Historical Materialism Book Series Reading Capital's Materialist Dialectic

Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic analyzes the theory of materialist dialectic as it is developed in the writings of Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, and Alain Badiou, focusing on their singular analyses of Marx’s process of demonstration in Capital and Spinoza’s Ethics. While the explicit Althusserian engagement with Marx’s Capital remained largely limited to Reading Capital, after 1968, Nick Nesbitt argues, this theoretical intervention remained insistent, adopting the form of a general theory of materialist dialectic. The book thus analyzes the Althusserianist theory of a materialist dialectic across diverse sites including Althusser’s unpublished archive, Macherey’s exposition of Spinoza’s Ethics, and Badiou’s Logics of Worlds, while simultaneously bringing this fully-developed theory of materialist dialectic to bear anew on the reading of Capital itself, to show that Spinoza's influence on Marx is far greater--and that of Hegel increasingly diminishing--than has been previously thought.