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Value | Theory | Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Christopher Nealon
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Extract

My aim in this short essay is to make it possible to read these two passages together, but not in the way i think we'd typically do so in the literary humanities. The passage by Walter Benjamin is a canonical instance of left-literary writing that means to ground itself in Marx's account of capital by demonstrating that the struggle of oppressed peoples, even before the rise of capital, leaves traces in texts and in reading practices. Because of his use of the figure of “the Messiah,” it is possible to read the passage as evidence of Benjamin's messianism, though that is exactly what I intend to suggest we shouldn't do.

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Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 101 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

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