Schiz-ability

Abstract

The visitor to Karl Marx's Grave in London's highgate cemetery is confronted by a large polished granite plinth, atop which squats an imposing bronze head and shoulders of Marx. Although the artist Laurence Bradshaw designed the rectangular plinth as a proxy for Marx's body, the effect is still to emphasize the head, the supposed locus of Geist, esprit, intellect. Marx was a headworker, it is true. Even in the depths of poverty, plagued by bodily ailments, he was never obliged to purvey körperliche Arbeit (“body work,” “manual labor”) in the restricted sense—that is, a körperliche Arbeit located in a social split that structurally denies the body worker access to the abstractions of a developed geistige Arbeit (“intellectual labor”).