Florian Endres

The paper proposes a parallel reading of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving ›Melencolia I‹ (1514) and Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s notion of real abstraction. It argues for a constitutive link between the abstractions operative in ›Melencolia I‹, in commodity exchange, and in certain formations of psychological suffering, most notably described in the psychoanalytic conception of melancholia theorized by Sigmund Freud and the subsequent Lacanian tradition. With and against the iconographic analysis put forward by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl in ›Saturn and Melancholy‹ (1964), this paper understands the engraving’s polyhedron as a pivot point in Dürer’s artwork and in art history in general – namely, as a stumbling block that indicates the negativity of abstraction through its very positive existence. Abstraction, understood in this specific sense, and contrary to classical ontology and epistemology can in fact constitute a world of real material social relations instantiated through acts (and failures) of exchange.

The following paper attempts to articulate a distinctly materialist notion of emergence and the formation of patterns by way of re-visiting two texts that have been considered oddities, if not embarrassments, by the subsequent developments of their respective disciplines: Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology and Engels’s Dialectic of Nature. Both texts are strikingly similar in their speculative engagement with the natural sciences and in their potential to inform a renewed engagement with the question of the relation between technology and life. In the concept of “path-breaking” [Bahnung] Freud understands perceptions as inscribing themselves in the structure of the very perceiving apparatus through repetition of what one could call a “material trace” (Sybille Krämer). This notion of the “material trace” can be connected to the key thrust of Engels’s “objective dialectics” in that it “concerns a model of structural emergence”(Hartmut Winkler). I want to propose that these texts can potentially enrich our understanding of how mental formations such as memory take shape and how subjectivity is constituted in material processes. That is, once Freud and Engels are read through recent philosophical thinking on technology (Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou) and the concept of recursivity (Yuk Hui). This approach can also supply resources for a Marxist notion of ideology—namely by performing a turn from a critique that is primarily concerned with the question of how we can penetrate false appearances towards a materialist account of how (“false”) appearances, something like “real abstractions” (Alfred Sohn-Rethel), can emerge out of the “flat plane” of matter.

Art, for Hegel, is not only distinct but self-distinguishing of and from nature – it happens in and through the latter. It liberates us from being merely natural creatures, and it does so by a dynamic of a cut or break - even though this liberation is achieved only through natural sensuousness, and hence, keeps us tethered to nature in some particular way. Inspired by Todd McGowan’s emphasis on the central role of contradiction in Hegel’s philosophy, this paper considers the possibility to applying the dialectic between art and nature as it is unfolded in Hegel’s Aesthetic to a more insidious constellation — namely, what Marxists came to refer to as second nature: the world of commodities, in which man-made things appear to those who produce them as a naturalised and repressive opposite, a pseudo nature, an alienated solidified history.