[Marxism] 2 micro-reviews of Werner Hamacher (+ critique)

[Max Clark]

Included below are a generous review of Werner Hamacher's essay, 'Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida's Specters of Marx', another kind review of his essay ''The Right to Have Rights (Four-and-a-Half Remarks)', and my brief critique of both entitled 'The Banality of Hamacher'.

All were "originally" posted at http://clarkmax.blogspot.com/ 

The very best,
Max Clark

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I. 

On Reading Hamacher's 'Lingua Amissa' 

Werner Hamacher, a close "brother" of Derrida, makes for obligatory reading in his 'Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida's Specters of Marx'. It has come to assume for me the premier rank amongst the entire "symposium" of texts on Derrida's Specters of Marx gathered under the title Ghostly Demarcations -- surpassing indeed even the contributions of Ahmad, Eagleton, Jameson, and Derrida himself. All its patient readers will greatly enrich themselves through Hamacher's superb reiteration and contextual fleshing out of one among Marx's primary theoretical categories, "commodity-language". Hamacher also includes in the latter part of this essay a telling rehearsal of the empty messianic formalism found in Derrida's Specters of Marx -- this betrays, although absent a critique, the theological "point of infection" in Derrida better than any else currently available on the market. In end, essential. I hope to return to it soon here. 

II.

On reading Hamacher's 'The Right to Have Rights' 

Having just completed Hamacher's essay on commodity-fetishism, 'Lingua Amissa' (see review [above]), I now turn to his much shorter work on state-fetishism, 'The Right to Have Rights (Four-and-a-Half Remarks)'. Both are essentially reiterations of Marx. None, furthermore, underline as well as Hamacher how the most popular "post-Marxist" theoretical currents owe a massive debt to Marx. Hamacher confesses for the guilty conscience of the milieu afraid to name Marx as their direct ancestor. In this he also salvages the hidden social content of their oftentimes abstracted discourses. Perhaps this explains his relative obscurity or effective non-dissemination or censorship. Such things aside, Hamacher's 'The Right to Have Rights' is easily the best critique of right to have appeared in the past several decades. Its greater fidelity to Marx allows it easily to excel beyond, and thus also make intelligible, Agamben's vastly more popular Homo Sacer. Hamacher
 also deftly articulates the genealogical emergence of Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism from a close reading of Marx's 'On the Jewish Question'.. He redeems Arendt as a "daughter" of Marx. It is only Hamacher's concluding passages, wherein he largely abstracts from the texts of Marx and Arendt, that I have reservations about. 

III.

The Banality of Hamacher 

Having given two rather generous reviews of Hamacher's essays (see [above]) I am now prepared to contribute something towards his critique. In essence, everywhere Hamacher digresses from his close readings of figures like Marx and Arendt (and I assume Hegel, although I've not read Hamacher's pleroma) he opens himself to the charge of banality. Banality, as in 'devoid of freshness or originality' (i.e. not 'evil'). Banal, because everywhere Hamacher leaves the more important text in question his 'original' discourse covertly reproduces the (at least non-banal) text of Derrida. A critique of Derrida is not something I'm prepared to give at this moment. Suffice it to say I have my reservations. Also, that Hamacher's value, being a banal replication of Derrida's, is dependent on the value of Derrida's.