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Bound to Labor: Life and Labor in (Early) Marx and (Early) Derrida
- Minnesota Review
- Duke University Press
- Issue 87, 2016 (New Series)
- pp. 139-148
- Article
- Additional Information
The work of Marx has often been treated as an ontology and metaphysics of labor, and this “ontology” has often been resisted in the name of life. In particular, in a series of recent theoretical works, the “savage ontology of life,” as Foucault names it, has been posed against the “limits” of political economy and Marx. This claim to escape the bind of labor and of Marx is critiqued by a return to the early Marx and the early Derrida to explore a different reading of the binding of life to labor. Contrary to Derrida’s later reading, in