Jacques Lezra's Books

Wild Materialism

The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic

By: Jacques Lezra

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Wild Materialism

The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic

By: Jacques Lezra

Blends a discussion of terror with radical democracy in a way that is thoroughly original ... an important book on a large and crucial topic."--Marc Redfield, Claremont Graduate University.

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334

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Fordham Univ Press

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ISBN 10

0823232352

ISBN 13

9780823232352

On the Nature of Marx's Things

Translation as Necrophilology

By: Jacques Lezra

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On the Nature of Marx's Things

Translation as Necrophilology

By: Jacques Lezra

On the Nature of Marx’s Things is a major rethinking of the Marxian tradition, one based not on fixed things but on the 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’s inheritors. This Lucretian strain, requiring that we think materiality in non-self-evident ways, as dynamic, aleatory, and always marked by its relation to language, raises central questions about ontology, political economy, and reading. “Lezra,” writes Vittorio Morfino in his preface, “transfers all of the power of the Althusserian encounter into his conception of translation.” Lezra’s expansive understanding of translation covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Obscured by later critical attention to the contradictory lexicons—of fetishism and of chrematistics—that Capital uses to describe how value accrues to commodities, and by the dialectical approach that’s framed Marx’s work since Engels sought to marry it to the natural philosophy of his time, necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx’s thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an object is, of what counts as matter, value, sovereignty, mediation, and even number. In On the Nature of Marx’s Things a materialism “of the encounter,” as recent criticism in the vein of the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form theory, post-Schmittian divisible sovereignty, object-oriented-ontologies and the critique of correlationism, and philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine, Cassin, and Derrida. The inheritors of the problems with which Marx grapples range from Spinoza’s marranismo, through Melville’s Bartleby, through the development of a previously unexplored Freudian political theology shaped by the revolutionary traditions of Schiller and Verdi, through Adorno’s exilic antihumanism against Said’s cosmopolitan humanism, through today’s new materialisms. Ultimately, necrophilology draws the story of capital’s capture of difference away from the story of capital’s production of subjectivity. It affords concepts and procedures for dismantling the system of objects on which neoliberal capitalism stands: concrete, this-wordly things like commodities, but also such “objects” as debt traps, austerity programs, the marketization of risk; ideologies; the pedagogical, professional, legal, even familial institutions that produce and reproduce inequities today.

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318

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Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823279448

ISBN 13

9780823279449

Untranslating Machines

A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought

By: Jacques Lezra

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Untranslating Machines

A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought

By: Jacques Lezra

On what basis can we establish an alternative to the unifying of cultures brought about by economic globalization? When ideas, like objects and words, can be translated and marketed everywhere, what forms of critique are available? Straddling the fields of political philosophy, comparative literature, animal studies, global studies, and political economy, Untranslating Machines proposes to this end a weakened, defective concept of “untranslatability.” The analytic frame of Jacques Lezra’s argument is rooted in Marx, Derrida and Wittgenstein. He moves historically from the moment when “translation” becomes firmly wed to mercantilism and to the consolidation of proto-national state forms, in European early modernity; to the current moment, in which the flow of information, commodities and value-creation protocols among international markets produces the regulative fantasy of a global, coherent market of markets. In a world in which translation and translatability have become a means and a model for the consolidation of a global cultural system, this book proposes an understanding of untranslatability that serves to limit the articulation between a globalized capitalist value-system and the figure and techniques of translation.

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222

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1786605090

ISBN 13

9781786605092

Defective Institutions

A Protocol for the Republic

By: Jacques Lezra

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Defective Institutions

A Protocol for the Republic

By: Jacques Lezra

Defective Institutions overturns the basis of institutionalism. Faith in classic institutions—exposed as clamorously inadequate by the failure of governance under neoliberalism--does not result in greater democracy, greater horizontality, or more equitable living. Nor does trust in the standing of decisions, in the authority of antecedent cases, in the coherence, strength, continuity, or solidity of the institutions that frame and render legitimate these decisions and the rules they buttress. To the contrary: the classically-imagined institution and our faith in it lie at the heart of neoliberal unfreedom and racialized violence. Working at the point of contact and conflict between socialist and anarcho-philosophical traditions, Defective Institutions offers an alternative, which is also an alternative to the figures of governance associated with the liberal conception of the state: an aberrant republicanism comprised of defective institutions, run through with the necessity of their abolition. Lezra’s book moves from the primitive scenes of Western political institution—the city; the family; the university; the first person; “race”—through recent work in the philosophy of translation, decolonial studies, abolitionism, Afropessimism and its critiques, psvchoanalysis, and musicology. To offer an original wedding of abolition and institution, Lezra brings together genealogies of contemporary institutionalism (from Durkheim and Hauriou to Searle); post-Marxist accounts of the state (Balibar, Abensour); philosophical and anthropological anarchism (Wolff, Malabou, Graeber, Scott); critical legal theory (analyses of Marbury v. Madison as well as Dobbs v. Jackson); continental and analytic versions and critiques of foundationalism (Heidegger, Lyotard and Butler; Quine, Searle and Fine); and political and sociological abolitionism (Lewis, O’Brien). At a time when some call for strengthening institutions and for defending liberties ostensibly protected by such institutions, and others long for the destruction of institutions that have long been oppressive, Lezra’s book offers today’s Left a new framework for confronting institutions’ necessity and their necessary abolition.

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315

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Fordham Univ Press

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ISBN 10

1531506933

ISBN 13

9781531506933

Unspeakable Subjects

The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe

By: Jacques Lezra

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Unspeakable Subjects

The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe

By: Jacques Lezra

In readings that link works of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Descartes with current debates in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary and cultural criticism, the author reassesses the grounds of literary and philosophical history as a materialist practice of eventful reading.

