Students from across the social sciences and humanities celebrate and reflect upon Moishe Postone’s historical, theoretical, and pedagogical work. Moishe’s profound and rigorous social theory illuminates supra-disciplinary questions ranging from capitalism’s historical dynamic to the social, political, and economic crises of the contemporary conjuncture. The conference will elaborate some of the critical methods of potentials of Moishe’s theory.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019: THE PAST AND LEGACY
9:00am — Continental Breakfast for Presenters
9:30am — Welcome
Parker Everett and Charlotte Robertson
9:45am — The Ideology and Practice of State-Centric Capitalism
“The Antimonies of Space in State-Centric Capitalism”
Parker Everett
“Corporatism as Otherness: Contra-Modern Fascist Productivism in the Roman Exhibition of 1942”
Gregory D. Milano
“Japanese Imperialism in 1930s Shanghai: A Doomed Anticipation of Mass Society”
Jake Werner
“Japanophobia and Anti-Capitalism in Korea”
Jaewoong Jeon
11:15am — Coffee Break
11:30am — Postone, 1968, and its Radical Critique
“The Marxist Turn as a Return to Marx: Nicolaus, Postone, and the Question of Marx’s Marxism in the 1970s”
Spencer Leonard
“Moishe Postone and Frankfurt am Main: Exploring the Origins of His Interpretation of Marx”
Jason Dawsey
“Class War with a Map: Anti-Capitalism and Space”
David Spreen
“The Politics of Violence, Glue-Sniffing, and Liberation: Making 1968 in Japan”
William Marotti
1:00pm — Lunch Break
2:00pm — Political Economy and the Writing of History
“Real Abstractions: On Tocqueville’s Grappling with Capital
Thomas Dodman
“Contemporary Analyses of Capitalism, Proletarianization and ‘Primitive Accumulation’ in the Postrevolutionary French Imperial Plantation Zone, 1830-1848”
Robin Bates
“Postone and Race: The Commodity Form and 19th-Century Slavery”
Benjamin Postone
“Neo-Marxism, Post-Marxism, and Post-Idealist Intellectual History”
Sean Forner
3:30pm — Postone and the Postcolonial
“Elements of Anti-Gikuyuism”
Zeb Dingley
“Office Hourse with Moishe Postone: Time, Labor, and Social Domination and the History of Modern South Asia”
Dwaipayan Sen
“After Marxism: Reading Moishe Postone from Post-Apartheid South Africa”
Bernard Dubbeld
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2019: THE PRESENT AND FUTURE
9:00am — Continental Breakfast for Presenters
9:30am — Deindustrialization and the Remaking of City, Image, and Subject
“How Middle Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs: The New Bohemia and the Remaking of the Industrial City”
Richard Lloyd
“Post-Fordism, Graphic Design, and “Premature Post-Capitalism”
J. Dakota Brown
“Human Capital and the Middle-Class Family”
Hadas Weiss
11:00am — Coffee Break
11:15am — Thinking through Contemporary Politics with and beyond Postone
“Blaming the Victim: Projective Identification, Capital, and Postonian Lessons and Racism”
Elia Maoz
“Bitcoin, the Flat Earth, and the Fetishes of Apocalyptic Capital”
Andrew Sloin
“The Rise of Brazil’s Extreme-Right: Thinking with the late Moishe Postone”
Aaron Ansell
“”Fat Guys in Tutus,” or Gender, Moishe, and the Commodity Form”
12:45pm — Lunch
1:45pm — Contemporary Crises and the Critique of Political Economy
“On the Displacement of Labor and the Future of Work”
Mark Loeffler
“Financialization and the Growing Anachronism of Value”
Charlotte Robertson
“Is there a Marxist Economic Science?”
Joe Lough
“Capital Personified”
Ben Fong
3:15pm — Coffee Break
3:30pm — Migration, Rights, and the Dynamics of Capital
“Figures of Migration in Neoliberalizing Greece”
Tracey Rosen
“Real Things: Fetish and Token in Migrant Lives”
Lisa Simeone
“Superfluous Populations and the Future of Human Rights”
Robert Stern
“Adorno, Rubin, and the Superfluity of Labor”
Fabian Arzuaga
5:00pm — Closing Remarks
Robert Stern and Mark Loeffler
This conference is generously co-sponsored by the Bernard Weissbourd Memorial Fund, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, the Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Graduate Council Fund, the International House Global Voices Program, the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, and the Departments of Anthropology, Comparative Human Development, Germanic Studies, and History at the University of Chicago.
