A Marxist Philosophy of Language (Historical Materialism)

Central to the critical materialism that informs this book... is the insistence

that the concrete bodies, practices, and desires, which have been forgotten

by idealism, perform a return of the repressed. Invariably, these things return

in devalued form, as ‘the excrescences of the system,’ as the degraded and

discarded elements of refuse which ‘show the untruth, the mania, of the

systems themselves.’ The task of critical theory is produce a knowledge

built out of these excrescences, a knowledge derived from attending to the

fragments which have escaped the imperial ambitions of linguistic idealism.

And this means starting from the body....^9

We can welcome this philosophical programme in that it adopts a materialist
position. The labouring body is what linguistic idealism, which prefers angels,
excludes; and it does indeed reappear in the outgrowths of the system, which
subvert its ideality (as the inventor of the linguistic concept of ‘remainder ’,
I cannot but sympathise with this viewpoint). The origin of the idealist
conception of language is clearly attributed to a basic feature of market society,
in which we have no difficulty recognising fetishism. At this stage, the concept
of ‘body’ is still vague, and not wholly distinct from the erotic body of the
psychoanalysts. But it becomes more precise when this body becomes labouring,
when the ‘labouring body’ emerges, introduced in the most classical Marxist
terms (with a feminist nuance):

Of course, bourgeois discourses have to admit the body at some stage of

the game. But they do so by ‘cleansing’ it of the sweat of labor and the

blood of menstruation and childbirth. The bourgeois body is a sanitized,

heroic male body of rational (nonbiological) creatures: it does not break

under the strain of routinized work; it does not menstruate, lactate, or go

into labor; it does not feel the lash of the master ’s whip; it does not suffer

and die. The bourgeois body is, in short, an abstraction.^10

I like the direct language that uses the adjective ‘bourgeois’ unreservedly.
And the lyricism of this passage owes something to the North-American
conjuncture: McNally plays on the ambiguity of the word ‘labour ’ (work and
parturition) and signals a solidarity, which has something obligatory about
it but can only arouse our sympathy, with the struggles of women and blacks.

180 • Chapter Seven

(^9) McNally 2001, pp. 1, 4.
(^10) McNally 2001, p. 5.