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HM Online 2020: Whither Real Abstraction?

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A panel with Katerina Kolozova, Alberto Toscano and Conrad Hamilton

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PLEASE NOTE YOU WILL RECEIVE AN EMAIL WITH THE LINK TO VIEW THE PANEL APPROX 1 HOUR BEFORE THE EVENT BEGINS.

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

Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s epistemology enables a materialist account of the abstractions embodied by the species being of humanity, i.e., the “social relations” that include the questions of individual and collective subjectivation. By recourse to François Laruelle’s non-philosophical procedure of ridding Marxism of “the principle of philosophical sufficiency,” aligning it with Marx’s own ambition to “exit philosophy,” and grounding it in Sohn-Rethel’s epistemology we will examine the fallacies of reification in mainstream identity politics as opposed to affirming social abstractions as real and materialist of the last instance. Sohn-Rethel’s epistemology facilitates a collectivist language of structural inequalities that include questions of gender, sexual difference and class going beyond the post-liberal individualism of mainstream progressive politics and its poststructuralist epistemology.

Articulations: Real Abstraction and Racial Capitalism – Alberto Toscano

Debates about the nexus of capital and race are frequently framed as pitting the abstract and the concrete. Those who argue that racialisation is not an integral feature of capital accumulation, often posit that while lived histories of capitalist exploitation might be saturated with skin prejudice and privilege, ultimately it is possible to think the formal determinations of capital in abstraction from race (and gender and sexuality and… but not class). Conversely, certain formulations of racial capitalism stake their claims against a classist orthodoxy on the inescapable concreteness of racial domination and white supremacy. The aim of this talk will be to bring into dialogue debates on racial capitalism and real abstraction, with a specific focus on both distinguishing and articulating the violence of abstraction in its racial and value modalities, while identifying different practices and devices of abstraction (juridical, metrological, philosophical) that cut across race and capital. As I will argue, treating race as an empirical instrument of or supplement to capital understood as the transcendental principle of socio-economic organisation is untenable. Similarly, to turn ‘real abstraction’ into some kind of inescapable objective spirit is to flinch back from its scandalous challenge to any philosophical idealism, even the crypto-idealism of many strains of value theory.  

The Unfinished Revolution of Real Abstraction – Conrad Hamilton

Since the ‘Great Recession’ of 2007-08, Marxist philosophy has come a long way towards breaking out of the structuralist, “closed circle of idealism” that Sebastiano Timpanaro prophetically claimed in 1975 would persist until the arrival of a “new socio-political situation.” This shift has been attested to by the popularization—in no small part due to the efforts of Alberto Toscano—of the notion “real abstraction” as an epistemological mediator. In the work of the thinker who originally coined the term, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, “real abstraction" refers to the idea according to which epistemological formations from the time of the Milesian school onwards have derived their structure from the originary abstraction of commodity-exchange (a standpoint he also applies to explain the Kantian “categories a priori”).   Over the past decade both Toscano and Katerina Kolozova have deployed “real abstraction” to great effect—Toscano to wage a two-pronged struggle against both the non-Marxist materialisms that have gained traction since 2007 and the rationalist residue still present within Marxist philosophy, and Kolozova to locate within Laruelle’s non-philosophy the potential for a (feminist) rupture with the commodity-form. Yet due to Toscano’s insistence that the thinking of real abstraction provisionally stay within “weak correlationist” confines, and Kolozova’s conceptualization of the moment of revolutionary upheaval as a kind of ek-stasis or stepping-beyond, what remains elided by their work is the question of how a temporal and dialectical rupture with real abstraction could be affected. Heeding Postone’s critique of Sohn-Rethel—that he reifies a “category of labour” as the alternative to real abstraction which in fact indexes to the commodity-form—what is proposed is this: that the solution to our current impasse may not lie in the excision of abstraction. Rather, what is needed is an intensification of it, to the point where it destabilizes the epistemic contours of capitalist reality. 

Dr. Katerina Kolozova is senior researcher and full professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje. She is also a professor of philosophy of law at the doctoral school of the University American College-Skopje. At the Faculty of Media and Communications-Belgrade, Kolozova teaches contemporary political philosophy. She was a visiting scholar at the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California-Berkley in 2009, and a Columbia University NY-SIPA Visiting Scholar at its Paris Global Centre in 2019. Kolozova is a member of the Board of Directors of the New Centre for Research and Practice – Seattle WA. She is also the first co-director and founder of the Regional Network for Gender and Women’s Studies in Southeast Europe (2004- ). Her most recent monograph is Capitalism's Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy published by Bloomsbury Academic-UK in 2019, whereas Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy, published by Columbia University Press-NY in 2014, remains her most cited book.  She is the author of numerous articles in international journals among which "Subjectivity without physicality: machine, body and the signifying automaton," Subjectivity 12 (Springer Journal), 49–64 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-018-0056-z 

Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Visiting Faculty at the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University from January 2020. Since 2004 he has been a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism and is series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books. He is the author of The Theatre of Production (2006), Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2010; 2017, 2nd ed.) and Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle, 2015). A translator of Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Franco Fortini, Furio Jesi and others, Toscano has published widely on critical theory, philosophy, politics and aesthetics.

Conrad Hamilton is a doctoral student at Paris 8 University, currently developing a thesis on the relationship between the value-form and social agency in the work of Karl Marx under the supervision of Catherine Malabou and Pierre Cassou-Noguès. He is a co-author, with Matthew McManus, of What Is Postmodern Conservatism: Essays on Our Hugely Tremendous Times (Zero Books, 2020) and Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson (Zero Books, 2020).

Additional reading and resources:

Discount flyer for Capitalism's Holocaust of Animals by Katerina Kolozova

MATERIAL FOR ECONOMIC EXPERIENCE: FEMINIST MANAGEMENT

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