Bro Ken,
Thanks for your support. Your insight is right as usual that Specters of Marx is ripe for a debate by African scholars and friends of Africa. Not only was it written in response to a 'Whither Marxism' conference to which no African was invited except Derrida, the symposium on it consisting of review essays completely missed the point of Derrida's African perspective (with the exception of Terry Eagleton's polemic which recognized that it was a text about the African National Congress even while being critical of Derrida for what he called his opportunism, a charge that Derrida denied in his hilarious response, 'Marx and Sons': 1) That in African thought, the spirit remains an important part of reality that cannot be banished by crude materialism and so even after Marx set Hegel back on his feet, he did not chop off his head, for instance; 2) That Marx never denied the existence of the spiritual or ideological aspect of the struggles contrary to the views of those he dubbed the Sons of Marx who proceed as if Marxism is an inherited materialist property of theirs based on a certain reading of The German Ideology; 3) That the inheritance of Marx includes his enormous debts to Africa in the sense that the struggle against slavery and the enslavement of Africans became for him the paradigm for the struggle against wage slavery or capitalism. This hegemonic African presence in Das Kapital is yet to be acknowledged by most analysts even when the spirit of Africa haunts hundreds of pages of Capital, vol. 1. Thanks for your encouragement, Ken, maybe I should get started on this startling discovery hidden in plain sight. Eric Williams, CLR James, Du Bois and Walter Rodney already indicated that black slavery was the dominant mode of primitive accumulation of capital by the West (contrary to Weber's theory of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) but I am yet to read a text that identifies Marxism as a theory that was influenced by the struggles of Africans rather than the white-supremacist opposite assumption that African struggles were always dependent on Eurocentric Marxism for guidance. Biko --- On Thu, 12/23/10, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
From: kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Derrida as Africa-Centered Critical Scholar-Activist
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Thursday, December 23, 2010, 4:29 PM
thanks to biko for a wonderful review. i would quibble about this
point or that, but the overall sense of derrida and his political
sensibilities are captured quite nicely. without burdening the list
i would recommend the discussion of marxism in derrida's Spectres of
Marx, which biko analyzes in the context of derrida's larger
political thought.
derrida was one of the great minds of our times, and thanks to biko
for capturing so much of his importance
ken
On 12/23/10 3:06 PM, Biko Agozino wrote:
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kenneth w. harrow
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
east lansing, mi 48824-1036
ph. 517 803 8839
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