In Specters of Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida writes: “Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task.” Ten years later, Fred Moten’s In the Break grapples with a similar notion of inheritance vis-à-vis the theorization of the commodity in Marx’s Capital vol. 1 as a mute object that has to be spoken for. Julius Greve’s talk aims to think through how and why the concept of inheritance—and, at the same time, the question concerning the specter and its haunting voice—resonates with the notion of knowing on a gut-level in deconstruction and in contemporary Black studies. Against this backdrop, Greve will show how the highly acclaimed lyricism of Kendrick Lamar’s work critically enacts the problematics of cultural inheritance in terms of both content and form, writing and voice, as can be witnessed on albums such as To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) and Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers (2022). Finally, this reading will suggest that Derrida’s, Moten’s, and Lamar’s respective accounts of the commodity’s hauntological disposition are part and parcel of the discursive history of ventriloquism; the “phonic materiality” (Moten 2003), that is, of vocal disembodiment.

Julius Greve is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies, University of Oldenburg, Germany. He is the author of Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature (2018), and of numerous essays on contemporary American fiction and poetry, media studies, and critical theory. Greve has co-edited volumes including America and the Musical Unconscious (2015), Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (2017), The American Weird: Concept and Medium (2020), and most recently, “Poetic Voice and Materiality” (2023), a special cluster of ASAP/J. Currently, Greve is working on a monograph that delineates the relation between modern poetics and ventriloquism.