On Jacques Rancière's Distant Freedom: Essay on Chekhov and Beyond.

Setting out from Jacques Rancière’s Au loin la liberté, this talk examines nihilism both in its metaphysical sense of destiny and in its political sense of servitude and revolution. I suggest new ways of approaching nihilism not as pure despair or stasis, but as a dynamic space of interruption and transformation where freedom can emerge.

The publication of Reading Capital [Lire le capital] marked an event in the full philosophical sense of the term: at the same time a rupture and irreversible beginning. A collaborative, seminary effort between multiple authors - convened by Louis Althusser - the text proposed a radical new reading of Das Kapital, one that was intentionally partial and unorthodox, and all the more productive for being so. Its almost immediate success within both domestic and international circles inaugurated a new tradition of philosophical thought under the banner of structural Marxism, thematising notions such as symptomatic reading, militant science, structural causality and theoretical anti-humanism. The precocious seminary contributors invariably went on to become hugely influential forces themselves, from Pierre Macherey, Jacques Ranciere, and Roger Esablet, to the beloved, one-time Professor at the CRMEP, Etienne Balibar. On the occasion of its 60-year anniversary, this conference seeks to revisit the intellectual legacy of Reading Capital, investigating its contemporary relevance, as well as the polemics that have emerged since its publication. We thereby invite papers that critically reflect on this legacy, drawing attention to the limits of the work as well as its unexplored potentials. We would also like to welcome papers that engage with Capital itself, and the various other readings that have become canonised in the intervening decades.