Nora and Imogen are joined by Billie to discuss her forthcoming essay 'Charaktermasken: Value, Relation and Performance in Marx's Critique of Political Economy' in which she traces the history of Marx's concept of the Charaktermasken.. With excursions into Goethe's Faust, the critique of Marx brought to bear by Black radical thinkers (namely Sylvia Wynter and Fred Moten), the antinomies of the structuralist reading of Capital and the comedy of the Rosean recovery of speculative thought, the three consider the Charaktermaske first as tragedy and again as farce.

Donate to Billie's FFS fund! https://gofund.me/0a72791c1

Billie's Acid Horizon Course on the Commodity, starting September 8: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses/p/the-commodity-appearance-reification-and-practice-from-karl-marx-to-sylvia-wynter

Texts mentioned:

• Louis Althusser (1963) 'The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht - Notes on a Materialist Theatre' in: For Marx

•Theodor S. Adorno (1966) 'Negative Dialectics'

•Gillian Rose (1978) 'The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno'

• Fred Moten (2003) 'The Resistance of the Object' I&II in: 'In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition'

•Sylvia Wynter (unpublished) 'Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World'