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Marxist Philosophy
Jiwei Ci (1)

All texts by Marx (and Engels) are in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C.
Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). Only these texts are required reading.

1. Revolution, resentment, sublimation (i): class struggle and class consciousness

Reading: (a) Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party; (b) Marx, Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; (c) Georg Lukács, “Class Consciousness,” in History and
Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971)

2. Revolution, resentment, sublimation (ii): the beginning of politics

Reading: Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)

3. Revolution, resentment, sublimation (iii): the slave revolt in morality

Reading: (a) Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann & R.
J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), First Essay; (b) Alain Badiou, Saint Paul:
The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2003)

4. The invention of universality through the sublimation of resentment (i): Marx’s critique of
the bourgeois democratic revolution in terms of political state vs. civil society, political
emancipation vs. human emancipation

Reading: Marx, (a) “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”; (b)
“Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction”; (c) “On the
Jewish Question”

5. The invention of universality through the sublimation of resentment (ii): the proletariat as
universal class; proletarian vs. bourgeois resentment and sublimation; racism

Reading: Marx, (a) “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

Introduction”; (b) Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; (c) The
Holy Family; (d) The German Ideology; (e) The Critique of the Gotha Program; (f) Etienne
Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London:
Verso, 1991)

6. The demise of universality, proletarian and bourgeois

Reading: (a) Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. & trans. Quintin
Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971); (b) Louis Althusser,
On the Reproduction of Capitalism, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2014), chaps.
6, 8, 12, and Appendix 2: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses; (c) Immanuel
Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: New Press, 1995)
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7. The desublimation of resentment (i): human rights as last utopia, identity politics, and
clash of civilizations

Reading: (a) Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010); (b) Charles Taylor et. al., Multiculturalism: Examining the
Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); (c)
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1996/2011); (d) Francis Fukuyama, Identity: Contemporary Identity
Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (London: Profile Books, 2018)

8. The desublimation of resentment (ii): the case of China—from revolution to rejuvenation

Reading: Branko Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the
World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019)

Assessment

To be decided in light of semester’s progress