On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory.


Syllabus Autumn 2008

 Form-giving fire
A critique of post-operaist Marxism and its concept of living labor 

The second part of the seminar series on the post-workerist concept of living labor starts with a discussion of Moishe Postone's analysis of value theory by which he rejects any use-value and appropriation oriented idea of living labor as antagonist content or creative potentiality. Capital, Postone argues, is not the mystified form of powers that acutally are those of the workers, rather it is the real form of existence of species capacities that are constituted historically in alienated form as socially general powers. While Postone returns to the Hegelian current in Marx's critique of political economy, we will subsequently debate three different deconstructions of Marx's theory which avoid the dialectical short-circuit persisting in the idea of the social as effect of a law that explains it by having interiorized all its relations: Derrida's deconstruction of value theory, Balibar's deconstruction of Marx's shifting concepts of ideology and his temporary idea of politics as pure proletarian act, Rancière's corresponding critique of Marxian metapolitics that displace politics by class as both, positive social content of a false capitalist form and as negative pure excess, the immediate dissolution of the status quo, against which Rancière demonstrates how that which is proper to the political is precisely an absence of the proper.


Thursday 11 September
10:00 – 12:00
Value and Capitalist Capacity
Reading Moishe Postone's "Time, Labor and Social Domination"
- Seminar
- Room 204

Moishe Postone: Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 144-158; 166-171

Monday 6 October
16:00 - 18:00
Deconstructing Value Theory
Reading Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx"
- Seminar
- Room 204

Jacques Derrida: Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, London and New York: Routledge, 1994 (second half of the last chapter), pp. 147-177 http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida2.htm

Monday 3 November
18:00 - 20:00
Steve Wright
Tronti's Legacy: The Refusal of Labor
- Guest Lecture by Steve Wright, Monash University, Australia
- Auditorium

Tuesday 4 November
11:00 - 13:00
The non-totalizable complexity of the historical process
Reading Balibar's "The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism"
- Seminar with Steve Wright
- Paper by Ozren Pupovac
- Room 204

Etienne Balibar: Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism I. In Masses, Classes, Ideas, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 87-102

Thursday 4 December
18:00 - 20:00
Martin Saar
Political Spinozism. Negri on Power.
- Guest Lecture by Martin Saar, University of Frankfurt/M.
- Auditorium

Friday 5 December
11:00 -13:00
Marx's Metapolitics
Reading Jacques Rancière's "Dis-agreement"
- Seminar
- Paper by Emiliano Battista
- Room 204

Jacques Ranciere: Dis-agreement. Politics and Philosophy, London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pr, 1999, pp. 82-93