•  25
    Inheriting Marx Daniel Bensaïd, Ernst Bloch and the Discordance of Time
    Historical Materialism 28 (1): 147-182. 2019.
    This essay traces a Marxist notion of cultural heritage drawing on the work of twentieth-century thinkers Daniel Bensaïd and Ernst Bloch. Both authors, indeed, address the act of inheriting as a way of rethinking Marxism beyond determinist and teleological concepts of history. In particular, Bensaïd’s 1995 Marx for Our Times and a 1972 essay on cultural heritage by Ernst Bloch reimagine the handing-on of cultural inheritance as the political reactivation of untimely and non-synchronous survivals…Read more
  •  12
    This essay offers a reading of German philosopher Ernst Bloch's 1952 essay Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left in relation to the question of orientalism. Bloch's study of first-century Islamic philosopher, scientist and doctor Ibn Sina (Avicenna) relies on orientalist sources and authors also discussed in Edward Said's Orientalism. Yet, it challenges many stereotypes and ‘structures of attitude and reference’ that are recurrent in European representations of the Middle East. Bloch presents Avice…Read more
  •  9
    This essay proposes a reading of the American photographer Allan Sekula’s 1995 essay “Dismal Science” alongside The Forgotten Space, an essay film he directed with Noël Burch in 2010. These works are still resonant today because they suggest the possibility of picturing the totality of capitalist modernity. Sekula’s representations of the shipping container and the subsequent shifts in maritime economy recuperate the prospect of a panoramic, totalizing view in an era marked by a prevalence of de…Read more
  •  9
    Reading Hegel after Marx: Lukács and the Question of Teleology
    International Critical Thought 1. 2022.
    This paper offers a rethinking of the concept of teleology in Marxist theory. In particular, I propose some reflections on György Lukács’s teleology of labour, addressed in The Young Hegel and subsequently reworked in The Ontology of Social Being. Lukács challenged an idealist notion of teleology understood as realisation of a transcendental principle posited a priori. He redefined the concept by showing how Hegel and Marx reintroduced the question of purpose as an essential quality of human lab…Read more
  • This essay discusses the concept of nonchronological time through the philosophies of Paolo Virno and Ernst Bloch, mostly focusing on Virno’s Déjà vu and the End of History, originally published as Il Ricordo del Presente in 1999. In this work, Virno formulates the thesis that capitalism is the first social form that historicizes the metahistorical and nonchronological invariant that defines human life. An important element in Virno’s argument is what he presents as a more radical reinterpretati…Read more