Marx and the Body with Søren Mau

In this talk, Søren Mau will argue that Marx’s writings on the body have been underestimated and that a critical reconstruction of his analysis contains the basis for a theory of the corporeal roots of historicity and freedom. Throughout the history of Western thought, the body has often been overlooked, devalued, or treated with mistrust and hostility. The failure to fully acknowledge human corporeality and its entanglement with the rest of nature is deeply connected to contemporary ecological crises, and has since the 1980s been subjected to a thorough-going critique by scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Mau argues that the body occupies a central place in Marx’s thought, and that a critical reconstruction of his dialectical understanding of the relationship between humans and the rest of nature and his concepts of corporeal organization, labor, tools and metabolism provides a foundation for an eco-Marxist theory of human nature and the corporeal roots of human historicity and freedom.

This talk is based on Søren Mau’s article “Karl Marx and the Body: Towards an Eco-Marxist Philosophical Anthropology” in Body & Society 32(1).

Søren Mau is a political philosopher and the author of Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (Verso Books, 2023). His work centers on critical theories of capitalism, power, ecology, the body, technology, human nature, and utopian thought, with the central theme of freedom: its nature and sources, the political and economic barriers to its realization under contemporary capitalism, and its potential forms in a post-capitalist world.