Speaking Internationalism: Class Difference in the Writerly Cosmopolitics

Abstract

Amrohini Sahay’s paper, “Speaking Internationalism: Class Difference in the Writerly Cosmopolitics,” offers a critical reading of Marx’s “First Address to the International Working Men’s Association” in relation to the institutionalization of what Roland Barthes calls the “writerly” in the cosmopolitical writings of Derrida and Latour. The writerly, Sahay argues, has worked to cancel the inside-outside binary, which (like all binaries) is not discursive but the cultural expression of a (material) two-tier economy, reducing the analysis of the relation of capital to labor to a Deleuzean immanent “intensity.” The immanent displaces the two-sided international class struggle – red internationalism – with cosmopolitanism as a postclass “ethics” – a deconstructive attentiveness to aporias of representation, or, more recently, a Latourian actor-network “irreductionism” that is a renew- ing of the Deleuzean immanent for cognitive capitalism.