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Sami Khatib: Marx, Real Abstraction, and the Question  of Form
Marx, Real Abstraction, and the Question of Form
(p. 69 – 92)

Sami Khatib

Marx, Real Abstraction, and the Question of Form

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  • criticism
  • aesthetics

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Sami Khatib

Sami Khatib

is Professor of Visual Arts at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and member of the Mellon Foundation research group “Extimacies: Critical Theory from the Global South.” He is also a founding member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). Before joining AUC, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the German Research Council (DFG) research training group “Cultures of Critique” at Leuphana University Lüneburg. His ongoing research project “Aesthetics of the Sensuous-Supra-Sensuous” examines the aesthetic scope and political relevance of Marx’s discovery of the commodity form. Prior appointments include a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Arts and Humanities at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and visiting professorships at the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at AUB and at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2017).
Other texts by Sami Khatib for DIAPHANES
Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

Critique is a form of thinking and acting. It is determined by its objects, yet never accesses them immediately but is always mediated through its own forms of (re)presentation. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been a dynamization and fluidization of the understanding of form, as topoi such as the break, the marginalization, the tearing and opening indicate. However, these multifarious attempts to “build on the structure through demolition” (Benjamin) testify to the dependence of all articulation on the forms of (re)presentation [“Darstellung”]. As a philosophical problem, the question of form arises in critical theory from Marx to Adorno. Since the 1960s, literary practices have proliferated which generate their critical statements less argumentatively than through the programmatic use of formal means. At the same time, the writing self, along with its attitudes, reflections, affects and instruments, visibly enters the critical scene—whereas the theatrical scene as a stage of critique has been contested intensively during the 20th century. This volume examines how the interdependence of critique, object, and form translates into critical stances, understood as learnable, reproducible gestures, which bear witness to changing conditions and media of critical practice.

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