The Spirit of Capital: Philosophy Graduate Student Conference on Hegel and Marx at the New School for Social Research

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Call For Papers

Tenth Annual Philosophy Graduate Student Conference at the New School for Social Research   

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: MOISHE POSTONE

APRIL 28TH -29TH, 2011

55 W 13th St., New York, New York

The New School University

The New School for Social Research

“It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the  whole of Hegel’s Logic. 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.

Themes
We encourage submissions on a wide range of topics and thinkers: 

Themes	Thinkers
The Philosophy of Right	I.I. Rubin
Substance and Subject in Capital	György Lukács
Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Grundrisse	Karl Korsch
Property, Alienation, and Class	Ernst Bloch
Form and Content in Hegel and Marx	Walter Benjamin
Concrete and Abstract Labor	Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Master and Slave	Theodore Adorno
Critique, Dialectic and Method	Herbert Marcuse
Time and History	CLR James
Freedom and Necessity	Raya Dunayevskaya
The Value-Form	Guy Debord
Critique of Labor	Alexander Kojeve
Revolution and Negation	Jean Hyppolite
Proletarian Self-Abolition	Frantz Fanon
Materialism and Idealism	Helmut Reichelt
Commodity, Money and Capital	Hans-Georg Backhaus
Capital and Spirit	Gillian Rose

Submissions
Papers ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 words should be submitted in blind review format to s p i r i t o f c a p i t a l @ gmail.com
Include the following in the body of the email:
i. Author’s name
ii. Title of Paper
iii. Institutional affiliation
iv. Contact information (email, phone number, mailing address)
Please omit any self-identifying information within the body of the paper.

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Plato's Allegory of the Cave in Plain Language

Retold from The Republic of Plato

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image credit: "Plato and the Pure Forms"

       Once upon a time, everyone on earth lived in total darkness. In a cave.
       The only light people had was from a huge fire. The fire never stopped burning. The fire shone light from behind the people. But people were unable to turn around and see the source of the light because they were all chained to a wall. In between the fire and the people were cut-outs, of animals, trees, dogs, cars, etc., all the objects of the sensible world.
        The light from the flame cast the outline of the paper cut-outs onto the wall of the cave. The people chained to the wall were only able to perceive shadows of objects and not real objects. People only saw images. People were content. No one attempted to escape.
        But, one day a man became unchained. He at first did not know what to do with his new found freedom. But, he decided to turn around. He was surprised to see, when he turned around, that what he thought was real, was only shadows cast onto a wall from paper cut-outs.
         "That's lame," he said.
         He walked around the fire and the paper cut-outs and found an exit out of the cave. He climbed out. He stood on solid ground. He looked up and saw the brightness of the sun and shielded his eyes. The light was intense. After living in a cave all his life he had never experience the light of the sun. The intensity of the light was way too much for his unaccustomed eyes. But after a few hours above ground he began to adjust to the light and was able to see more clearly. He could discern leaves on trees and was able to distinguish goats from dogs. Everything was way more clear than down in the darkness of the cave.
        He became so overjoyed at what he was seeing, that he decided to tell all his friends in the cave so they could know the truth. He went back underground. Into the darkness.
        "Hey, guys. It's me. Look. You're all chained to a wall and what you see on the wall is not really real. Those are just shadows. You cannot see it, but behind you is a fire that casts shadows of paper objects onto the wall. None of that is real. I have been above ground and seen the sun and have seen real trees and real dogs. Not shadows. Allow me to release you from your chains and you can see for yourself."
        The people would not have any of this. They said amongst themselves, "He is crazy. Let us kill him." So they did. All at once they pounced on him and killed him because they could not accept the truth of his words.
         After they killed him they forgot about him. To this day no one speaks of the unchained man.

The End

If you would like to teach your students the Allegory of the Cave and you need additional resources, check out this lesson plan I created on Teachers Pay Teachers. You and your students will love it - and I gave it a lot of extra time and attention (which I hope you'll use and appreciate).

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Art Review: Hitler McDonald

Learn about Noah Lyon, an artist in New York City who does mashups of Ronald McDonald-cum-Adolf Hitler.

Noah Lyon, an artist in New York City, has showcased at the New York Art Book Expo his poster image of an amalgam between Hitler and Ronald McDonald. Strangely, the combination seems appropriate, don't you think?

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Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Plato's Theory of Bisexuality

Read about how the song "Origin of Love" from the musical movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a primer on Plato's theory of bisexuality.

image credit: Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Freud uses the myth of the three human figures (taken from Plato’s Symposium) to illustrate the human instinct to return to a former state, which he calls the death drive, which, as seen by the myth, is fueled by the libido of desire.

