Marx's Temporalities

Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-90-04-23678-3
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 44, 208 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 490 g

Reihe: Historical Materialism Book Series

The book rethinks the central categories of Marx's work beyond any philosophy of history, providing a critical analysis of his political and theoretical development from his early writings, to the elaboration of the critique of political economy and his final anthropological studies on pre-individualistic and communist forms. The study aims to integrate the paradigm of the spatialisation of time with that of the temporalisation of space, showing how capital places diverse temporalities into hierarchies that incessantly produce and reproduce new forms of class struggle. An adequate historiographical paradigm for globalised capitalism has to consider the plurality of temporal layers that are combined and come into conflict in the violently unifying historical dimension of modernity.

Zielgruppe

All interested in Marx’s thought, the concept of historical time in the modern world and the history of political thought and philosophy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tomba, Massimiliano

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Geschichtsphilosophie, Philosophie der Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Marxismus, Kommunismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
Chapter One: The Historical Materialist
Appendix One: Marx as Historical Materialist. Re-reading the Eighteenth Brumaire
Chapter Two: A New Phenotype
Chapter Three: Capital as Phantasmagoria
Appendix Two: A Contribution to the Historiography of Layers of Time
Bibliography
Index

Leseproben

Extract from the Preface

‘Historical materialism’ as a theory of history or a materialist conception of history does not exist. ‘Historical materialism’ is not a passe-partout for the comprehension of history, but a practical mode of intervention into history. The goal of this book is both to study Marx’s concepts of time and history, and to rethink the idea of historical time beyond the universal conception of history that was expressed by many ‘cold streams’ of Marxism. The book tries to reconnect to Marxism’s ‘warm streams’, reactivating Bloch’s idea of a ‘multiversum’ and Benjamin’s considerations on the concept of time. Moving into the ‘warm stream’ allows for the production of a different representation of the temporalities of capitalist modernity, by means of an alternative, transcendental approach. This change of perspective not only constitutes the content of the book, but is also embodied in its style, the goal of which is to effect a shift away from the current view of capitalist phenomena. Since form and content depend on each other, the break with the unilinear conception of time must be expressed in the very form and spatial organisation of the text. The book’s focus necessarily stands at its centre, constituting the second chapter on the ‘new phenotype’. Capitalism transforms the environment, de-naturalising nature, destroying space through the acceleration of time, and altering the form of human experience and human being itself. This is the real starting point of the book, which proceeds in both directions: towards the first chapter, in order to sketch out the different ‘types’ confronting the crisis; and towards the third chapter, where the perspective is transformed into the paradigm of plural temporalities. The two appendices constitute ‘laboratories’. They are approaches to a historiography of historical temporalities.
This book is written with the conviction that an entirely new consideration of time and space is needed if we are to confront our contemporary world. The materials of this first book (a second monograph on Time, Space and Anthropology is currently in progress) are assembled according to the spirit of the ‘warm stream’ of Marxism and Marx himself.
It is remarkable that Marx himself does not use the term ‘historical materialism’, but, instead, uses the expressions ‘practical materialist’ and ‘communist materialist’: figures able to produce new historiographical images by creating separation and choice in relation to the present. The ‘practical materialist’ does not presuppose a conception of history, be it idealist or materialist, but rather intervenes into an historical situation, delineating its force-fields and opening a new terrain of possibilities. This figure requires two preliminary moves: on the one hand, a critique of the singularisation of histories in the collective-singular Geschichte [history]; and, on the other hand, a historiography able to consider history in its incompleteness. Thus, it is never an object of which we could give an objective representation. Insofar as it is incomplete, history is produced constructively by a historiography able to trigger off the explosive charge of the past in the present. This ‘presentification’ of the past is the opposite of its ‘actualisation’. The latter tends to cancel out differences and historical ruptures, while the presentification of the past reopens, in the moment of a current struggle, the possibility of beginning another history, alternative to the course of capitalist modernisation. Rethinking different historical temporalities of the global present means rethinking and reopening other possible paths of modernisation that stand before us; that is, behind us and in front of us at the same time, pieces of the future that are encapsulated in the past. This task has become difficult or even almost impossible, since capitalism and the modern state have become metahistorical or even ‘natural’ ‘facts’. It is possible to im

Über Autor(innen)

Tomba, Massimiliano
Massimiliano Tomba is Professor of Philosophy of Human Rights at the University of Padua. He has published many books, translations and articles, including Crisis and Critique in Bruno Bauer (2002) and La vera politica. Kant e Benjamin (2006).

Massimiliano Tomba is Professor of Philosophy of Human Rights at the University of Padua. He has published many books, translations and articles, including Crisis and Critique in Bruno Bauer (2002) and La vera politica. Kant e Benjamin (2006).