On the Nature of Marx's Things is a major rethinking of the Marxian
tradition, one based not on fixed things but on the inextricable
interrelation between the material world and our language for it.
Lezra traces to Marx's earliest writings a subterranean, Lucretian
practice that he calls necrophilological translation that continues
to haunt Marx's inheritors. This Lucretian strain, requiring that
we think materiality in non-self-evident ways, as dynamic,
aleatory, and always marked by its relation to language, raises
central questions about ontology, political economy, and reading.
"Lezra," writes Vittorio Morfino in his preface, "transfers all of
the power of the Althusserian encounter into his conception of
translation." Lezra's expansive understanding of translation covers
practices that put different natural and national languages into
relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms
internal to each language. Obscured by later critical attention to
the contradictory lexicons-of fetishism and of chrematistics-that
Capital uses to describe how value accrues to commodities, and by
the dialectical approach that's framed Marx's work since Engels
sought to marry it to the natural philosophy of his time,
necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence
in Marx's thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of
what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what
an object is, of what counts as matter, value, sovereignty,
mediation, and even number. In On the Nature of Marx's Things a
materialism "of the encounter," as recent criticism in the vein of
the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form
theory, post-Schmittian divisible sovereignty,
object-oriented-ontologies and the critique of correlationism, and
philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine,
Cassin, and Derrida. The inheritors of the problems with which Marx
grapples range from Spinoza's marranismo, through Melville's
Bartleby, through the development of a previously unexplored
Freudian political theology shaped by the revolutionary traditions
of Schiller and Verdi, through Adorno's exilic antihumanism against
Said's cosmopolitan humanism, through today's new materialisms.
Ultimately, necrophilology draws the story of capital's capture of
difference away from the story of capital's production of
subjectivity. It affords concepts and procedures for dismantling
the system of objects on which neoliberal capitalism stands:
concrete, this-wordly things like commodities, but also such
"objects" as debt traps, austerity programs, the marketization of
risk; ideologies; the pedagogical, professional, legal, even
familial institutions that produce and reproduce inequities today.
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