This book traces to Karl Marx's earliest writings on the Epicurean tradition, a subterranean, Lucretian practice that this book calls “necrophilological translation.” “Translation” here is extensively used and covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx's thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an “object” is; “matter; ... More

This book traces to Karl Marx's earliest writings on the Epicurean tradition, a subterranean, Lucretian practice that this book calls “necrophilological translation.” “Translation” here is extensively used and covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx's thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an “object” is; “matter;” “value;” “sovereignty;” “mediation;” and “number.” In this book, a materialism “of the encounter,” as recent criticism in the vein of the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form theory; the development of so-called divisible sovereignty in post-Schmittian political philosophy; Meillassoux's critique of correlationism; the resurgence of humanism in object-oriented-ontologies; and philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine, Cassin, and Derrida. The book addresses Marx through Lucretius; through Spinoza's marranismo; through his translators. Freud's account of the agency of the unconscious, through Schiller's Don Karlos; Adorno's exilic antihumanism, against Said's cosmopolitan humanism; the absolutization of what is not-one, in Badiou, Meillassoux, and Freud through Donne and Neruda.