Emissaries of the Outside-Within:On the Speecherly in Marx’s “Speech at the Hague”

Abstract

In “Emissaries of the Outside-Within,” Robert Faivre and Julie Torrant read Marx’s 1872 address at The Hague not only for its explicit political statement but for how the speech’s explanation and confirmation of the International’s decisions enact a historical materialist theory of language. Marx’s critique of the mimetic (“readerly”) theory of language provides a dialectical account from outside the bourgeois logic of the market and thus also produces the conceptual resources necessary to critique contemporary anti-mimetic (“writerly”) theories – from textualism to new materialism – which give the market logic of individualism an “ethical” update. In the speech, Marx develops an analytics of class solidarity that enables transformation because it grasps workers as the emissaries of the future: representatives of what has become materially possible given the development of the productive forces of labor but is blocked by the existing capitalist relations of production based on exploitation.