THE SPIRIT OF CAPITAL: A CONFERENCE ON HEGEL AND MARX
THE TENTH ANNUAL GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY
AT THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: MOISHE POSTONE
APRIL 28TH -29TH, 2011
“It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’sLogic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” wrote Lenin in 1915. In 1969, Althusser responded, “A century and a half later no one has understood Hegel because it is impossible to understand Hegel without having thoroughly studied and understood Capital.” What are we to make of this challenge today? Are we now ready to understand Hegel through Marx, and Marx through Hegel?
It is high time for a reassessment of the core stakes of the Marx-Hegel debate. What would it mean to think the concepts of capital and spirit together? This conference is a place to explore the internal relations between Hegel and Marx’s philosophical projects. Some possible questions include: how does Hegel’s phenomenology, logic, philosophy of nature, history and right internally contain the elements that Marx will use to decipher the world of property, labor, commodities and capital? Is Capital a logical theory of forms or a theory of history? How does Marx negate and realize Hegel’s project? What is the role of labor in Hegel, and the role of spirit in Marx? Does the development of history show the unfolding of freedom or the unfolding of capital? This conference echoes the early Frankfurt school tradition, with its project for a critique of the social forms of the present. We encourage submissions on a wide range of topics and thinkers:
Possible Themes
Capital and Spirit
Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Grundrisse
Property, Alienation, and Class
Form and Content in Hegel and Marx
Concrete and Abstract Labor
Master and Slave
Critique, Dialectic and Method
Time and History
Freedom and Necessity
Substance and Subject in Capital
The Value-Form
Critique of Labor
Revolution and Negation
Materialism and Idealism
Proletarian Self-Abolition
Commodity, Money and Capital
The Philosophy of Right
Possible Thinkers:
I.I. Rubin
György Lukács
Karl Korsch
Ernst Bloch
Walter Benjamin
Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Theodore Adorno
Herbert Marcuse
CLR James
Raya Dunayevskaya
Guy Debord
Alexander Kojeve
Jean Hyppolite
Frantz Fanon
Helmut Reichelt
Hans-Georg Backhaus
Gillian Rose
EMAIL SUBMISSIONS TO: spiritofcapital@gmail.com
SUBMISSION DEADLINE is Dec 1st, 2010
Papers should be sent as word documents or pdfs, not exceeding 5000 words. Personal information including institutional affiliation is to be sent in the body of the email and should not appear on the paper itself or in the file name.
