︎ Deconstructive Realism and the Naturalization of Bourgeois Metaphysics


Jan 08, 2022



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This seminar explores the relationship between Derrida’s realism and his critique of Marxism in order to assess the resources that deconstruction offers contemporary realist/materialist projects. Starting from Derrida’s recently published lecture course Theory and Practice, Elmore details Derrida’s resistance, particularly in his critique of Althusser, to a number of key Marxist assertations in order to show how this resistance complicates the recent and quite compelling attempts to find in Derrida’s thought a dynamic realism/materialism. In particular, it is Derrida’s strange resistance to the materialist insistence on the preponderance of the object that, for Elmore, proves most decisive and problematic, this resistance at odds with Derrida’s dynamic account of the real itself.


( Rick Elmore)