RAY BRASSIER: MARX & PHILOSOPHY

The New Centre for Research & Practice – Streamed live on Jan 20, 2018

DESCRIPTION: Marx’s analysis of capital continues to haunt contemporary theoretical discourse. As capitalist globalization enters its world-dissolving phase, Marx’s account of the logic of capital provides cognitive traction on this process. Understanding the theoretical and political stakes of his analysis remains an urgent contemporary task. This course will try to reconstruct the movement linking Marx’s critique of philosophy to his critique of political economy by elucidating the fundamental concepts of Marx’s critical theory: alienation, practice, labour, production, commodity, fetishism, value, contradiction. We will examine Marx’s relationship to Hegel and Feuerbach as well as the ongoing controversy between Hegelian and anti-Hegelian interpretations of his work. Lastly, we will consider the stakes of the distinctions between humanism, anti-humanism, and post-humanism in contemporary philosophy and critical theory.