Subsumption in Kant, Hegel, and Marx: An Event with Andrés Saenz de Sicilia
When: Wednesday, April 23, 2025, 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Where: Hybrid (London & YouTube Live), Mile End campus
A major intervention into debates surrounding the historical trajectories of capitalism, Subsumption in Kant, Hegel, and Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society systematically refutes the influential thesis that we are now in a stage of "total" capitalist subsumption which leaves no space of refuge or resistance.
Join us to hear more about Sanez de Sicilia’s account of subsumption, followed by a conversation with Felix del Campo and an open discussion.
The last cycle of class struggle and defeat has brought a renewed engagement with the problem of social domination in capitalist societies. This has been accompanied by a productive return to Marx’s value theory and the logical and formal determinations underpinning capital as a mode of production and social reproduction. By critically evaluating the historical reconfiguration of sexuality, sexual categories, and racial orders in relation to the process of capitalist accumulation, queer, trans, and feminist Marxists have made productive use of these works through their insistence on understanding the deeply personal effects of an impersonal mode of social reproduction such as capitalism.
The relationship between impersonal, indirect, abstract domination – the mute compulsion of market relations – that characterises the logical unfolding of capitalist forms and the very personal, direct, and concrete – empirical, as Marx refers to them – forms of domination through which capitalist relations of production subsist is one of the historical unfolding of class struggle, of the constant remoulding and reshaping of the various forms through which life subsists as a moment, or an excretion, of capital’s self-reproduction. The critical concept of subsumption, if properly understood, can provide us with the analytical and political ammunition to navigate the murky waters of capitalism’s very concrete abstractions.
Capital is often depicted as an all-encompassing and abstract social force which seeks to "subsume" all of human life. But what in fact is involved in such "subsumption," and how might it be resisted? Tracing the discourse of subsumption through the work of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the critical Marxist tradition, Saenz de Sicilia offers a materialist framework for analysing capitalist power. Saenz de Sicilia argues that capitalist subsumption operates at three distinct yet interrelated levels: exchange, production, and reproduction, each characterised by distinct logics of domination and resistance. Conflicts over subsumption at each of these levels lie at the heart of capitalism’s struggle to determine the shapes of human social life.
A major intervention into debates surrounding the historical trajectories of capitalism, Subsumption in Kant, Hegel, and Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society systematically refutes the influential thesis that we are now in a stage of "total" capitalist subsumption which leaves no space of refuge or resistance.
Join us to hear more about Sanez de Sicilia’s account of subsumption, followed by a conversation with Felix del Campo and an open discussion. This event will be in person and broadcast on the HM YouTube channel. Access through this link: https://youtube.com/live/F5WSaB5Xv7w