The Spectral Silence of différance, the Speech of Object-Oriented Exploitation

Abstract

In “The Spectral Silence of différance, the Speech of Object-Oriented Exploitation,” Jennifer Cotter argues that Marx’s speeches in Wage- Labour and Capital produce concepts that break the silence on the relations of exploitation behind “exchange-value” and teach workers to see through the “language of the market” that obscures over the social causes of their exploitation in class relations. The dominant (post)humanities, however, teaches methods of analysis that render exploitation “unspeakable” and translate the language of the market into a new metaphysics by asserting that all “values” are underwritten by an originary “différance” (Derrida, Margins of Philosophy) or an ontology of irreducible things-in-themselves (Graham Harman, “The Road to Objects”). To intervene in the way the (post)humanities dismantles classconsciousness, it is particularly urgent to return to Marx’s speeches owing to the way they speak to the development of workers as collective agents of social transformation who understand that capitalism is not a law of nature but a socially and historically produced and therefore collectively transformable mode of production.