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The universe plausibly has an infinite future and an infinite past. Given unlimited time, every qualitative state that has ever occurred will occur again, infinitely many times. There will thus exist in the future persons arbitrarily similar to you, in any desired respects. A person sufficiently similar to you in the right respects will qualify as literally another incarnation of you. Some theories about the nature of persons rule this out; however, these theories also imply, given an infinite past, that your present existence is a probability-zero event. Hence, your present existence is evidence against such theories of persons.

Vegan reception to follow.

There is a broad consensus that Aristotle introduced the concept of matter in order to develop a consistent account of substantial change. However, it is disputed which role matter fulfills in substantial change. According to the traditional interpretation, matter persists while taking on or losing a substantial form. According to a rival interpretation, matter does not persist in substantial change; instead, it is an entity from which a new substance can emerge and which ceases to exist in this process. In my view, both interpretations are problematic in the light of Aristotle’s broader ontological project and are at odds with the way Aristotle describes the substantial generation of living beings. On the basis of Aristotle’s biological theory, I will suggest that Aristotelian matter is a continuant in substantial generation, but does not satisfy the common criteria for persistence that apply to individual substances.

Anna Schriefl
Anna Schriefl is Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin (assistant professor) at the University of Bonn, and currently a visiting scholar at the New School. She has published a book about Plato’s criticism of money and wealth, and most recently an introduction into Stoicism (both in German).

“The issue of anarchy is at once metaphysical and political. Nevertheless, (French) philosophy and politics have always turned their backs on each other when defining it.  One of the fundamental motivations of my lectures is to understand the reason of such a non-dialogue.

Different, sometimes contradictory, signs are making manifest the necessity of a new interrogation on anarchy in the current global political situation, far beyond the idea of a violent strategy against the State. How are we to understand and interpret those signs?”

– Catherine Malabou

Catherine Malabou is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine, a position formerly held by Jacques Derrida.

Her last books include Morphing Intelligence, From IQ To IA, CUP (2018), Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016, trans. Carolyn Shread), Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (with Adrian Johnston; New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); with Judith Butler, You Be My Body For Me, For, Corporeity, Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Blackwell, 2012).

In English

Sponsored by Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture

Western metaphysics is based on the opposition between reality and appearance. This construction essentially rests on a visual model, or more exactly on some staging of what visual experience is.
I am going to question the basis of this metaphysics, by taking into account the reality of appearances and reflecting on their various uses, in particular artistic ones. This path will be taken in the first place by shifting the focus of philosophical analysis from visual to acoustic models. Thus, I will envisage a realism of echoes, as opposed to the metaphysics of shadows.

Biography:

Jocelyn Benoist, born in 1968, is Professor at the university Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he teaches Contemporary Philosophy, and currently a member of the ‘Institut Universitaire de France’. He has dedicated his early work to phenomenology and the bridges between phenomenology and early Analytic philosophy. For some time he was the Director of the Husserl Archive of Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Then, he developed a personal investigation into the meaning of realism in philosophy. He has published many books, including recently: Toward a Contextual Realism, H.U.P., 2021, and Von der Phänomenologie zum Realismus, Mohr Siebeck, 2022.

Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a reading of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Princeton University Press, 2024) and a conversation with the book’s editor Paul North (Yale University) and translator Paul Reitter (Ohio State University), which will be moderated by Emily Apter (NYU). The first new English translation in fifty years – and the only one based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself – produces a critical edition of Capital for our time, one that faithfully preserves the vitality and directness of Marx’s German prose and renders his ideas newly relevant to modern readers.

Please RSVP for in-person attendance here.

About the book:

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx’s lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy. At once precise and boldly readable, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx’s thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source.

For Marx, our global economic system is relentlessly driven by “value”—to produce it, capture it, trade it, and, most of all, to increase it. Lifespans are shortened under the demand for ever-greater value. Days are lengthened, work is intensified, and the division of labor deepens until it leaves two classes, owners and workers, in constant struggle for life and livelihood. In Capital, Marx reveals how value came to tyrannize our world, and how the history of capital is a chronicle of bloodshed, colonization, and enslavement.

About the participants:

Emily Apter (moderator) is Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University.  Her books include: Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018); Against World Literature:  On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013); Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006).  The current project What is Just Translation? takes up questions of racial justice, reparative translation, and the limits of translation as a medial form.

Paul North writes and teaches in the tradition of critical theory, emphasizing Jewish thought, emancipatory strains in the history of philosophy, and European literatures. He has written books on the concept of distraction, on Franz Kafka, and on likeness in culture and thought. Currently he is co-editing an edition Marx’s Capital volume 1 with a new translation, which will appear from Princeton University Press in 2024 and writing a monograph entitled “The Standpoint of Marx’s Capital.” He co-edits the book series IDIOM: thinkingwritingtheory at Fordham University Press and co-directs the international exchange, Critical Theory in the Global South, in collaboration with faculty at the Universidad Metropolitana de Sciencias de la Educación in Santiago, Chile.

Paul Reitter earned his PhD at UC Berkeley and teaches in the German department at Ohio State University. He’s written many books, including a widely discussed history of crisis thinking in the academic humanities. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other venues. His most recent translation, The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, was shortlisted for a National Jewish Book Award.

Attendance information:

While NYU has ended COVID-19 related restrictions and policies, we continue to remind and recommend to members of the NYU community that they stay up-to-date on their boosters and stay home if they feel sick. Masks are always welcome.

Please RSVP for in-person attendance here.

“Karl Marx’s ‘Capital:’ An Evening with Paul North, Paul Reitter, and Emily Apter” is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).