they mark the appearance in the English language of one of the truly intelligent, pan-paradigmatic and provocative political philosophers of our era.