“More than other writers, Marx wrote in the conjuncture.”
The Philosophy of Marx, Etienne Balibar
“Disastrologes”-would be the title, do you like it? I think it suits us well. One day you were walking in front of me without knowing me, without looking at me. I fell on you.
The Postcard, Jacques Derrida
It almost should have been predictable that the New York Times would dismiss the event of Jacques Derrida’s death through the anti-intellectual violence of journalism at its least responsible moment. While only a few months later, Western teletechnologies mobilized to bring of the death of the Pope to a “world” in mourning accompanied with a teary-eyed Bush near the casket. In an article in the “London Review of Books,” Terry Eagleton recently remarked that the Pope was a bad phenomenologist, and had, in fact, taken swipes at Derrida. It would appear that the world is still in love with transcendence and that “everyday life” is mediated and reduced by journalese. One only need recall the teletechonological disaster that Debord had announced with the publication of The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, in which the spectacle itself had become a social relation. “Pas une image juste, juste une image(!)” (Godard)
However, within this seemingly ‘one-way street’ with ‘no exit,’ critical resistance continues to reorganize and re-constitute itself against these endless “transcendent scores.” The important work of such diverse theorists as Negri, Montag, Deleuze, Althusser, Macherey and Balibar on Spinoza suggests a radical departure from classical ontological categories predicated on notions of transcendence through the concepts of “subject,” “people,” “State,” to a transformation without transcendence of ontology, and the potentia of the multitude as a challenge to capital. In a different philosophical trajectory, we have another encounter against transcendence with Derrida (Jean Luc Nancy, Philipe Lacoue-Labarthe, to name a few) interrogating the classical and “fundamental” concepts of ontology and “the political.”
In this light, I am reminded and haunted by the productive exchange between Derrida and Negri in Ghostly Demarcations over the very question of how to read ontology, and perhaps the ownership of a smile. While this is not the place to attempt to develop an essay exploring the complexities and implications of their crucial debate and differences over the question of Marx, politics and ontology, it might be a moment to fold back Derrida’s recent work on animality into Negri (and Hardt’s) cruical work of radically articulating the multitude, and bear in mind Eugene Thacker’s suggestion to consider “the multitude as being non-human, a nonhuman politics of the multitude.”
With the immanent arrival of the multitude “to come,” perhaps we will have already read and “fallen on” Deleuze’s Grandeur de Marx and Derrida’s ‘writings’ on Spinoza.
–Frederick Young
Editor’s Note: The Marxist Reading Group at the University of Florida puts out one peer reviewed issue a year. The group consists of a wide variety of interests and approaches concerning critical engagement with Marx and post-marxist thought in terms of theory, cultural studies and grass roots activism. A special thanks to those whose efforts and labor goes into organizing the yearly conferences, especially to those whose work may not appear visable here. Each spring the group organizes a conference which has featured such keynotes as Michael Hardt, Kristen Ross, Ross Birrell (Scottish Conceptual Artist), Cesare Casarino, Susan Buck-Morss, Warren Montag, Randy Martin and Fredric Jameson.
Frederick Young received his Ph.D. in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies from the University of Florida. He is currently a Marion L. Brittain Fellow in “Literature, Communication and Culture” at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has published on Levinas, Derrida, Che, Animality and Deleuze.
Issue Intro: Disastrologies by Frederick Young
To the memory of Jacques Derrida
“More than other writers, Marx wrote in the conjuncture.”
The Philosophy of Marx, Etienne Balibar
“Disastrologes”-would be the title, do you like it? I think it suits us well. One day you were walking in front of me without knowing me, without looking at me. I fell on you.
The Postcard, Jacques Derrida
It almost should have been predictable that the New York Times would dismiss the event of Jacques Derrida’s death through the anti-intellectual violence of journalism at its least responsible moment. While only a few months later, Western teletechnologies mobilized to bring of the death of the Pope to a “world” in mourning accompanied with a teary-eyed Bush near the casket. In an article in the “London Review of Books,” Terry Eagleton recently remarked that the Pope was a bad phenomenologist, and had, in fact, taken swipes at Derrida. It would appear that the world is still in love with transcendence and that “everyday life” is mediated and reduced by journalese. One only need recall the teletechonological disaster that Debord had announced with the publication of The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, in which the spectacle itself had become a social relation. “Pas une image juste, juste une image(!)” (Godard)
However, within this seemingly ‘one-way street’ with ‘no exit,’ critical resistance continues to reorganize and re-constitute itself against these endless “transcendent scores.” The important work of such diverse theorists as Negri, Montag, Deleuze, Althusser, Macherey and Balibar on Spinoza suggests a radical departure from classical ontological categories predicated on notions of transcendence through the concepts of “subject,” “people,” “State,” to a transformation without transcendence of ontology, and the potentia of the multitude as a challenge to capital. In a different philosophical trajectory, we have another encounter against transcendence with Derrida (Jean Luc Nancy, Philipe Lacoue-Labarthe, to name a few) interrogating the classical and “fundamental” concepts of ontology and “the political.”
In this light, I am reminded and haunted by the productive exchange between Derrida and Negri in Ghostly Demarcations over the very question of how to read ontology, and perhaps the ownership of a smile. While this is not the place to attempt to develop an essay exploring the complexities and implications of their crucial debate and differences over the question of Marx, politics and ontology, it might be a moment to fold back Derrida’s recent work on animality into Negri (and Hardt’s) cruical work of radically articulating the multitude, and bear in mind Eugene Thacker’s suggestion to consider “the multitude as being non-human, a nonhuman politics of the multitude.”
With the immanent arrival of the multitude “to come,” perhaps we will have already read and “fallen on” Deleuze’s Grandeur de Marx and Derrida’s ‘writings’ on Spinoza.
–Frederick Young
Editor’s Note: The Marxist Reading Group at the University of Florida puts out one peer reviewed issue a year. The group consists of a wide variety of interests and approaches concerning critical engagement with Marx and post-marxist thought in terms of theory, cultural studies and grass roots activism. A special thanks to those whose efforts and labor goes into organizing the yearly conferences, especially to those whose work may not appear visable here. Each spring the group organizes a conference which has featured such keynotes as Michael Hardt, Kristen Ross, Ross Birrell (Scottish Conceptual Artist), Cesare Casarino, Susan Buck-Morss, Warren Montag, Randy Martin and Fredric Jameson.
Frederick Young received his Ph.D. in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies from the University of Florida. He is currently a Marion L. Brittain Fellow in “Literature, Communication and Culture” at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has published on Levinas, Derrida, Che, Animality and Deleuze.