As a fundamental example, he says in The Preface to the First German Edition of _Capital_ " My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."
On the one hand this seems contra-post-modern in that it smacks of "essentialism" and reducing economics to natural history or biology. But "natural history" here is a slurred literal meaning. He really means "like" a process of natural history.
Charles Brown
>>> Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> 06/04/99 03:55AM >>>
>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