Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in R e v i e w
labour. There is no doubt that the book
provides a thoughtful elaboration of Marx's
labour theory of value, along with a consideration
of competing value theories. What
remains baffling is the offhand rejection of
"postmodernism" (which for Smith
encompasses a wide range of theorists from
Derrida to Foucault to Laclau and Mouffe)
in a text that makes no effort to engage
with the consequences for Marxism, both
direct and indirect, posed by Derrida,
Foucault, and others.
Indeed, far from confronting the challenge
to fundamental Marxist assumptions
made by "celebrants of 'postmodernism'
and/or 'post-structuralism,'" Smith deliberately
identifies four basic "premisses" (sic)
grounding the Marxist project: i) that experiential
reality "is an ontologically unified
ensemble or totality," ii) that the subject of
history is "real living individuals," iii) that
human actions are "purposive and rational,"
and iv) that "Marx's pivotal notion of
a 'universal human history' [is] marked
by a determinate (if not 'inexorable') developmental
logic." These premises are,
according to Smith, too fundamental to
be questioned, effectively eliminating
any troubling reservations about the status
of history, reality, or subjectivity those
he dubs 'postmodernists' might have
brought up.
The bulk oí Invisible Leviathan is given
over to a debate waged entirely on the
grounds of conventional economics, and
here Smith's careful elaboration of key
Marxist concepts is very valuable. But the
rigidity of the four initial premises leads to
the repetition of clichéd Marxist positions
such as "capitalism is, at bottom, an 'irrational'
and historically limited system, one
that digs its own grave. . .." Smith's caricature
of "disoriented" postmodernist intellectuals
"[w]allowing in impressionism"
precludes any serious engagement with the
possibility that current crises in capitalism—such
as the increasing fragmentation
and disorganization of the working class,
rising rates of'structural unemployment,' a
shift in emphasis from the mode of production
to what Mark Poster has called
"the mode of information"—are also crises
for orthodox Marxism, crises that cannot
be resolved within an unmodified Marxist
paradigm founded on unquestioned
assumptions. The irony is that it is precisely
those 'postmodernists' Smith rejects who
have endeavoured to uncover the historical
formation and ideological function of categories
such as a universal history or the
idea of progress or Enlightenment, and in
so doing have made possible a critique of
Marxism that does not repudiate it entirely.
While Murray Smith is intent on protecting
Marx from his critics, Rodolphe
Gasché, in Inventions of Difference: On
Jacques Derrida, seems intent on saving
Derrida from his own admirers. Gasché's
book collects essays from 1979 to 1993, each
revealing the depth of Derrida's involvement
with the philosophical tradition,
especially his relationship to Hegel. Gasché
contends that Derrida has been misappropriated
by two identifiable groups. On the
one hand, literary critics such as J. Hillis
Miller have popularized an impoverished
and simplistic variant of deconstruction,
while on the other hand, philosophers such
as Richard Rorty claim that Derrida has
rejected philosophy as a universal discourse
and turned his attention to creating a localized,
private discourse. In response,
Gasché's essays show that Derrida's thought
cannot be detached from the philosophical
tradition, and indeed elaborates upon that
tradition.
If there is a single thread of continuity
linking Gasché's essays, it is his concern
with the play of intelligibility and unintelligibility
in Derrida's work. In the preface he
frames this point in terms of the tension
between invention (the completely new)
and comprehension (the code within which
the new must be interpreted): "For a differ-
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