A panel with Katerina Kolozova, Alberto Toscano and Conrad Hamilton
In the past decade or so, the notion of real abstraction – hitherto a relatively marginal item in the Marxist and principally associated with the critical project of Alfred Sohn-Rethel – has played an increasingly prominent role in theoretical debate. Of particular note has been the way in which the thesis whereby capitalist domination operates through abstractions that are not in our heads, while originating in the Marxian critique of political economy, has cut across the fields of aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, philosophy and political thought. But if, as Marx argued in the Grundrisse, ‘Individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another’, what is the precise nature of those abstractions, and of that rule? This panel will explore the contemporary currency of real abstraction, bringing the interpretation of this concept into contact with other domains of theoretical debate, including racial capitalism, the politics of identity and the proliferation of non-Marxist materialisms.
The Radical Dyad of the Non-Human: Thinking Inequality Beyond Identity as Reification – Katerina Kolozova
Articulations: Real Abstraction and Racial Capitalism – Alberto Toscano
The Unfinished Revolution of Real Abstraction – Conrad Hamilton
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