On the Nature of Marx's Things: Translation as Necrophilology

With impressive erudition and passion, Jacques Lezra returns to Marxian things to clarify some older debates and to make a fresh and welcome intervention in contemporary critical and literary theory. For Lezra, the term 'object' designates neither the mental object nor the material one but precisely the relation between them, a relation of translation that shows how objects produce new forms of knowing. Elaborating a 'necrophilology' that gives place to the structuring powers of loss, Lezra shows how critique requires the materiality of the poem as what is constantly rewrought to understand the process, the system, and the stuff of life.-Judith Butler, University of California, BerkeleyOn the Nature of Marx's Things impressesevery minute, exhorting us to see the messianic contradictions not only of contemporary capitalism but of fetishism itself. Reading theoretically and aesthetically, historically and formally, Lezra provides us with a 'necrophilology' that tracks the 'costs of translation' when processes get represented as objects. A great, wild and precise, work of art.-Lauren Berlant, University of ChicagoLezra's book makes ontology powerfully viable for, and by means of, the critique of contemporary capitalism. -Antonio NegriOn the Nature of Marx's Things is a major rethinking of the Marxian tradition, one based not on fixed things but onthe inextricable interrelation between the material world and our language for it. Lezra traces to Marx's earliest writings a subterranean, Lucretian practice that he calls necrophilological translation that continues to haunt Marx'sinheritors. This Lucretian strain, requiring that we think materiality as dynamic, aleatory, and always marked by its relation to language, raises central questions about ontology, political economy, and reading.On the Nature of Marx's Things draws the story of capital's capture of difference away from the story of capital's production of subjectivity. The book builds concepts and procedures for dismantling the system of objects on which neoliberal capitalism stands, whether concrete things like commodities, conceptual objects such as debt traps, austerity programs, and the marketization of risk, or the pedagogical, legal, even familial institutions that produce and reproduce inequities today.Jacques Lezra is Chair of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.