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).

Preface: The Limits of Capital

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations



1 Introduction: Reading Capital Beyond Its Limits

 1 The Limits of Reading Capital

 2 An Act of Theoretical Repression

 3 For Marx in Its Limits

 4 Reading Capital’s Process of Exposition

 5 Hallucinatory Empiricism

 6 Reading Capital’s Apodictic Structure

 7 The Topography of the Attributes

 8 The Theoretical Danger of Monism

 9 Against Monism, the Return of Substance

 10 The Theoretical Basis of Theoreticism



2 What Is Materialist Analysis? Pierre Macherey’s Spinozist Epistemology

 1 Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic

 2 A Theoretical Prolegomenon to the Materialist Analysis of Texts

 3 Textual Production in a Materialist Mode

 4 On the Inadequacy of the Structuralist Combinatory

 5 Toward a Materialist Analysis of Form

 6 Against Materialism, en matérialiste

 7 Reading Capital as a Theory of Literary Production

 8 Materialism in a Spinozist Way

 9 On Telling Stories

 10 The Persistent Problem of the Attributes

 11 Reading Capital in a Materialist Way



3 The Positive Logics of Capital: On Spinoza and the Elimination of the Negative Dialectic of Totality from Marx’s Revisions to Capital, 1857–1875

 1 The Discontinuity of the Attributes

 2 Totality, Negation, Contradiction

 3 Totality

 4 The Imaginary Presuppositions of Systematic Dialectics

 5 The Problem with Totality

 6 The Systematic Dissonance of Capital

 7 Negation and Contradiction

 8 Constituting the Commodity

 9 From Dialectical Contradiction to Additive Synthesis

 10 Toward an Additive Demonstration, Without Contradiction

 11 When Does Socially Necessary Labour Exist?

 12 The Raw Materials of Marx’s Additive Synthetic Method

 13 On Ignorance and Common Notions

 14 Marx’s Spinozist Theory of Knowledge



4 Toward an Axiomatic Analysis of the Commodity in Badiou and Marx

 1 1968: Logical Materialism

 2 Bolzano and the Formalisation of Axiomatic Thought

 3 Ontological Materialism in Its Limits

 4 The Displacement of Capital

 5 A Materialist Axiomatic



5 Capital, Logic of the World

 1 Badiou’s Lacan, Badiou’s (Marx)

 2 ‘Qu’en Est-Il De La Logique?’: Reading Logics of Worlds After Capital

 3 Logics of (Capitalist) Worlds

 4 Reading Capital as the Logic of a World



Conclusion: Theory and Practice Today



References

Index