Now this is just a brief post. N Pepperell of Rough Theory has posted a succinct account of some of her thinking on Derrida’s Specters of Marx. While NP had been focussing on Derrida’s reading of Marx, I had been more directed towards Heidegger’s role in this text. More on this to come. All this is in preparation for the Derrida Today conference that will be in Sydney soon.
In any case, NP and Praxis had been working on Specters and in particular, Derrida’s elision of the phrase: “so it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands” [their emphasis], from a key passage in Capital.
Now, why this ommision?, they ask. Well, this comes down to ‘whose hand is it?’. Is it Marx’s, or is it someone elses? Is there a sleight of hand going on here. Perhaps, I wonder, it could be Heidegger’s hand?
Now, happily, Derrida has written on Heidegger’s hand – the essay called Geschlecht II, subtitled “Heidegger’s Hand”. Heidegger thematises the hand in Was heisst Denken? Derrida, in this essay, traces the hand through this and other parts of Heidegger’s work Recall Being and Time, and the designation of equipmentality as presence-at-hand and ready-to-hand etc.
Now, I don’t have time at the moment here to work out the links between Geschlect II and Specters – I’ll hope to come back to it. But suffice to say that from my quick skim of the essay, the hand, which is intimately caught up with the thought and speech for Heidegger, and therefore thought is the primordial handicraft, that is production and the source of all technics (and Derrida notes that Heidegger refers to Marx here). The hand, so emphasised by Heidegger, is caught up in all the metaphysical themes, according to Derrida, that Heidegger wants to think beyond. Derrida traces all of this in interesting directions to do with national socialism and animality and sexual difference (the resonances of geschlecht).
But anyway, this was just meant to be a quick suggestion that maybe there is a sleight of hand – Marx’s, Heidegger’s, Derrida’s…and where are our hands?
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Pingback on Jun 28th, 2008 at 5:01 am
[...] Drew over at Contaminations has a beautiful post up, riffing off some of the ideas Praxis and I have been bouncing around about [...]
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Pingback on Jun 29th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
[...] christens the fetish. We’ve discussed the possibility that these are Marx’s hands and Heidegger’s hands – what about Husserl’s? From On Touching (2005 pp.179-180): This last example (the visible [...]
June 27, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Drew – This is very nice. Pingbacks don’t seem to be working at my site lately – when I’m more awake, I’ll post a link. Praxis and I had discussed the issue of Heidegger lurking in the background, but I’m not confident enough of my Heidegger to write on the link – very, very interesting to see your analysis and associations.
I’ll ask again: if you’re writing on this, why are we on different panels at this conference? It just seems as though the discussions would benefit from some synergy between the papers…
June 30, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Thanks NP,
I’m not sure if I’m that confident on Heidegger either! But I’m more familiar with him than Marx, hence my choosing that thread.
When I submitted the proposal for the Derrida Today conference I hadn’t indicated which text I would finally present on, and the paper was framed around problems in the philosophy of history I am working on. As it’s turned out, Specters has been the text that usefully groups the themes together.
Looking at the program the whole thing seems disparate. Derrida inspires as many conflicting ghosts as Marx… I’m still relatively inexperienced with these things, so I’m not sure how it will turn out.