Kolja Lindner : The German Debate on the Monetary Theory of Value . Considerations on

Philology, the 'love of the word', is an academic discipline that threatens to turn the texts collected in critical editions into intellectual playgrounds. For the important task that consists in trying to arrive at as coherent an understanding of a text as possible by considering everything its author has written always trails a certain danger in its wake: it can all too easily become an academic exercise in textual criticism and commentary. When what is at stake is critical social theory, this variant on 'art for art's sake' is especially risky: it can transform scientific critique into contemplative scholarship. That said, critical social theories must also, in view of the rich textual corpus now at our disposal, run the risks of philology. Marx's oeuvre offers philologists several different avenues of attack. Thus it has not only appeared in different editions (in Germany, both the MEW—Marx-Engels-Werke, as well as the second edition of the MEGA, Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe), but also in divergent translations across the globe. Moreover, it presents us with an open-ended theory that, if Althusser is right, can be broken down into different stages. Even the last of them, according to Althusser, attempts to formulate a critique of political economy that is not always theoretically coherent, and is on the whole extremely complex (cf. Althusser 1996, 27). As for the propagandistic simplification and textual canonisation that state socialism inflicted on Marx, it certainly did his work no service. The upshot is that there is no body of critical social theory that stands more to gain from discriminating philology than Marx's. Confronted, however, with such variegated, ambiguous, and manipulated texts, philological criticism must bring theoretical and political criteria to bear if it is neither to degenerate into an activity pursued for its own sake nor lose sight of what Marx actually wrote. Such criteria will also provide the kind of interpretive framework that is the sine qua