This project attempts to rethink the relation between the black radical tradition, formed in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, and the Marxist critique of political economy. This is invigorated by Fred Moten's fascinating, though cryptic, claims that the resistance to slavery presents a problem for the dialectics of political economy as set out by the Marxist, and later critical theoretic, traditions.
To do this, I will attempt to read Marx's dialectics as emergent from a peculiar philosophical history regarding the relation between illusion and appearance, via Kant and Hegel among others. In so doing, I will try to show that reading the critique of political economy out of the scene of the plantation, rather than of the factory, productively transforms, this reading, and indeed the critique itself. That is, this reading produces another negativity to Marx's historical materialism: we produce a negative dialectics.
After completing a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at The Queen's College, Oxford, I recently graduated from the MPhilStud at Kingston University. I wrote a project on the philosophy of utopia, addressing work from Frederic Jameson, Theodor W. Adorno, Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten. I grew up in the South West of England.