Isabelle Garo

Isabelle Garo: Marx Without the Museum

France has produced more readings of Marx than any country outside Germany, and it has never had a complete French edition of what Marx and Engels actually wrote. The person leading the attempt to fix that is not a professor at the Collège de France but a philosophy teacher at a Paris lycée. Isabelle Garo presides over the Grande Édition Marx et Engels, writes books that put Foucault and Deleuze on trial, and insists — against three decades of consensus — that the point of reading Marx is still to change something.

The Position She Speaks From

Garo was born on 5 September 1963. She teaches philosophy at the Lycée Chaptal in Paris — a secondary school post, not a university chair — and has built an unusually influential body of work from outside the academic hierarchy that normally licenses French philosophical authority.

Her institutional roles are almost all collective ones. She presides over the GEME, the Grande Édition de Marx et d'Engels en français, the project to produce the first complete French-language edition of the pair's writings. She co-leads the seminar "Marxismes au XXIe siècle." She co-directs the journal *ContreTemps* and the "Mouvement réel" book series at the publisher La Ville Brûle. Since 2018 she has sat on the orientation council of the Fondation Copernic, the left-wing French think tank. The pattern is consistent: she works by building things other people can use.

Reading Marx as a Critique of Philosophy

Her first book, *Marx, une critique de la philosophie* (2000), set the frame she has never abandoned. Its title contains an ambiguity she exploits: Marx offers a critique of philosophy, and Marx himself must be read as something other than a philosopher producing doctrine. On this reading, the interesting thing about Marx is not a system to be summarised but a sustained argument that philosophy misdescribes its own relation to the world it thinks about.

*L'idéologie ou la pensée embarquée* (2009) — ideology, or embarked thought — pursued the consequence. The phrase is the argument: ideas are never floating above the situation they interpret; they are on board, carried along, implicated. Garo's concern throughout has been to work out what that means without collapsing into the lazy conclusion that all thought is merely interest in disguise.

*Marx et l'invention historique* (2012) turned to history — the question of what it means to say that Marx invented, rather than discovered, a way of reading historical change. *L'or des images: art, monnaie, capital* (2013) took the analysis into aesthetics, examining what happens when images, money and capital circulate in the same economy of value. Her work has been described as reading Marx and Engels contextually, from both theoretical and political angles, and as addressing the Marxist tradition's situation inside contemporary capitalism and its crises.

The Quarrel with French Theory

Her most contentious book is *Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser & Marx: la politique dans la philosophie* (2011). The three names are the pillars of what the English-speaking world calls French Theory, and each has a complicated relationship to Marx — Althusser as the great structuralist Marxist, Foucault and Deleuze as thinkers who absorbed Marx and moved somewhere else. Garo's subject is politics *inside* philosophy: what political content these philosophies actually carry, as against what their admirers assume. It is a book written by someone who thinks the displacement of Marx by these figures had costs that were never properly counted, and it has been read that way — as a considered challenge to the dominant French philosophical settlement of the last forty years.

*Communisme et stratégie* (2019) made the positive case. Its subject is the word almost nobody on the French left wanted to defend and the concept the left has most obviously lost: strategy, the question of how a political aim connects to an actual sequence of actions. The same year she published *Avec Marx, philosophie et politique*, a volume of interviews conducted with Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar and others — an attempt to take the pulse of a whole generation of Marx readers by asking them directly.

She has also written poetry: *L'île, légendes définitives* (2001) and *Consignes pour un communisme du XXIe siècle* (2011), the latter conceived as an object-book.

The Politics

Garo does not separate her scholarship from her commitments, and does not pretend to. She supported the Front de Gauche and its candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the 2012 presidential election. In November 2015 she signed the Appel des 58, the appeal protesting the state of emergency declared after the Paris attacks — a position that put her against most of French public opinion at the moment of maximum national fear.

Why Isabelle Is Called a Genius

The claim is not for a system but for a rare combination of scholarly patience and refusal. Garo took on the editorial labour that French Marxism had somehow never completed — a full French Marx and Engels — which is a decade-consuming, largely thankless task that confers no theoretical glory. At the same time she mounted a direct intellectual challenge to Foucault, Deleuze and Althusser at the height of their authority, arguing that the political content of their philosophies had been badly misread. Doing both at once takes an unusual kind of nerve: the archival scrupulousness of an editor and the willingness to pick a fight with the entire field. Her account of ideology as "embarked thought" is a genuinely economical formulation of a hard problem, and her insistence that communism requires a theory of strategy identified, before most, the specific thing the European left had lost.

The counter-case is real. Garo is a partisan, and she says so; her readings of Foucault and Deleuze are contested by scholars who find them unfair to the texts and driven by a prior political verdict. Much of her most important work is editorial and collective rather than singly authored, which is admirable but is not the same as originality. She has produced no single book that reorganised the field the way *Reading Capital* or *Discipline and Punish* did, and her influence remains largely confined to the French-speaking Marxist left — she is not, on the current evidence, a figure of the stature of the interlocutors she interviews. The honest description is a formidable scholar-organiser of a tradition rather than the author of a new one, and it is worth noting that she has never claimed otherwise.

Legacy

The GEME will outlast every argument Garo has had, because a complete edition is the kind of infrastructure that determines what the next century can even read. Beyond it, her effect has been to keep alive a specific and unfashionable proposition: that Marx is not a chapter in the history of philosophy but an unfinished political argument, and that treating him as a museum piece is itself a political act. In a French intellectual culture that spent decades declaring the question closed, arguing it from a lycée classroom — while editing the texts, running the seminar, and co-directing the journal — has turned out to be a durable way of reopening it.