PIGOTT HALL, ROOM 216
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Guest speaker: Eric L. Santner (University of Chicago, Germanic Studies)

Santner proposes a new interpretation of Marx’s labor theory of value as one concerned with the afterlife of political theology in secular modernity. The soveriegn’s phantasmatic flesh — the sublime subject-matter of the King’s Two Bodies — was constituted, in medieval and early modern Europe, as an effluence of sacramental and liturgical actions. Marx tracks the migration of that activity to its new place and function within the political economy of modern nation-states. Marx’s notion of the “fetishism of the commodity” aims at unmasking the liturgical dimension of commodity-producing labor, the aspect of human productive activity in the quasi-religious service of the self-valorization of Value. Modernity, Marx shows, is characterized by a doxology of everyday life that keeps the bodies of its “officiants” in constant motion, constitutes them as busy-bodies. In the lecture Santner argues that the critique of political economy must, if it is to engage this dimenison, become paradoxological.

Eric Santner is the Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. He works at the intersection of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, and religious thought. His most recent publications are On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (2001), On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (2006), The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology with Slavoj Zizek and Kenneth Reinhard (2006), and The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (2011).

Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature Amir Eshel will respond.

Event Sponsor:
Department of German Studies and the Program in Modern Thought and Literature