DIGESTION AND THE INFINITY OF LABOR

This essay returns to Jacques Derrida’s 1975 essay, “Economimesis,” to account for its unacknowledged Marxist language. Focusing on Derrida’s analysis of the mouth in the Critique of Judgment, this essay traces a genealogy of oral logic between Kant and Marx that unveils both Marx’s Kantian inheritances and Kant’s proto-Marxist tendencies. In identifying this genealogy, the essay argues that “Economimesis” should be treated as an important reading of Marx, a reading that also demonstrates the critical passages between deconstruction and Marxism. In doing so, it responds to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique that “Economimesis” only demonstrates Derrida’s tendency toward “Marxist metaphorics.”.