Panel discussion

Before his purported divorce from Hegelianism in The German Ideology, the “young” Marx wrote in 1844, “The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.” Following this line of inquiry, this presentation will address how recent works in labor and intellectual history have engaged and integrated extra-textual objects of analysis such as emotion, affect, and sensuous experience, within a materialist, if not explicitly Marxist, frame. This paper will also gesture towards scholarship in other, cognate humanistic disciplines, which have drawn on diverse intellectual and theoretical resources including Spinozism, psychoanalysis, Italian autonomism, “difference” feminism, and, most pertinently, affect theory. It will consider to what extent intellectual historians might emulate or refine such approaches to rigorously contextualize and methodologically pluralize the latter’s theoretical concerns. These include the co-production and conceptual interdependence of labor, desire, the constitution of political subjectivity, the affective substrate of ideology and ideological commitment, and the resistance of embodied life to what Foucault called “the chain of causes and effects” that are often at work in conventional modern historicist narratives.