Comments on: There’s a Ghost in my House

By: Seán Báite

Seán Báite — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 08:31:34 +0000

Was misled by your title, Donagh, all those heads - Derrida, Althusser, Eagleton, Hegel, Rose - did they get covered by Marx E Smith too ??
Refer yourself to one of his originals too (from the mid 80s) - ‘My New House’ - the line ‘According to the postman, it’s like the bleedin’ Bank of England’ takes on new meaning in the light of the whole sur-prime crisis…
Northern effin’ Rock indeed…

By: sonofstan

sonofstan — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 11:04:35 +0000

The bit I quoted above is from Mourning becomes the Law - the essay on The Comedy of Hegel

By: Donagh

Donagh — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 10:24:02 +0000

Ah, yes, I’ve never read Gillian Rose, but she has an excellent point. And I enjoyed reading part of the intro to Mourning Becomes the Law and completely agree with her opinion that the post-modern is ‘despairing rationalism without reason’, ‘the story of what happens when ‘metaphysics’ is barred from ethics’.

And this bit too

“Yet by disqualifying the universal notions of justice, freedom and the good, for being inveterately metaphysical [….] post-modernism has no imagination for its own implied ground in justice, freedom and the good.”

I guess I’d better start reading her stuff. Thanks for that sonofstan.

By: sonofstan

sonofstan — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:20:21 +0000

In the Derridean spirit of infinite defferal, I offer a ‘text’ about a book I haven’t read, about a book you haven’t read; this is the late Gillian Rose writing about the lecture from which Spectres of Marx derives;

“In distancing himself from Althussers legacy, what does Derrida assert is discardable as the body of Marxism and why? Class structure, class consciousness and class struggle, the party, the law of capital accumulation, the theory of value, human practical activity……….”
and later;
“there is no materialism in Derrida’s account of Marx (…..) This spectral idea of internationalism represents the most explicit emergence of the anarchic utopianism at the heart of postmodern thinking; it is the very antithesis of Marx’s ’scientific socialism”

Possibly unfair on Jacques, but i like that first list….