Reading Capital's Materialist Dialectic

In this critical re-appraisal of Reading Capital, Nick Nesbitt traces the Althusserianist theory of a materialist dialectic across diverse sites, including Althusser’s unpublished archive, Macherey’s exposition of Spinoza’s Ethics, and Badiou’s Logics of Worlds.

The explicit Althusserian engagement with Marx’s Capital was largely limited to Reading Capital. But this theoretical intervention remained insistent after 1968, adopting the form of a general theory of materialist dialectic. In this book, Nesbitt brings this fully developed theory of materialist dialectic to bear anew on the reading of Capital itself. In doing so, he unsettles common misconceptions about Marx and shows that Spinoza's influence on Marx is far greater – and that of Hegel lesser – than has been previously thought.

Nick Nesbitt is Professor of French at Princeton University and Senior Researcher at the Department for the Study of Modern Czech Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, CAS, Prague. He is the author most recently of The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (Virginia 2022), and editor of The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today (Duke 2017).