> As for Marx, it is sometimes said that Marx's
> deconstructive analysis or "critique" of capitalist
> economy is no longer relevant, has become hopelessly
> old-fashioned and inapplicable, because he was
> describing an early stage of industrialism, of
> capitalism, and of Western imperialism.
[snip]
>I answer that Marx, as I have shown, already saw
> commodities as, insofar as they embody exchange
> value, disembodied. They are just so much socially
> generated "value," that is, they are forms of
> information communicated by impersonal speech
[snip]
> The linen, the coat, the paper on which money
> is printed, the computer's hard drive or the
> modulations of electrical or optical currents
> necessary to transmit information are all material
> bases for the disembodied sign systems they sustain.
This is about as good as any understanding of Marx's critique that I have encountered in the English language. I have not read much of the work which is derisively referred to as "pomo", but I think if people are capable of misreading Marx as they have done for the past century and a half, then it should not wonder that other thinkers might be similarly difficult to understand.
One question that I constantly ask myself is how much of the misunderstanding of certain thinkers arises from problems of translation. For example, I am of the opinion that many of the thinkers that more-or-less "get" Marx are those writing in the same language that Marx wrote in: Rosdolsky, Backhaus, Reichelt, Heinrich, Kurz, or those who read that language: Postone, Holloway.
In the English speaking world, there is a tendency to read Marx as a successor to the political economy of Smith and Ricardo, and to reject him on that basis. And perhaps it's because in English translation (or the Aveling translation, I should say), Marx really does read like classical English political economy. But then again, this would not account for historicist readings of Marx by individuals who should really know better (Ernest Mandel, Wolfgang Fritz Haug).
I don't know if Jerry can read French. I myself do not read it or speak it well at all. Could it be that the "difficulty" of Derrida might be attributable to real problems of conveying ideas across languages, rather than saying that this or that thinker is really a charlatan, or dressing up trivial ideas with complex language?
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