With Neil Larsen, Aylin Bademsoy and Christine Achinger
The Krisis Lectures series invites theorists who work with value-form theory. Value critique and the work of the Krisis Group are received and further developed internationally. Our series aims to bring these joint efforts together and initiate cross-border discussions.
Wednesday, 10 September, 7 PM (UTC+2)
Neil Larsen: Mimesis and Reification
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87237815770?pwd=iBXXv4x02PAg16WiGaDvDrLv20AiqF.1
Thursday, 18. September, 7 PM (UTC+2)
Aylin Bademsoy: Capital Fetish and Anti-Armenian Ressentiment
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86011669092?pwd=sFIOWsaMwh4OqQ37xnIIp1b5o5rkpn.1
Thursday, 25. September, 7 PM (UTC+2)
Christine Achinger: Antisemitism. An Introduction
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88640889572?pwd=YhbI32ANdBAzUh0Drr2KKahvRuku2I.1
Neil Larsen: Mimesis and Reification
However we choose to call it—whether value-form theory (VFT), Wertkritik, or the theory of value-dissociation—what, it may be asked, are the implications of such thinking for aesthetics?
“Mimesis and Reification” explores this question by focusing on the antithetical relationship between value and mimesis as equally elemental forms of social mediation, or, to use Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s language, as antithetical forms of social synthesis: one (value) generative and reproductive of capitalism’s social form; and the other, mimesis, structurally averse to the value-abstraction and, according to my hypothesis, a socially-synthetic relation immanent to pre-capitalist social forms. But whereas value-based social synthesis— unconscious, absolute and exclusive—is totalitarian in character, mimesis, consistent with the social forms it mediates, is multiform, variable, ad hoc and, although always liable to falsehood and mystification, conscious.
While the mimetic faculty itself is, self-evidently, an inalienable feature of human ‘species-being,’ its precise relationship to modes of social synthesis can surely vary historically. And this then results in multiple questions, among them what the negativity of the mimetic relation in a capitalist, value-mediated social formation might imply for the status and the fortunes of art and literature under the totalitarian domination of value?
Aylin Bademsoy: Capital Fetish and Anti-Armenian Ressentiment
In his seminal essay “National Socialism and Antisemitism,” historian and critical theorist Moishe Postone established a relation between capitalist modernity and antisemitism via a theoretical recourse to the commodity form. The dichotomy of essence and appearance, which in Marx’s Capital characterizes the basic underlying structure of the commodity—the nucleus or “cell-form” of capitalist economy—becomes in Postone’s early work an analytical prism through which to illuminate the social relations between “capital fetish” and antisemitism.
This theoretical point of departure, however, by no means accounts for the uniqueness hypothesis that Postone remained beholden to throughout his work. It seems doubtful that the projection of the great, abstract power of capital would not find other objects of attachment in different historical or political contexts. Through a reflection on Postone’s theory of antisemitism vis-à-vis anti-Armenian ressentiment, we may revise the theoretical foundation of Postone’s critique to extend it to the broader history of capitalist modernization.
