从戏剧舞台叙述角度解读马克思《资本论》: 以莎士比亚为依据

Abstract

A key to understanding Marx is how he overcomes Hegel’s ‘dialectical method’. Marx uniquely developed his own “mode of presentation”(Darstellungsweise) to differentiate his dialectical method from Hegel’s, which centered on the manifestation of essence or historical totality. As a detour to identify the uniqueness of Marx’s mode of presentation and his non-Hegelian dialectics, it is important to investigate the Shakespearean trope to identify the features of ‘theatrical structure of narrative’. There are two turning points in the ‘encounter’ between Marx and Shakespeare, and on this basis, three periods can be divided. The first is the “Strum und Drang” period of young Marx, when he foregrounds Shakespeare as an authoritative source for his critique of modern society. The second period is the period when Marx himself put into practice the command to “Shakespearize” and the representative result is his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written in London in 1852. The third period is the period of ‘the critique of political economy’ and the publication and revision of the first volume of The Capital. Although in the Capital, Shakespeare seems to fade into the background, and Marx seems to be writing a very ‘economics’ narrative, the work of the Critique of Political Economy embodies the instruction to “Shakespearize” much more than the second period. Reading The Capital as a theatrical staging structure, we can see that the narrative structure of The Capital is not monophonic but multiphony: what is not written (or not presented) is already embedded in the overall composition of the theatrical stage, forming the stage background (the “Fallstaffian background”) as well as what is written and what is presented.