“‘The original human nature was not like the present, but different. In the first place, the sexes were originally three in number, not two as they are now; there was man, woman, and the union of the two.’ Everything about these primaeval men was double: they had four hands and four feet, two faces, two privy parts, and so on. Eventually Zeus decided to cut these men in two .... After the division had been made, ‘the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one.’” (Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 69-70).

In the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Hedwig uses the same myth to inspire a song she calls “The Origin of Love.” 

Feel inspired? Use the lesson plan I added to the TpT catalog.

Lyrics from “Origins of Love”

Photograph: "Make A Wish"

The Make-a-Wish Virgin

There are miracles around us. New Orleans is a city of the night. If you live here, it is imperative that you make your way through its streets with an open eye. You never know what you may find.

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Philosophers and Their Buzzwords: A Primer on Metaphysics

A Table of Western Philosophers and Their Metaphysical Systems

Philosopher	Buzzword
Thales	Arche (Latin for "first principle")
Heraclitus	Becoming
Parmenides	The One
Socrates	Dialectic
Plato	The Forms
Aristotle	being qua being
Thomas Aquinas	God as Being
Descartes	The Cogito (Latin for "I think")
Spinoza	God as Causa Sui
Leibniz	Monads
Hume	Experience
Kant	The Transcendental
Hegel	Absolute Spirit
Nietzsche	Will-to-Power
Kierkegaard	Relation
Marx	Capital
Freud	Ego
Heidegger	Dasein (Literally in Germain, "being-there")
Sartre	Existence precedes essence
Lacan	Symbolic
Foucault	Power
Derrida	Différance (with an “a”)
Bataille	Eros
Deleuze	Flow
Baudrillard	Simulacrum
Desmond	The Metaxu (The Between)
Butler	Inscribed Body
Žižek	Ideology

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image credit: Society Of Metaphysical Advancement

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Film Still: Playing Chess With Death

In this post, I jot down some thoughts on when I first saw Ingmar Bergman's 1957 black and white masterpiece The Seventh Seal.

"The Seventh Seal" (written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and  starring Max von Sydow and Bengt Ekerot)
        The Seventh Seal is a visually stunning movie. And it has a narrative that keeps the viewer fixated. Death has come to collect Antonius Block (played by Max von Sydow), a crusader who has returned home from war to find his home stricken by Bubonic Plague. Death offers a concession — beat him in a game of chess. And the crusader can cheat death. What transpires after this pact is a visual lexicon of human suffering and hope for that which is beyond all hope. Filled with religious symbolism that is concurrent with the era of the plague — Europe in the Fourteenth Century — the film plays on themes of chance and deceit to deliver its message. In one scene, the Crusader goes to a church and confesses to a priest, all the while, revealing what his next chess move will be. The curtain is revealed, and it is death itself pretending to be a prelate.         Ironically, the movie offers a sublime treatment on the theme of death and despair. And presents a couple of transcendent moments as well — including what appears to be a vision of the Virgin Mary who appears to Jof (played by Nils Poppe), a lovable roving theater actor (which I found to be shot in soft light, a trick of the camera that enunciates the ethereal moment and leaves the event to mystery. Was it really the Virgin Mary? Or was it just a mirage that the actor saw through bleary, morning eyes?         I first saw the Seventh Seal as a teenager. I had checked it out from the local public library and I know it had an effect on me. It was the first movie that I had seen that played with visual allegories — like an early scene where Death cuts down a corpulent human who has tried to escape by climbing up a tree! I remember trying to show the movie to a couple of friends, but they were bored by it and could not relate to its what seemed out-of-date imagery. I think I related to the idea of Antonious Block, preventing death from taking him, so he could carve out one meaningful event in his life after having lived it so vainly and disagreeably in war. At one point, Block asks, (and I am paraphrasing), "What is there?" and Death gives a matter-of-fact answer: "Nothing."         What I felt the movie was saying was that life is fleeting, and beauty is captured in a moment, then gone. The famous final scene — all of the cast carried away in a dance towards Death — seems to me, a visual for life lived, of the fragile connections we have with others and the suddenness with which life comes to an end. That is why Bergman chose the Plague as his setting. In a time of disease, death is everywhere; one can smell it, taste it, know it. And it forces one to come up out of one's everyday dealings and contend with finality.         Deep stuff. PDF Copy for Printing