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On the Nature of Marx’s Things traces to Marx’s earliest writings a Lucretian practice that Lezra calls necrophilological translation.
Lezra's previous book reached a wider audience in literature, cultural studies, and political philosophy and has been translated into Spanish and Chinese.
Jacques Lezra is Professor and Chair of Hispanic Studies at the University of California—Riverside. His most recent book is On the Nature of Marx’s Things: Translation as Necrophilology (Fordham, 2018).
Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago:“On the Nature of Marx’s Things impresses every minute, exhorting us to see the messianic contradictions not only of contemporary capitalism but of fetishism itself, with its parade of objects that insist on establishing the general equivalency of unlike things. The ‘thing’ that matters to Lezra is therefore not stable but an occasion for playing out the dynamics of what’s collectively held. Reading theoretically and aesthetically, historically and formally, he provides us with a ‘necrophilology’ that tracks the ‘costs of translation’ when processes get represented as objects or objects are said to substitute for each other. Adorno, Said, and Benjamin, the speculative realists, early modern drama and poetry, and a truly fantastic reading of “Bartleby’s” translatability anchor us to engaging the set of rhetorical tropes and drives that enforce capitalist logics of general equivalence, creating false sovereignties and comforting relics. On the Nature of Marx’s Things is a great, wild and precise, work of art.“
Antonio Negri:“The project of returning ‘Marxist logic’ to a materialist and pragmatic approach has been underway for some years now. Jacques Lezra, plunging into this logic’s deepest reaches, discovers there a ‘language of things,’ exactly as in Lucretius; but also a language of singularities, as in Spinoza; and of differences, marshaled against the possibility of any system of general equivalences. What he calls ‘necrophilology’ intervenes wherever such systems would reinstall the fetishes of humanism to the heights from which they’ve been cast—as a rupture, a break. Is Lezra proposing an ontology? The word is heavy, but recalling Lucretius and Spinoza in this way certainly lightens its weight, and makes ontology powerfully viable for, and by means of, the critique of contemporary capitalism.“
Lezra’s project is really to enrich our reception of Marx as a comprehensively cultural thinker, disrespecting the disciplinary boundary-lines of his time and ours.
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