Samir Gandesha is Director at the Institute for the Humanities, Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Johan Hartle is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Adjunct Professor for Aesthetics at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China. He was visiting research fellow at Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre for German Jewish Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem and Humboldt Research Fellow at the Universitá Roma Tre. He is editor, along with Samir Gandesha, of Reification and Spectacle. The Timeliness of Western Marxism (2016).

The whole of Marx's project confronts the narrow concerns of political philosophy by embedding it in social philosophy and a certain understanding of the aesthetic. From those of aesthetic production to the "poetry of the future" (as Marx writes in the Eighteenth Brumaire), from the radical modernism of bourgeois development to the very idea of association (which defined one of the main lines of tradition in the history of aesthetics), steady references to Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, and the idea that bourgeois politics is nothing but a theatrical stage: the aesthetic has a prominent place in the constellation of Marx's thought.
This book offers an original and challenging study of both Marx in the aesthetic, and the aesthetic in Marx. It differs from previous discussions of Marxist aesthetic theory as it understands the works of Marx themselves as contributions to thinking the aesthetic. This is an engagement with Marx's aesthetic that takes into account Marx's broader sense of the aesthetic, as identified by Eagleton and Buck-Morss - as a question of sense perception and the body. It explores this through questions of style and substance in Marx and extends it into contemporary questions of how this legacy can be perceived or directed analytically in the present.

By situating Marx in contemporary art debates this volume speaks directly to lively interest today in the function of the aesthetic in accounts of emancipatory politics and is essential reading for researchers and academics across the fields of political philosophy, art theory, and Marxist scholarship.

Introduction

Section I: Aesthetics / Emancipations
Chapter 1: Three Logics of the Aesthetic in Marx
Samir Gandesha, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Chapter 2: Poiesis, Praxis, Aisthesis: Remarks on Aristotle and Marx
Henry Pickford, Duke University, USA
Chapter 3: "Sensuous Supra-Sensuous": The Aesthetics of Real Abstraction
Sami Khatib, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Chapter 4: Free Associations: On Marx and Freud
Johan F. Hartle, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Section II: Style and Performativity in Marx

Chapter 5: On Beauty and its Challenges: Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Karl Marx
Anna Katharina Gisbertz, University of Mannheim, Germany
Chapter 6: Marx: The Philosophical Defense of History in the Metonymical Mode
Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Chapter 7: Imagery as Weaponry: ars gratia belli
Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, UK
Chapter 8: Radical Schiller and Young Marx
Daniel Hartley, University of Leeds, UK
Section III: Modes of Artistic Production
Chapter 9: Installing Communism
Boris Groys, New York University, USA
Chapter 10: Marx's Aesthetics in Mexico: Conceptual Art After 1968
Robin Greeley, University of Connecticut, USA
Chapter 11: Filming Capital: On Cinemarxism in the Twenty-first Century
Sven Lütticken, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Chapter 12: Marx as Art as Politics: Representations of Marx in Contemporary Arts
Johan H. Hartle, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
List of Illustrations