thomas waller

Thanks Dominique!

For @eflux.bsky.social, I wrote about Jaleh Mansoor’s new book and Marx’s metaphor of “universal prostitution” www.e-flux.com/notes/678337...

Bad Object — Parapraxis Errant Marxist-Lacanian ideology Thomas Waller

For Parapraxis, I wrote about Marx and Lacan. “Is there something inherent to Lacanianism itself that leads towards a politics of reaction?” www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/bad...

Some reflections on the new Gillian Rose lectures and the question of style for @criticalinquiry.bsky.social criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/thomas_walle...

Irene V. Small’s The Organic Line | The Brooklyn Rail Despite its epochal importance in the trajectory of modern art, the organic line has hitherto been excluded from official histories, which have tended to rely on categories like the grid, the monochro...

I've got a short review of Irene Small's new book on Lygia Clark and modernism in this month's issue of The Brooklyn Rail brooklynrail.org/2025/04/art_...

I interviewed Bev Best about her book, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Vale in Marx’s Capital.

Up now at @endnotesjournal.bsky.social

endnotes.org.uk/posts/sean-o...

Opinião - Mario Sergio Conti: Um livro britânico sobre Roberto Schwarz fala em urdu da China e Beethoven O livro é bom não só por realçar os feitos de um pensador brasileiro, mas pelo que traz sobre a literatura mundial

There is a review of Roberto Schwarz and World Literature in today's Folha de S.Paulo (@folha.com): "Um livro britânico sobre Roberto Schwarz fala em urdu da China e Beethoven" folha.com/74xygd1e

Finally, in Leandro Pasini's chapter, there is an engagement with Schwarz's poetry collection Corações Veteranos (Veteran Hearts) and his play A Lata de Lixo da História (The Dustbin of History), which are little-known if discussed at all in the anglophone world 6/

The book also includes one of the first English translations (by myself and emilio sauri) of the work of Paulo Eduardo Arantes, an influential Brazilian Marxist thinker, a scholar of Hegel, and a long-time interlocutor of Schwarz's writing 5/

Contributors take up the challenge of Schwarz's dialectical criticism by offering new readings of Urdu literature (Sahota), Israeli science fiction (Nir), Chinese political economy (Karl), and Guyanese speculative fiction (Niblett) 4/

The chapters evaluate Schwarz's work in dialogue with the Frankfurt School (Durão; Della Torre), with Antonio Candido's work (Brown), with postcolonial studies (Larsen), and with world-literary studies (Cevasco; López; Waller) 3/

The book discusses key Schwarzian concepts such as 'misplaced ideas', 'volubility' and 'objective form'. In the intro, I provide an overview of Schwarz's intellectual formation, covering his reading of Marx in Brazil, his correspondence with Adorno, and his exile in Paris 2/

Roberto Schwarz and World Literature is now out in hardback with Palgrave Macmillan, marking the first book-length engagement in English with Latin America's foremost dialectician and one of the all-time great Marxist literary critics 1/

For next year's (virtual) ACLA, I'm organising a seminar with Carson Welch on 'Hegel and World Literature'. Please do consider sending in an abstract to us, and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions!

www.acla.org/hegel-and-wo...

250 word abstracts are due by May 5th 2024. Full essays of 2000-3000 words are due by August 28th 2024. If you've got any questions, feel free to get in touch with either Sean or myself!

@seanobrien.bsky.social and I are editing a special issue of CLCWeb entitled 'Keywords for Value and Culture'. The aim is to bring together short essays that explore the dialogue between value-form theory and Marxist cultural studies. Details in the CFP below! docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb_cfp/1/

Stably Unusual: Artistic Labor and Aesthetic Autonomy Abstract. This article critically compares two recent approaches to the problem of aesthetic autonomy: Dave Beech’s Art and Value and Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy. By recentering the differences betw...

I've got an article out in the latest issue of
Qui Parle on art, autonomy, and subsumption. It's called 'Stably Unusual: Artistic Labor and Aesthetic Autonomy', and you can check it out here: read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/ar...

Marx and the Climate Crisis #1: Marx and Nature by Sean O’Brien — the87press This four-part lecture series asks what we can learn from Marx about the climate crisis: its origins, its impacts, and what possible solutions we might seek in the face of increasingly inadequate go...

First instalment in the new series on Marx & the Climate Crisis now up at the 87. www.the87press.co.uk/thehythe-ope...

For anyone attending the Historical Materialism conference in London this weekend, I’ll be speaking on the roundtable ‘Keywords for Value and Culture’. If you’re free on Saturday morning 11:00-12:45, be sure to come along for the discussion!

Abstract and info available here: www.rhome.letras.ulisboa.pt/pt/aulas-abe...

Thanks Anna -- happy to send over the talk if interested

I'm giving a talk on Roberto Schwarz and Henry James tomorrow at the University of Lisbon. If anyone's in the city and wants to attend, feel free to get in touch! Details are on the poster.

I've got two poems out in the latest issue of Postcolonial Text: 'Toll' and 'Or Eternity'. Both dealing with southern African themes, they're dedicated to the great Mozambican author Orlando Mendes and anti-apartheid activist/scholar Ruth First. www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pc...

New Penguin Classics/Companhia das Letras edition of Roberto Schwarz's writings to be published in Portuguese in November. Seems like it will include some of his early stuff, like the 1964 essay on Fellini's 8 1/2 (a banger).