Marxism and Biography
In a time deprived of reality, biography should have a political application.
If all philosophy is biography, a statement Lou Salomé popularized in her book on Nietzsche, there is little to no agreement on whether biography matters for Marxism, or how Marxism is to think biography in its practice. There was an active debate about biography and Marxism accelerated by the rise of psychoanalysis and existentialism in the 20th century. Sartre famously accused Marxists of getting rid of the particular and of not ‘studying real men in depth.’ He argued that Marxism does not possess a theory of the concrete individual, and that Marxists, even so-called Marxist humanists dissolved real men in “a bath of sulphuric acid.” Sartre was driven to resolve this fundamental aporia at the heart of Marxism in his later years. Why else would he dedicate his final study to the most comprehensive philosophical biography ever written on Flaubert in The Family Idiot. But more on that later.1
If biography is to matter for Marxism biography must have a political valence. There is a tradit…