I recently finished and defended my thesis for my MA in Philosophy. I wrote about surplus value in economics, Marx, and Deleuze. Here’s the introduction: In his critique of political economy from the Grundrisse to Capital, Karl Marx presupposes abstraction and quantification. The process by which activity and its product are alienated from the human…
Tag Archives: Historicism
Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels) lays out his method of revolutionary critique in The German Ideology. Not a professional philosopher (like Kant and Hegel, or Feuerbach) and more like an intellectual journalist absorbed in political economy committed to the Revolution, Marx, drawing from the philosophical currents of his day (Hegel’s idealism and Feuerbach’s materialism), nonetheless…
This is the second and final written part of my MA exam. In this part, I was asked to evaluate the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the study of the humanities. Issues that came up during the oral defense include the materiality of language in Lacan (as cited in an article where Lacan interprets that…
I have just passed my comprehensive exam for my MA in Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University. The area of focus is critical theory, specifically Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Foucault and Deleuze. I thought I would pose my responses to the first two parts of the exam (the third and last part being the oral defense).…
[Alexander at the Battle of Issos; from a mosaic in Pompeii] Antonio Gramsci (as is apparent in this collection of his writings) makes more nuanced and dynamic the base-superstructure model described by Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels) in The German Ideology and the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy. In doing this, he turns…
The Base-Superstructure model is basically a theoretical framework, a schema, a blueprint, charting the different parts of society, how these elements interact, and how they form a coherent social structure, i.e. the particular shape that society takes at a given moment (hence it is a historical model). The model has two main elements: the base and the superstructure, both of which can be divided further into two parts.
