Showing posts with label social research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social research. Show all posts

16.11.10

The Spirit of Capital: Philosophy Graduate Student Conference on Hegel and Marx at the New School for Social Research


Call For Papers
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: MOISHE POSTONE
APRIL 28TH -29TH, 2011
55 W 13th St., New York, New York
The New School University
The New School for Social Research


It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the  whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the  Marxists understood Marx!!” wrote Lenin in 1915. In 1969, Althusser responded, “A century and a half later no one has understood Hegel because it is impossible to understand Hegel without having thoroughly studied and understood Capital.” What are we to make of this challenge today? Are we now ready to understand Hegel through Marx, and Marx through Hegel?
It is high time for a reassessment of the core stakes of the Marx-Hegel debate. What would it mean to think the concepts of capital and spirit together? This conference is a place to explore the internal relations between Hegel and Marx’s philosophical projects. Some possible questions include: how does Hegel’s phenomenology, logic, philosophy of nature, history and right internally contain the elements that Marx will use to decipher the world of property, labor, commodities and capital? Is Capital a logical theory of forms or a theory of history? How does Marx negate and realize Hegel’s project? What is the role of labor in Hegel, and the role of spirit in Marx? Does the development of history show the unfolding of freedom or the unfolding of capital?  This conference echoes the early Frankfurt school tradition, with its project for a critique of the social forms of the present.
Themes
We encourage submissions on a wide range of topics and thinkers: 
Themes
Thinkers
The Philosophy of Right
I.I. Rubin
Substance and Subject in Capital
György Lukács
Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Grundrisse
Karl Korsch
Property, Alienation, and Class
Ernst Bloch
Form and Content in Hegel and Marx
Walter Benjamin
Concrete and Abstract Labor
Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Master and Slave
Theodore Adorno
Critique, Dialectic and Method
Herbert Marcuse
Time and History
CLR James
Freedom and Necessity
Raya Dunayevskaya
The Value-Form
Guy Debord
Critique of Labor
Alexander Kojeve
Revolution and Negation
Jean Hyppolite
Proletarian Self-Abolition
Frantz Fanon
Materialism and Idealism
Helmut Reichelt
Commodity, Money and Capital
Hans-Georg Backhaus
Capital and Spirit
Gillian Rose
Submissions
Papers ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 words should be submitted in blind review format to s p i r i t o f c a p i t a l @ gmail.com
Include the following in the body of the email:
i. Author’s name
ii. Title of Paper
iii. Institutional affiliation
iv. Contact information (email, phone number, mailing address)
Please omit any self-identifying information within the body of the paper.

17.10.10

The Stages of Life According to Erikson

Erik Erikson, the accessible psychologist, child of Freud, conceived of an eight-layered schematic to illustrate the entirety of human development —  first marked out in his groundbreaking book, Childhood and Society. In this book, he maps out a continuum from birth to death of the struggles of human development. Even though they are not meant to be like a grocery list, I list them out here:

1. Trust and Mistrust  
The first stage begins at the moment the infant meets the outside social world for the first time. Our first experiences with the world forms the basic trust/mistrust dyad. It’s kind of like the father who tosses his daughter up in the air and catches her. Trust: he catches her safely. Drops her? Basic mistrust forms.
2. Autonomy and Guilt
The struggle between autonomy and guilt – that nasty fight between independence and the debilitating fear of the all-seeing eye that threatens to swallow you alive with its judgment, catapulting a person into shame and doubt.
3. Initiative and Guilt
Then, of course, there is the whole question, “what do I do with myself once I’ve achieved autonomy?” that either gets us going to self-actualization or we become mired in the things we should have done or said – in a word: guilt. 
4.Industry and Initiative
Every child has to learn what to create with their bodies after they’ve decided they can actually get off their haunches and express themselves – and added with that, the internal feeling of being loved and the inner worth that goes along with creating work worthy of pride.
5. Identity
You can have an identity, it seems, without struggling through those forgotten visceral experiences of infancy; adolescence merely pokes its ugly head in to confuse us all over again – and we thought the womb was tough.
6. Intimacy and Isolation
But once we get a firm grounding on who we are as individuals we can really enter into genuine intimacy with another, although rocking precariously with the threat of isolation; this is where boundaries are set and committed relationships begin.
7. Generativity versus Stagnation
  And once we accomplish these mile markers we feel we have to give something back; we feel mortality nipping at our heels and generativity rushes in as a contraposition to idle stagnation.
8. Coming to terms. Or not.
The final hurrah is accessing whether the whole thing was worth it from the womb to the final tomb. We struggle at this point in the journey between feeling satisfied that we have gained much from life and whether or not we have nurtured the seeds for our children’s children. If we feel we've failed, death is a painful process, and we sink into the depressing cavity of despair, hopelessly casting off any hopes for immortality.