Postmodern Marx

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Jun 4 07:47:14 PDT 1999


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

So Rakesh, you agree with this? A quote without a comment? How about the rest of the book? Inquiring minds want to know!

Doug



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