Reading Capital's Materialist Dialectic

Nick Nesbitt is Professor of French at Princeton University and Senior Researcher at the Department for the Study of Modern Czech Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, CAS, Prague. He is the author most recently of The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (Virginia 2022), and editor of The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today (Duke 2017).

Nick Nesbitt’s Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic is a major contribution to the literature on Spinozist Marxism, to our understanding of the stakes of Althusser’s theoretical intervention, and to debates about rationalist epistemology more generally. Theoretically daring and impeccably written, it offers a substantial and important reinterpretation of Marx’s dialectical method in Capital.– Nathan Brown, Concordia University, author of Rationalist Empiricism

• Preface: The Limits of CapitalAcknowledgementsAbbreviations1 Introduction: Reading Capital Beyond Its Limits1 The Limits of Reading Capital2 An Act of Theoretical Repression3 For Marx in Its Limits4 Reading Capital’s Process of Exposition5 Hallucinatory Empiricism6 Reading Capital’s Apodictic Structure7 The Topography of the Attributes8 The Theoretical Danger of Monism9 Against Monism, the Return of Substance10 The Theoretical Basis of Theoreticism2 What Is Materialist Analysis? Pierre Macherey’s Spinozist Epistemology1 Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic2 A Theoretical Prolegomenon to the Materialist Analysis of Texts3 Textual Production in a Materialist Mode4 On the Inadequacy of the Structuralist Combinatory5 Toward a Materialist Analysis of Form6 Against Materialism, en matérialiste7 Reading Capital as a Theory of Literary Production8 Materialism in a Spinozist Way9 On Telling Stories10 The Persistent Problem of the Attributes11 Reading Capital in a Materialist Way3 The Positive Logics of Capital: On Spinoza and the Elimination of the Negative Dialectic of Totality from Marx’s Revisions to Capital, 1857–18751 The Discontinuity of the Attributes2 Totality, Negation, Contradiction3 Totality4 The Imaginary Presuppositions of Systematic Dialectics5 The Problem with Totality6 The Systematic Dissonance of Capital7 Negation and Contradiction8 Constituting the Commodity9 From Dialectical Contradiction to Additive Synthesis10 Toward an Additive Demonstration, Without Contradiction11 When Does Socially Necessary Labour Exist?12 The Raw Materials of Marx’s Additive Synthetic Method13 On Ignorance and Common Notions14 Marx’s Spinozist Theory of Knowledge4 Toward an Axiomatic Analysis of the Commodity in Badiou and Marx1 1968: Logical Materialism2 Bolzano and the Formalisation of Axiomatic Thought3 Ontological Materialism in Its Limits4 The Displacement of Capital5 A Materialist Axiomatic5 Capital, Logic of the World1 Badiou’s Lacan, Badiou’s (Marx)2 ‘Qu’en Est-Il De La Logique?’: Reading Logics of Worlds After Capital3 Logics of (Capitalist) Worlds4 Reading Capital as the Logic of a WorldConclusion: Theory and Practice TodayReferencesIndex