[Review] Paul Delany (2002) Literature, money and the market

Review of: Delany, P., 2002. 'Literature, Money and the Market'. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave

Postmodern Antigones: Women in Black and the Performance of Involuntary Memory

The author analyzes how one non-governmental, anti-war organization in Serbia, Women in Black (Žene u crnom) -- a branch of an international feminist and anti-militarist organization -- remembers and commemorates every year the execution of 8,372 Muslim civilians, in a Bosnian town, Srebrenica that took place in July of 1995. The text is departing from an assumption that the act of remembering does not always depend on a stable system of place, but it can also depend on the bodies, and to concentrate on bodily (or incorporated) practices means to question a dominant idea that only written words, or tangible monuments, may be taken as a metaphor for remembering. Therefore, live performances of Women in Black, here and now, with their subversive aesthetics, are seen as a potential threat. Their performances are also turning them into a kind of contemporary Antigones, or anomalous female historians. To be a female historian is not merely to write about the past, it also means binding oneself to the dead, to tell the truth about the suffering of the Other, who is absent, or dead, and cannot speak for himself

Alienation as a critical concept

This paper discusses Marx's concept of alienated (or estranged) labour, focusing mainly on his account in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. This concept is frequently taken to be a moral notion based on a concept of universal human nature. This view is criticized and it is argued that the concept of alienation should rather be interpreted in the light of Hegelian historical ideas. In Hegel, alienation is not a purely negative phenomenon; it is a necessary stage of human development. Marx's account of alienated labour should be understood in similar terms. It is not a merely subjective discontent with work; it is an objective and historically specific condition, a stage in the process of historical development. Marx usually regards it as specific to capitalism. The criticism of capitalism implied in the concept of alienation, it is argued, does not appeal to universal moral standards; it is historical and relative. Overcoming alienation must also be understood in historical terms, not as the realization of a universal ideal, but as the dialectical supersession of capitalist conditions of labour. Marx's account of communism as the overcoming of alienation is explained in these terms