Raphael, Resurrection of Christ (oil painting on wood, 1499 - 1502)
Thanks for a wonderful class! Your phenomenal comments and analysis in response to the blood bot's latest tweet put Hieronymous Wierix's engraving into sophisticated dialogue, not only with Marxian perspectives on labour and Derrida's account of the pharmakon, but also with the pharmakos and the wider Christian narrative of suffering and redemption.
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As we discussed in class, Marx was deeply attentive to social, economic and historical contradictions. Two of the most fundamental contradictions with which he grappled were: (1) the contradiction between labour and capital; and (2) the contradiction between the economic base of society and its political and legal superstructure. Since the first of these effectively coincides with the economic base, it can be understood as nested within the second.
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| Hugo Gellert, Primary Accumulation 3 (lithograph, 1933) |
One way of thinking about Marx's critique of Hegel's political philosophy would be to grasp it in terms of a discrepancy between the "is" and the "ought". Hegel's concept of the state as representing the general interest corresponds to how a political system ought to operate. Marx's critique, however, is grounded in how the state actually operates --- that is, it's grounded in how the world really is.
One thing I forgot to mention in class is that the messianic, redemptive and salvific dimensions of Marx's call for a proletarian revolution are further reinforced by the parallel between Marx's account of the proletariat as the truly universal class and Paul the Apostle's first century preaching vis-à-vis the universal equality of the early Christian community (Galatians 3: 28).
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For this week's blogging assignment, I'd like you to identify and describe an example (from religion, history, politics, current affairs, advertising or your own life experience) of a discrepancy between an "ought" and an "is".
Your example could be a divergence between how something is theorized and/or conceptualized and how it is in reality, or a mismatch between how something should be (ideally, in theory) and how it actually operates here on earth. Does the level of the "ought" (of ideas, theory, concepts and/or discourse) mask or repress the underlying material reality?
As always, if you prefer, please feel free to articulate one question which arose for you in relation to this week's reading, lecture and/or tutorial.
I look forward to learning from your blogs!