You are invited to join us for Bruin Christensen presentation at the Philosophy seminar at UNSW.
TITLE: What is Species-Being? Towards a Radical Reappropriation of the Concept of Alienation DATE & TIME: 4 October, 12:30-2:00 VENUE: UNSW, Morven Brown 209 ABSTRACT: In her book Entfremdung-Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems, Rahel Jäggi has sought to rehabilitate the concept of alienation. I would strengthen this claim: critical theory must recover this concept and, unlike Jäggi, it must construe alienation as bound up with the nature of work under capitalist relations of exchange, hence production. Alienation is first and foremost alienated labour. Recovering a notion of alienation in this strong sense is essential to identifying motives for the kind of social change needed if we are to find just solutions to environmental crisis. In this paper I take first steps towards this. I first provide a reconstruction of Marx's claim that the human being is species-being "in that, practically and theoretically, he makes the species, both his own and that of all other things his object." (MEW 40, S.515) Since this claim derives from the proto-existentialist Feuerbach, I use a reconstruction of Heidegger's notion of existence to accomplish it. On this basis, I then briefly interpret the third of the four ways in which according to Marx workers are alienated under capitalism-alienation from their character as a species-beings. Markos Valaris Senior Lecturer in Philosophy Associate Editor, Australasian Journal of Philosophy University of New South Wales Phone: +(61) 2 9385 2760 (office) Personal webpage: markosvalaris.net<http://www.markosvalaris.net/>
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