Marx’s Capital, Between System and Rhetoric
Description
In the Afterword to the second German Edition of Capital, Marx divided his work on the project into two sides or phases: the search for the proper method and the search for the proper mode of presentation for the modern economic and social phenomena he analyzes. The recent publication by Princeton University Press of a new English translation of Capital Volume 1 offers an occasion to reflect upon the relationship between conceptual articulation, terminological specificity, rhetorical tropes, and systematic argument in Marx’s key work. How is our understanding of Marx’s analysis of value and his critique of political economy transformed when we return to the philological and stylistic questions raised by translation and textual criticism? Since Paul Reitter’s translation is based on the second German edition of Capital I, it also presents an opportunity to think through the stakes of how different presentations of Marx’s argument—including new or omitted passages, variations in the structure of chapters, and altered rhetorical or stylistic strategies—might change our understanding of its substance (and indeed, to work through the opposition of substance and accidents as it bears upon writing and conceptual production).
More broadly—beyond questions raised by the new translation and edition in particular—this seminar welcomes papers focused on the agency of writing and of language in the determination of Marx’s system of concepts and his historical diagnosis. We want to ask how Marx’s multiple styles, ventriloquized voices, different narrative stances, and literary thinking relate to both sides of his project: the analysis of a system in systematic terms and the critique of that system through rhetorical resources.
For example, participants might address:
- how new approaches to the theory of value intersect with philological approaches to Marx’s work
- how rhetoric was central to the project of critique
- the import of literary sources and literary techniques in Marx’s presentation of his ideas
- how semantic and etymological questions raised by translation bear upon our understanding of Marx’s German vocabulary
- issues raised by the notes to the Princeton edition requiring reflection, critique, or revised approaches to Marx’s text
- general questions concerning the relation between rhetoric and historiography, philosophy, political theory, or political economy
- how the development of critical theory over the past several decades—especially focused on philological, rhetorical, and literary critical questions—might inform our reading of Capital
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Vanessa Gubbins is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University.
Speaker Bio
Joshua Harold Wiebe is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute. He is co-editor of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on the topic of "filming capital," from October 2025. His work has been or will be published in Film-Philosophy, Media Fields Journal, CLCWeb, and Cultural Critique.
Speaker Bio
Jacques Lezra, Distinguished Professor of English and Hispanic Studies at the University of California—Riverside, 2022 Chaire Internationale de Philosophie Contemporaine at University of Paris-8. Relevant publications include Defective Institutions: A Protocol for the Republic (Fordham, 2024); On the Nature of Marx’s Things: Translation as Necrophilology (Fordham, 2018); and various articles, including most recently “The Diagrammatic Imaginary.” Escritura e Imagen 17 (2021), 287-290.
Papers
Speaker Bio
William Ross is a instructor of philosophy and president of the Association for Adorno Studies. Recently, he was guest fellow at the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. In 2022-24 , he was guest fellow and lecturer at the Goethe University Frankfurt. His research focuses on ‘Darstellung’ in German philosophy. He is developing a materialist theory of presentation based on Benjamin and Adorno, within a reconstruction of Frankfurt School theory of society.
Speaker Bio
Sara Sanchez-Zweig is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Auburn University's English Department. She is a theater and performance studies scholar and is at work on projects about the influence of the stage magician on secular spectatorship, and about spirit mediumship.
Speaker Bio
Chris Hoffman is Core Lecturer in Contemporary Civilization in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. He completed his dissertation in 2024 at Columbia University in 2024, and his book project studies the trajectory of aesthetic exercise in literature and philosophy between Goethe and Arendt. Further research addresses the history of literary theory, the problem of scale in realism, and the transnational aesthetics of fascism.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Nathan Brown is Professor of English at Concordia University, Montreal, where he is founding director of the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the author of Baudelaire's Shadow: On Poetic Determination (2026), Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (2021), and The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (2017). He is also the translator of The Flowers of Evil (Verso 2025).
Speaker Bio
Liam Barer is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy. He completed his undergraduate studies in Philosophy at the University of Toronto and earned an MPhil in Philosophy at University College London. Liam is primarily interested in Kant, the post-Kantian tradition (esp. German idealism and the Frankfurt School), and aesthetics. He is also in the Collaborative Program in Jewish Studies.
Speaker Bio
Michael Giesbrecht is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at Duquesne University (PA). His research examines critiques of causality in the history of political philosophy, with particular focus on early modern philosophers (esp. Spinoza and Hobbes) as well as contemporary French philosophy, especially Althusser.
Speaker Bio
Ryan Moore is lecturer faculty in Sociology at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Sells like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis (NYU Press, 2010) and has published widely about popular music and youth subcultures. Most recently, he has written about Marx and critical social theory for Jabobin, Protean, and other online outlets.