On the Nature of Marx's Things

On the Nature of Marxs 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 Marxs earliest writings a subterranean, Lucretian practice that he calls necrophilological translation that continues to haunt Marxs 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. Lezras 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 lexiconsof fetishism and of chrematisticsthat Capital uses to describe how value accrues to commodities, and by the dialectical approach thats framed Marxs work since Engels sought to marry it to the natural philosophy of his time, necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marxs 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 Marxs 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 Spinozas marranismo, through Melvilles Bartleby, through the development of a previously unexplored Freudian political theology shaped by the revolutionary traditions of Schiller and Verdi, through Adornos exilic antihumanism against Saids cosmopolitan humanism, through todays new materialisms. Ultimately, necrophilology draws the story of capitals capture of difference away from the story of capitals 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.