Postmodern Marx

[Dennis Breslin]

Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> 
> >From Terrell Carver's The Postmodern Marx (Penn State Press, 1999):
> 
> "Marx did not accept a commonplace distinction between literal and
> figurative langauge, and he did not attempt to avoid the latter in what is
> taken to be his most scientific work. Rather his use of figurative language
> to make a political statement aligns him with the textualising
> approach...Marx's critique takes political economy as a textual surface,
> and by means of a thoroughly linguistic analysis, he refigures, in a
> parodic text, a supposedly familiar and uncontentious world as strange
> (requiring explanation) and problematic (requiring political action). Thus
> a 'textualising' reading of Marx need not be 'against the grain.' Given the
> idealist origins of both Marx's thought methods and of subsequent
> hermeneutics and the 'contemporary linguistic turn', it should not be
> surprising that this kind of reading can be undertaken and that Marx begins
> eerily to track postmodernism.My quarrel with Derrida in this chapter is
> that he flies off the textual surface too readily into a discursive space
> that I find puzzling or meaningless." p. 20
> 
> rnb

Wow, I'm puzzled!  And how is this more meaningful?  Why should it be
surprising
that any kind of reading could be undertaken that doesn't eerily or
cheerfully
track pomoism.  There's rules to this stuff?

I think the dark satanic mills riff was appropriated from Robert
Browning.
Hmmm...Browning is the better poet.  Wait, wait, he was an apologist for
capital,
wasn't he?  

Hell must be other people doing lit-cultural studies!