Introductory Post

I'm Seth. I'm in German at the University of Michigan, and work on the late GDR with particular emphasis on politics [attempting to get beyond the complicity/trangression binary] against art [punk, Prenzlauer Berg, Götze, etc.] as a kind of un-untyable knot with all kinds of curves worth looking at.

Reading Kapital, I'll have an eye toward contemporary interventions [Laclau/Mouffe, Negt/Kluge, Therborn, Hardt/Negri, Adorno] that draw heavily on minutiae in Capital. One thing I'll try returning to throughout is Tony Judt's posthumous trouncing of Louis Althusser, in which one element is that Althusser's reading [and here I'm wondering if Judt really just meant Althusser, since you might put Zizek, among quite a few others, in the hot seat] "chopped Marx into little bits, selected those texts or parts of texts that suited the master's interpretation and then proceeded to construct the most astonishingly abstruse, self-regarding and ahistorical version of Marxist philosophy imaginable." My guiding question is: does Marx do systematic philosophy, from which individual elements are fundamentally irrecuperable? Or is what Judt curses as "symptomatic" reading admissible?

Also worth noting: my own Marx training only extends to and Die deutsche Ideologie and the Thesen über Feuerbach. Since these are two places Marx initially develops historical materialism, and at the same time quite early writings, it'll be worth seeing whether I can "spring over my own shadow" here. I'll be reading the Aveling translation primarily, republished on the hundredth anniversary of Marx' original publication. Alongside this I'll be working with a photo reprint of the final edit Marx made before he died, with all Vorworte intact.