The Future of an Allusion: Poïesis in Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

But of all diversions, the theater is undoubtedly the most entertaining. Here we may see others act even when we cannot act to any great purpose ourselves.

— August Wilhelm Schlegel, Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (31)

I

Skepticism about the possibility of autonomous action accounts in part for romanticism’s many theatrical failures—misfires precisely because they stage failures to act. Uncertain whether the playing out of the revolution in France underscored the capacity of people to act independently or confirmed their status as mere instruments of heteronymous forces, the romantic dramas of Heinrich Von Kleist and William Wordsworth direct our attention not to the actions of characters but to the character of action. This uncertainty about the possibility of autonomous action also explains the repeated analogy drawn in romantic texts between the French Revolution and theater: the revolution is being directed by sinister forces that pull the strings backstage; scripted events are being performed as acts of liberty.¹ Situating Karl Marx’s essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) within this post-revolutionary critique of human action, this essay will read Marx’s text as settling accounts with both of these romantic legacies: the theater as a privileged site to explore human action, and revolutions as essentially theatrical.

Restoring this romantic context to The Eighteenth Brumaire brings into focus another preoccupation at the center of Marx’s analysis of historical transformation: the imagination, central to romantic theories of the event, plays a subterranean but essential role in Marx’s anatomy of action. While the imagination is identified in the Eighteenth Brumaire as a source of fantasies [Einbildungen] and illusions [Vorstellungen] that can entrap historical actors in repetition’s house of mirrors, it also functions within the text as the instrument of poïesis: the maker of what might be. If the trope of theater explores revolution as repetition, poetry marks the possibility of a revolution “arriv[ing] at its own content” [ihrem eignen Inhalt anzukommen] (149). In the Eighteenth Brumaire, the mind’s imaginative power—its ability to draw poetry out of the future—offers us an exit out of the circuit of reenactment.

II

Augustus Wilhelm Schlegel’s Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1809) identifies the essence of tragedy as the confrontation between man’s power of self-determination and the laws of necessity: “Inner freedom [Innere Freiheit] and external necessity [äußere Notwendigkeit] are the two poles of the tragic world. It is only by contrast with its opposite that each of these ideas is brought into full manifestation” (67, modified). At its core then, drama interrogates the nature, extent, and limits of human agency. According to Schlegel, great drama doesn’t simply show us events; it attempts to investigate the ontology of the event itself.

While Schlegel and Hegel after him would identify drama as the art that exemplified human autonomy, romantic plays—ranging from Heinrich Von Kleist’s The Prince of Homburg to William Wordsworth’s The Borderers—use the genre to question the human ability to act autonomously in the first place.² The Prince of Homburg stages the conflict between self-determination and subjection by pitting the eponymous hero, who hungers after military glory, against the Elector of Brandenburg, who demands unquestioning military obedience. Before the decisive Battle of Fehrbellin, the commanding officers are represented, pencils in hand, transcribing the Elector’s battle plan word for word. Prince Frederick—distracted by an earlier event staged by the Elector, in which a sleepwalking Frederick had been tricked into declaring his love for the Elector’s niece—proves incapable of transcribing the orders. As events unfold, nothing matters but following this script. The only acts permitted are those the Elector has prescribed. The victory of the Elector’s forces is overshadowed by Frederick’s perceived insubordination. Frederick’s indignation that his victory in the battle has been eclipsed by what he sees as a technicality is met with the refrain, “it’s all the same” [gleichviel]:

Frederick: Was it the Elector’s army that...