Dissertation by Svenja Bromberg
In light of an increasing embrace of the notion of ‘emancipation’ by various theoretical and poli... more In light of an increasing embrace of the notion of ‘emancipation’ by various theoretical and political perspectives in recent years, this thesis aims to scrutinise the philosophical connotations of the concept itself. It therefore returns to Karl Marx’s distinction between political and human emancipation, developed in his text ‘On the Jewish Question’, with the aim of excavating its theoretical stakes. The core argument of the first part is that Marx draws a line of demarcation between citizenship as the modern form of political, bourgeois emancipation realised by the American and French Revolutions, and human emancipation as necessitating a different kind of revolution that would allow for the constitution of a new type of social bond between the individual and the social. Marx’s formulation of the need for human emancipation is grounded in his critique of political emancipation, which he regards as failing to recognise the dialectical constitution of its social bond by both political and economic relations. The bourgeois social bond moreover makes ‘man’ exist as an individualised being who can only relate to his or her political existence and dependency on others in a mediated and abstract way. The second part turns to the post-Marxist critiques of ‘On the Jewish Question’, starting in the late 1970s with Claude Lefort, which coincide with a broader re-evaluation of the revolutionary legacy in France. It specifically interrogates Étienne Balibar’s alternative understanding of the form of emancipation achieved by the French Revolution under the name of ‘equaliberty’, with which he defends the struggle for citizenship as the unsurpassable horizon of a contemporary politics of emancipation. The aim is here to develop a deeper understanding of Balibar’s criticism of Marx’s dividing line, which allows the French thinker’s contribution to ‘thinking emancipation after Marx’ to be disentangled from his decision to distance himself from the Marxian approach.
Papers by Svenja Bromberg
Emanzipation: Zu Geschichte und Aktualität eines politischen Begriffs, Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2019
Badiou and The German Tradition of Philosophy, ed. by Jan Völker, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019
In this review, I discuss Balibar’s ‘proposition of equaliberty’ with regard to its theoretical s... more In this review, I discuss Balibar’s ‘proposition of equaliberty’ with regard to its theoretical status and contribution, its relationship to other contemporary theories of radical democracy as well as to the problematic of bourgeois versus communist emancipation in Marx. The primary interest of this essay is to develop a detailed understanding of Balibar’s analytical schema, which draws a complex picture of our contemporary ‘human condition’, and to place it within his own theoretical development since his contribution to Reading Capital in the 60s. On that basis, it will be possible to assess his contribution to thinking politics with and after Marx and place it more concretely within the generalised radical-democratic turn in post-Marxist theory.
In this paper, I elaborate on the value of the notion of affect and the related concept of affect... more In this paper, I elaborate on the value of the notion of affect and the related concept of affective labour for a feminist-materialist critique. The core argument is that an affective conception of the relationship between subject and structure would allow for a constructive intervention into the definition of ‘materialism’ that builds the ground for any critical social theory, but remains unfinished in the Marxist tradition. For that purpose, it will however be necessary to develop the concept of affect beyond the common, decidedly a-political interpretations that are part of the New Materialist Feminism, as well as beyond the overly emphatic connotations that the post-Workerist tradition has attached to it with regards to its immeasurable characteristic that might allow for the creation a noncapitalist future from within our present.
In my response to Ishay Landa's article “The Nietzschean Communism of Alain Badiou,” I develop an... more In my response to Ishay Landa's article “The Nietzschean Communism of Alain Badiou,” I develop an analysis of Landa's opposition between Marx(ism)'s communism and Badiou's Nietzschean communism through interrogating Badiou's relationship to Marx via his engagement with Althusser and Maoism, his explicit return to the young Marx in the formulation of his “Idea of Communism” and the paradoxes that are to be found in Marx's own oeuvre in relation to the concept of humanity, the social individual and the ground for political change. By exposing Badiou's conceptions of a materialist dialectical without historical materialism and of history that is based on its representation in thought, I show in contrast to Landa that it is not through a comparison with the utopian socialists or Nietzsche, but with the young Hegelian Bruno Bauer that we can grasp the conceptual weaknesses of Badiou's “communist invariant” as anchored on the plane of ideology. I similarly go on to evaluate Badiou's and Marx's conceptions of the relationship between a material transformation of the world and the transformation of humanity or social relations, which brings me to conclude a certain closeness between the Marx of the Einleitung, Badiou and Nietzsche that raises the question of how productive Landa's opposition of a supposedly unified Marx and a Nietzschean Badiou is. Finally, Badiou's conception of generic humanity and its claims towards instituting universal equality at a distance to the state is shown to be problematic not so much because of its Nietzschean pure radicality of the philosophical act that would break the world in Two while bearing the danger of preventing the new One to emerge, but through its closeness to Bruno Bauer's limited concept of “political emancipation.”
Reviews by Svenja Bromberg
Books by Svenja Bromberg
Guest edited special edition of the Graduate Journal of Social Science edited by , which I had th... more Guest edited special edition of the Graduate Journal of Social Science edited by , which I had the pleasure & privilege of playing a part in supervising and bringing into being, in my role as GJSS Co-Editor in Chief.
The idea for this exciting edition of the GJSS initially emerged out of mine and Dr. Rosemary Dellers shared passion for affect theory.
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Dissertation by Svenja Bromberg
Papers by Svenja Bromberg
Reviews by Svenja Bromberg
Books by Svenja Bromberg
Ed. Danilo Scholz, Svenja Bromberg, Birthe Mühlhoff.
Philosophers, economists, journalists and activists comment on past and present manifestations of Europe. Taken together, these essays are exercises in defamiliarisation.
http://merveberlin.tumblr.com/
The idea for this exciting edition of the GJSS initially emerged out of mine and Dr. Rosemary Dellers shared passion for affect theory.
Ed. Danilo Scholz, Svenja Bromberg, Birthe Mühlhoff.
Philosophers, economists, journalists and activists comment on past and present manifestations of Europe. Taken together, these essays are exercises in defamiliarisation.
http://merveberlin.tumblr.com/
The idea for this exciting edition of the GJSS initially emerged out of mine and Dr. Rosemary Dellers shared passion for affect theory.