Is there any reason to think Marx ever read Toussenel? And, even if
he did, is there any reason to think more than one in a million of
his readers did? But nobody anywhere has an excuse for not remembering
"Well said, old mole! Canst work i'th earth so fast? A worthy pioner!"
(Hamlet, I, 5, lines 162-163).
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all
things."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
>Is it coincidence that on the day of the second round of the French
>presidential elections I should stumble across the following quotation from
>Toussenel in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project?
>
>"The mole is... not the emblem of a single character. It is the emblem of a
>whole social period: the period of industry's infancy, the Cyclopean
>period... It is the... allegorical expression of the absolute predominance
>of brute force over intellectual force... Many estimable analogists find a
>marked resemblance between moles, which upturn the soil and pierce passages
>of subterranean communication... and the monopolizers of railroads and stage
>routes... The extreme nervous sensibility of the mole, which fears the
>light... admirably characterizes the obstinate obscurantism of those
>monopolizers of banking and of transportation, who also fear the light.
>{elipses in Benjamin's citation]"
>
>Clearly, Marx's famous mole from the Eighteenth Brumaire must have been
>Toussenel's. Marx also makes use of the "Cyclopean" image in his discussion
>of modern industry in Das Kapital.
>
>Toussenel's _L'Espirit des betes_ was published in 1847.
>
>Tom Walker
