Introduction: Talking Revolution: Marx’s Speeches and the Speculative Communism

Abstract

This special issue on “Marx’s Speeches” is an intervention into the dominant framework of “writing” that has underwritten the (post)humanities since the 1960s in the global North, in which the project of social transformation is reduced to a series of speculative interpretations and re-interpretations without end. Marx’s speeches, DeFazio and Wilkie argue, are not only about specific issues related to capitalism and the struggle of working people to transform it. They are also meta-texts on the historical conditions of language and consciousness and their dialectical connection to material relations. Marx’s speeches, in this regard, are “speecherly”: they are informed by and advance a materialist understanding of the relation of consciousness and the material world that also creates conditions for collectively changing material relations. Through a critical re-reading of the dominant articulations of writing and speech in contemporary cultural theory – from foundational critics such as Barthes, Derrida, Heidegger, and Foucault to the “speculative realism” of Harman, Barad, and Bennett – the Introduction argues that the materialist theory of the speecherly in Marx’s speeches makes theoretical thinking part of the everyday and thus turns the working class into revolutionary citizen-philosophers in the struggle for socialist transformation. The texts comprising the special issue are part of a project to return use-value to language and undo its appropriation by neoliberal capitalism by such concepts as “writing,” “writerly,” “reader-ly” […] and, of course, différant-ly.