Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire

Over the last century and a half, Karl Marx has been at the center of world politics as a prophet to those seeking an alternative to the speedy rise of capitalism. One of the most studied graduate works today is Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, an interesting bit of political satire and social criticism aimed at Napoleon III in between 1851 and 1852. The Eighteenth Brumaire refers to November 9, 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte took by force the title of French emperor, which demonstrates immediately how the reader should interpret Marx’s work. Several authors have detailed how Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire is not a reaction to political events but that it is a performative act of discourse, in which the book is not representative of the state of affairs but in fact brings about the events prescribed in the work.

The three authors briefly mentioned below all share overlapping concerns with performative literature, especially of the variety that Marx practices. One such concern is that there is a rejection of the preconstituted self, leaving a subject or subjects in a constant search of defining meaning without reference to the past. Another concern is over the rejection of class and economic considerations as primary starting points for an analysis of events. In performative discourse (similar to the “gonzo journalism” perpetrated by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson), there is only a narrow understanding of such considerations before work begins on defining the events because such background pieces would distract from the mission of performative language.