Archives on Contemporary History
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
cordially invites you to a Lecture on
Marx, Temporality, and Modernity
Rethinking Marx's Critical Theory for the Contemporary World
By
Prof. Moishe Postone
University of Chicago
Presided over by
Prof. C.P.Chandrasekhar
Dean, School of Social Sciences, JNU
March 2, 2017, 3.00 pm
Committee Room, School of Social Sciences I, JNU
Tea at 4.30 pm
Moishe Postone is the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of the College, the Center for Jewish Studies, and History Codirector, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory Coeditor, Critical Historical Studies. His research interests include modern European intellectual history; social theory, especially critical theories of modernity; twentieth-century Germany; anti-Semitism; and contemporary global transformations. He is author of the prize-winning book, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory. He is also co-editor with Eric Santner of Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, a collection of essays that consider the meaning of the holocaust in twentieth-century history and its influence on historical practice. Postone's work attempts to rethink the whole Marxist project through a reinterpretation of Marx's mature texts, such as Das Kapital. His work has been translated into German, French, Portugese, Japanese and Chinese. Scholars have used his theories in various disciplines including History, Sociology, Anthropology and Literature.
Abstract: The lecture seeks to explain that an adequate understanding of modern historical development of any country or region in the world today – must be framed with reference to global historical developments of the modern world, and that those forms of development can best be illuminated by a theory of capitalism.
Marx's critical theory is not, on its most fundamental level, a critique of a mode of class exploitation, undertaken from a standpoint that affirms labor. Rather it uncovers and analyzes a unique, abstract form of social domination ultimately rooted in a historically specific form of social interdependence that structures modernity itself as a determinate form of social life. This form of mediation is socially constituted by a historically specific function of labor and manifests itself in peculiar, quasi-objective forms of domination that cannot sufficiently be understood in terms of the domination of a class or, indeed, of any concrete social and/or political entity. These forms of domination, grasped by categories such as commodity and capital, are moreover, not static, and cannot adequately be conceptualized in terms of the market. Rather, they are temporal, constitutive of a historical dynamic that is at the very heart of capitalist modernity. Marx's critical analysis, then, is not an affirmation of the central role played by labor in human society. Rather it is a critique of labor's centrality as historically specific and of the historical dynamic it generates.
