Paul Reynolds | Real Abstraction: Some Thoughts on Sexuality and Embodied Pleasure скачать в хорошем качестве

Paul Reynolds | Real Abstraction: Some Thoughts on Sexuality and Embodied Pleasure

Real Abstraction: The Conference Hosted by: Foreign Objekt www.foreignobjekt.com https://www.foreignobjekt.com/real-ab... Organizers:Sepideh Majidi (Foreign Objekt) Conrad Hamilton (Kapital Komrades) Paul Reynolds (Historical Materialism) The essence of real abstraction is that the philosophical method of abstraction should be inverted from the essential and ideal to a dialectical tension between the concrete and material world and its processes and how theory and analysis draws out significances in understanding trends, developments and change. Method is always dialectically connected to material and historical ontology, and when abstraction creates self-sustaining ontologies for itself, through the process of intellectual/philosophical labor, these mask the terms of their location within power/knowledge relationships directly emergent from patterns of power, domination, oppression, exploitation and alienation. I want to explore this in the context of how sexuality and embodied pleasure are explored and understood in modern and contemporary capitalism. This takes a phenomenological turn and explores the tensions and contradictions of quantification/quality, the composition of embodied value in spatial, temporal and conjunctural contexts, and the contours of alienation, subjectivity and pleasure. About the Conference: The publication of Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labour in 1970 heralded a remarkable possibility--a rupture with all hitherto existing epistemology. The essential idea of the book is simple: that what we have throughout the modern era called "epistemology" in fact derives its structure from the commodity-form explicated by Marx--a commodity-form that has discretely informed our metaphysics since at least the seventh century B.C., with the arrival of coinage in Ancient Greece. The thesis of a structural equivalence between epistemology and commodity-exchange--what Sohn-Rethel calls "real abstraction"--proved influential in the ensuing decades. But while Marxian thinkers in this period made use of real abstraction, many of them also tended to foreshorten Sohn-Rethel's ambitions, transforming his critique of epistemology into a modulated critique of political economy. That is until 2008, when the publication of Alberto Toscano's "The Open Secret of Real Abstraction" signalled the rise of a new wave of thinkers, who would apply it to explain social phenomena ranging from race to gender to our conception of the natural world. In this conference, we will address these developments, showing how taking real abstraction seriously doesn't require fettering its conceptual scope.