The Marx 4/13 Seminar with Renata Salecl
The Full Introduction to Marx 4/13
A Conversation with Renata Salecl regarding Lacan’s 1958 seminar
The philosopher Renata Salecl reads and discusses
Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and Lacan’s Formations of the Unconscious (1958)
Tuesday, November 26, 2024
Columbia University, New York
When Marx’s Paris manuscripts on political economy and on Hegelian philosophy were posthumously published in 1932, in German, under the title Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, the publication produced shock waves in the intellectual world and in Marxist circles.
Their publication rejuvenated the reception of Marx’s writings. It opened new interpretations of his work. It gave birth to an entire field of philosophical investigation on alienation. And it gave rise to contentious debates over the value of the youthful, philosophical writings of Marx, as opposed to the more mature, scientific, economic writings.
In the Paris manuscripts, Marx develops, famously, a theory of human self-alienation, a first sketch of his signature historical account, focusing mostly on the transition from capitalism to communism, with the abolition of private property, and insights from his work on the critique of Hegel, specifically focused on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit rather than his Philosophy of Right. The Paris manuscripts have generated a large body of remarkable scholarship along all of these dimensions.
At Marx 4/13, we will return to the question of alienation in conversation with a brilliant philosopher in the psychoanalytic tradition, Renata Salecl, who joins us in New York from Ljubljana, Slovenia. Renata Salecl will discuss forms of social and political alienation that are currently being experienced and spreading widely across extreme right-wing movements in the West today. She will also reflect on apathy in today’s times and how it differs from alienation. Lacan’s text will help us understand the logic of desire and anxiety. In the seminar, we will look at the role anxiety, desire, and jouissance play in people’s fascination with populist authoritarian leaders—and how those emotions are experienced as well on the other side of the political spectrum.
Renata Salecl proposes that we reread Marx’s theory of alienation from the Paris manuscripts in conversation with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic writings, more specifically, paired with Lacan’s lecture “The Dream by the Butcher’s Beautiful Wife,” from a seminar he delivered on April 9, 1958, at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris.
Welcome to Marx 4/13!
