Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T04:05:28.486Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Birth of Theory and the Long Shadow of the Dialectic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jord/ana Rosenberg
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Theories, like people, need their fetishes. I'm speaking not of the object fixations of the contemporary humanities but rather of those figures that, while extrinsic to a theory's methodology—even striking a sour or discordant lexical note—come to possess and animate that theory. Such, at least, was true for Marx's Capital, which derives a good deal of its analytic force from the sacramental magnificence of the spirit world. Indeed, the religious language of the fetish—irreducible to the logic of exchange value and the mechanics of equivalence that Capital extrapolates—is the motor of the text. It is so because the language of the fetish lies outside the terms of political economy. The fetish—Capital's indispensable outlier—denaturalizes the banal, violent fungibilities that are the capitalist lifeworld, wreaking its stomach-turning unveilings as if from another planet. Capital would not be Capital without its fetish.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 3 , May 2015 , pp. 799 - 808
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Amin, Samir. Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment. Trans. Pearce, Brian. New York: Monthly Rev., 1978. Print.Google Scholar
Avilez, GerShun. “Cartographies of Desire.” Callaloo 34.1 (2011): 126–42. Print.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1969. Print.Google Scholar
Best, Stephen. “On Failing to Make the Past Present.” Modern Language Quarterly 73.3 (2012): 454–74. Print.Google Scholar
Best, Stephen, and Marcus, Sharon. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” The Way We Read Now. Ed. Best and Marcus. Spec. issue of Representations 108.1 (2009): 1–21. Print.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print.Google Scholar
Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Chaudhary, Zahid. “Subjects in Difference: Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, and Postcolonial Theory.” Differences 23.1 (2012): 151–83. Print.Google Scholar
Cole, Andrew. The Birth of Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cole, Andrew. “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies.” Minnesota Review 80 (2013): 106–16. Print.Google Scholar
Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2014. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delany, Samuel R. About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2006. Print.Google Scholar
Delany, Samuel R. Interview with Kenneth James. YouTube. YouTube, 18 June 2012. Web.Google Scholar
Delany, Samuel R. “Shadows.” Longer Views: Extended Essays. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1996. 251–323. Print.Google Scholar
Delany, Samuel R. “A Silent Interview with Samuel Delany.” Rain Taxi. Rain Taxi, Nov. 2000. Web. 17 Dec. 2014.Google Scholar
Delany, Samuel R. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. New York: Magnus, 2012. Kindle file.Google Scholar
Duchamp, Marcel. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Ed. Sanouillet, Michel and Peterson, Elmer. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Print.Google Scholar
Galloway, Alexander R. Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2014. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galloway, Alexander R. “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism.” Critical Inquiry 39.2 (2013): 347–66. Print.Google Scholar
Harkins, Gillian. Everybody's Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Harutoonian, Harry. “Remembering the Historical Present.” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 471–94. Print.Google Scholar
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Jennison, Ruth. The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Print.Google Scholar
Jerng, Mark. “A World of Difference: Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and the Protocols of Racial Reading.” American Literature 83.2 (2011): 252–78. Print.Google Scholar
Love, Heather. “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn.” New Literary History 41.2 (2010): 371–91. Print.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Penguin, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mezzadra, Sandro, and Neilsen, Brett. Border as Method; or, The Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke UP, 2013. Print.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013. Print.Google Scholar
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Nealon, Christopher. “Infinity for Marxists.” Mediations 28.2 (2015): 47–63. Web. 3 Aug. 2015.Google Scholar
Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York: New York UP, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Singh, Nikhil. “The Whiteness of Police.” American Quarterly 66.4 (2014): 1091–99. Print.Google Scholar