“Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history.⁴⁶⁷ The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that primal fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.” This passage contains a celebration of the metaphysical function of capital that magnificently outstrips all others that we know. No other apologists have Marx’s farsightedness—nor do they dare attribute such evocative power to the activities they are defending. The Universal, this spoiled firstborn of the bourgeois age, is indeed said to be born out of “production on the basis of exchange values”—and from nothing else. Marx disdains the communal relations of all previous phases (even if he is prepared to shed a hypocritical tear for the lost “primal fullness”), since he knows they are fatally limited, bornés. And narrow-mindedness, Borniertheit, for Marx, is the supreme defect, worse than all emptiness: it is the permanent threat, the hostile memory of the ghetto.

“Primal fullness” is not polútropos, it is not “omnilateral,” according to Marx (but is Ulysses “primal,” or not? A question still without an answer). At the other end of history we see—at a time of maximum prosperity—that the essence of the bourgeois individual is certainly universal, but at the same time totally empty, vacuous, hollow, the result of a relentless process of emptying. The anthropological question has to be posed then in these terms: what to do with this “total emptiness,” without resorting to some fatuous appeal to the lost “primal fullness” (and here Marx seeks to dismiss in one sarcastic phrase all reactionary criticism, great and small, of the bourgeoisie)?

At this point the apparatus of dialectics, in all its sham intrusiveness, seems once again enormously helpful. Progress will refill what progress has emptied. People will talk about “universal development of individuals” rather than production ratios. In place of a real emptiness a vacuous expression is thus used which nevertheless matches the feeling of an age that liked more than anything else the rule “do it yourself.” Avoiding certain questions is all that is required, but what if the specific object (the singular thing) stubbornly refuses? And what if the universal is prepared to exist only in conditions of perfect emptiness? Hegel has already performed a masterful sleight of hand around these points. Marx would now repeat it, more abruptly and with far less knowledge of the history of philosophy. And it would be performed again and again, in an ever more brutal way, by unpropitious descendants, itinerant cadres of the Third International or the heirs of some Black Byzantium that breathe the sacrificial fumes of polytechnic schools while waiting to transform their savanna into a bloody murder scene from Roussel, to mark the beginning of a belated entry into History.