Books by Jacques Lezra

On the Nature of Marx's Things traces to Marx's earliest writings a Lucretian practice that Lezra calls necrophilological translation.

On what basis can we establish an alternative to the unifying of cultures brought about by economic globalization? When ideas, like objects and words, can be translated and marketed everywhere, what forms of critique are available? Straddling the fields of political philosophy, comparative literature, animal studies, global studies, and political economy, Untranslating Machines proposes to this end a weakened, defective concept of ';untranslatability.' The analytic frame of Jacques Lezra's argument is rooted in Marx, Derrida and Wittgenstein. He moves historically from the moment when ';translation' becomes firmly wed to mercantilism and to the consolidation of proto-national state forms, in European early modernity; to the current moment, in which the flow of information, commodities and value-creation protocols among international markets produces the regulative fantasy of a global, coherent market of markets. In a world in which translation and translatability have become a means and a model for the consolidation of a global cultural system, this book proposes an understanding of untranslatability that serves to limit the articulation between a globalized capitalist value-system and the figure and techniques of translation.

In readings that link works of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Descartes with current debates in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary and cultural criticism, the author reassesses the grounds of literary and philosophical history as a materialist practice of eventful reading.

Opening a methodological dialogue between Freud's work and Althusser's late understanding of aleatory materialism, the author shows how an ethic of terror, and in the political sphere a radically democratic republic, can be built on what he calls 'wild materialism'.