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436

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804727783

ISBN 13

9780804727785

Wild Materialism

The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic

By: Jacques Lezra

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Wild Materialism

The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic

By: Jacques Lezra

Blends a discussion of terror with radical democracy in a way that is thoroughly original ... an important book on a large and crucial topic."--Marc Redfield, Claremont Graduate University.

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Page Count

334

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Fordham Univ Press

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ISBN 10

0823232352

ISBN 13

9780823232352

Of Grammatology

By: Jacques Derrida

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Of Grammatology

By: Jacques Derrida

The deconstruction bombshell that rocked the Anglophone world. Jacques Derrida’s revolutionary approach to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, linguistics, and indeed the entire European tradition of philosophy—called deconstruction—changed the face of criticism. It provoked a questioning of philosophy, literature, and the human sciences that these disciplines would have previously considered improper. Forty years after Of Grammatology first appeared in English, Derrida still ignites controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s careful translation, which attempted to capture the richness and complexity of the original. This fortieth anniversary edition, where a mature Spivak retranslates with greater awareness of Derrida’s legacy, also includes a new afterword by her which supplements her influential original preface. Judith Butler has added an introduction. All references in the work have been updated. One of contemporary criticism’s most indispensable works, Of Grammatology is made even more accessible and usable by this new release.

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561

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1421419963

ISBN 13

9781421419961

On the Nature of Marx's Things

Translation as Necrophilology

By: Jacques Lezra

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On the Nature of Marx's Things

Translation as Necrophilology

By: Jacques Lezra

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318

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Fordham Univ Press

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ISBN 10

0823279448

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9780823279449

The Marrano Specter

Derrida and Hispanism

By: Erin Graff Zivin

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The Marrano Specter

Derrida and Hispanism

By: Erin Graff Zivin

The Marrano Specter pursues the reciprocal influence between Jacques Derrida and Hispanism. On the one hand, Derrida’s work has engendered a robust conversation among philosophers and critics in Spain and Latin America, where his work circulates in excellent translation, and where many of the terms and problems he addresses take on a distinctive meaning: nationalism and cosmopolitanism; spectrality and hauntology; the relation of subjectivity and truth; the university; disciplinarity; institutionality. Perhaps more remarkably, the influence is in a profound sense reciprocal: across his writings, Derrida grapples with the theme of marranismo, the phenomenon of Sephardic crypto-Judaism. Derrida’s marranismo is a means of taking apart traditional accounts of identity; a way for Derrida to reflect on the status of the secret; a philosophical nexus where language, nationalism, and truth-telling meet and clash in productive ways; and a way of elaborating a critique of modern biopolitics. It is much more than a simple marker of his work’s Hispanic identity, but it is also, and irreducibly, that. The essays collected in The Marrano Specter cut across the grain of traditional Hispanism, but also of the humanistic disciplines broadly conceived. Their vantage point—the theoretical, philosophically inflected critique of disciplinary practices—poses uncomfortable, often unfamiliar questions for both hispanophone studies and the broader theoretical humanities.

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229

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Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823277690

ISBN 13

9780823277698

Untranslating Machines

A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought

By: Jacques Lezra

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Untranslating Machines

A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought

By: Jacques Lezra

This book explores the interrelated subjects of philosophy of translation and the critique of globalization. Taking a specifically deconstructive-Marxist approach, Lezra examines the concept of translation through the lens of political philosophy, political economy and comparative literature.

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222

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New Critical Humanities

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ISBN 10

1786610892

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9781786610898

Unspeakable Subjects

The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe

By: Jacques Lezra

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Unspeakable Subjects

The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe

By: Jacques Lezra

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436

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Stanford University Press

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0804727783

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9780804727785

Handsomely Done

Aesthetics, Politics, and Media after Melville

By: Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz

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Handsomely Done

Aesthetics, Politics, and Media after Melville

By: Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz

Handsomely Done: Aesthetics, Politics, and Media after Melville brings together leading and emerging scholars from comparative literature, critical theory, and media studies to examine Melville’s works in light of their ongoing afterlife and seemingly permanent contemporaneity. The volume explores the curious fact that the works of this most linguistically complex and seemingly most “untranslatable” of authors have yielded such compelling translations and adaptations as well as the related tendency of Melville’s writing to flash into relevance at every new historical-political conjuncture. The volume thus engages not only Melville reception across media (Jorge Luis Borges, John Huston, Jean-Luc Godard, Led Zeppelin, Claire Denis) but also the Melvillean resonances and echoes of various political events and movements, such as the Attica uprising, the Red Army Faction, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. This consideration of Melville’s afterlife opens onto theorizations of intermediality, un/translatability, and material intensity even as it also continually faces the most concrete and pressing questions of history and politics.

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Page Count

341

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810139758

ISBN 13

9780810139756

Book's by Jacques Lezra

Wild Materialism

Wild Materialism

On the Nature of Marx's Things

On the Nature of Marx's Things

Untranslating Machines

Untranslating Machines

Defective Institutions

Defective Institutions

Unspeakable Subjects

Unspeakable Subjects

Wild Materialism

Wild Materialism

Of Grammatology

Of Grammatology

On the Nature of Marx's Things

On the Nature of Marx's Things

The Marrano Specter

The Marrano Specter

Untranslating Machines

Untranslating Machines

Unspeakable Subjects

Unspeakable Subjects

Handsomely Done

Handsomely Done

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