The Marxist Project... Phenomenological Mediation to Understand the Philosophy of "Rupture"

One of the most important merits of reading Marx as presented by Gérard Granel is that it poses the question of the possibility and modes of dialogue between Marxism and phenomenology. Granel begins by defending a continuous interpretation of the Marxist achievement—through what can be articulated with Aristotelian ontology in the 1844 Manuscripts—demonstrating that there are "formal analogies" between the Marxist approach and Husserlian intentionality, and even between this approach and the existential analytic of Being and Time. He then designs a reading of Das Kapital as a "phenomenology of money." From this background, Marx's book turns into a "foundational text for the ontology of modernity." This interpretation not only makes a methodological confrontation with phenomenology necessary, but also allows for giving a new meaning to the idea of "revolutionary praxis."

Granel initiated his reading of Marx through his work on the text Incipit Marx (1969), subtitled Marxist Ontology of 1844 and the Question of "Rupture", where he searches in this text for a phenomenological understanding of Marxist work without projecting phenomenological theses onto it. He strives to stay close to the Marxist text, far from its dogma. While Louis Althusser in particular, and Marxists in general, view the texts of the young Marx as not expressing his mature Marxism—contrasting the scientific nature of the mature texts with the philosophical character of the youth texts—Granel seems to object to all the readings they have presented. He argues that the reading Marx presents through Das Kapital gives due weight to the strict and problem-driven scientific meaning at its absolute limits. Rather than rushing to understand the meaning of "rupture" and "continuity," he focuses on Marx's own analyses, turning toward an analysis of the "fetishism of commodities," while pointing out the impossibility of reducing the "analysis of forms" in the first section to premises of a Hegelian order under the assumption that it is an attempt to prove the validity of the labor theory of value.