Abstract

This talk will engage with a number of theoretical and critical approaches to questions of mobility and transfer in cultural inquiry, with a primary focus on the era of nation-states and a look towards the post-national. The discussion will take its cues from a number of terms which have been applied to these questions (cross-cultural, intercultural, transcultural, transnational, comparative, global) and a range of theorists who have animated the discussion (including Ahmed, Appadurai, Clifford, Damrosch, Greenblatt, Mignolo). These will prompt and inform a consideration of our interpretative and critical practice as researchers who establish distinct expertise within the language(s) and culture(s) of our chosen specialisms whilst also understanding and valuing the passage of ideas, cultural products, creative practices and languages themselves between and beyond borders of nation, region, language, culture and ethnicity. The discussion will posit a practice of thinking transculturally as a core and distinctive competency of research in Modern Languages for the present and future.

t is usually considered that Derrida’s first real incursion into Marx’s thought was Specters of Marx, published in French in 1993. However, archival research has revealed that Derrida had already offered very lengthy and detailed readings of Marx and Marxist texts much earlier in his career as a philosopher. During the 1960s and 1970s – a very important and prolific period for French and international Marxist thought – Derrida wrote and taught extensively about Marx and Marxist authors (including Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Benjamin, Althusser, Balibar, Buci-Glucksmann, and so on), but none of this work was ever published in Derrida’s lifetime. The discovery of these unpublished materials (approximately 1000 pages altogether) sheds new light on Derrida’s engagement with Marxism and materialism, but also on the ethical and political implications of deconstruction – much earlier than Derrida’s so-called ‘ethical-political turn’ (usually dated, with much bad faith, in the late 1980s or early 1990s). In this talk, we will discuss the political and philosophical aspects of the question – notably the relationship between deconstruction and dialectical materialism, in theoretical and political terms, with special focus on the notions of ‘labour’ and the ‘division of labour’ – but also its historical dimension, that is, the intellectual and political context of the French Marxist scene during the Cold War, before and after May 68: What was Derrida’s relationship with the fields of theoretical and political Marxism? Why did he decline to publish his deconstructive analyses of Marx and Marxist thought at the time? What was Derrida’s position with respect to his Marxist colleagues and contemporaries – in particular his close friend Althusser? How can we interpret the change of scenery justifying the publication of Specters of Marx in 1993, after the end of the Cold War and Althusser’s death?

Thomas Clément Mercier is a postdoctoral researcher at the Universidad Adolfo Ibañez (Santiago, Chile). His work has been published in journals such as Poetics Today, Global Discourse, Oxford Literary Review, Parallax, Derrida Today, CR: The New Centennial Review, Aisthesis, Ostium and Philosophiques. He specialises in 20th-century French philosophy, political thought and international studies, with a particular interest in the multilayered problematics of democracy, violence, and political resistance from the perspectives of deconstruction, Marxism, queer and decolonial thinking. His current projects include a book on deconstruction and Marxist thought, as well as the edition and publication of the Derrida-Althusser correspondence.

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