ISP Conversations: Wendy Brown and Paul North on Marx’s Capital

Hess Theater and online, via Zoom

The Whitney’s Independent Study Program (ISP) hosts a conversation between scholars Wendy Brown and Paul North on Karl Marx’s Capital, moderated by ISP Associate Director Sara Nadal-Melsió. As contributors to the most recent English edition of Capital, Brown and North discuss Paul Reitter’s innovative reading of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Princeton University Press, 2024). 

This first new English translation in five decades, as well as the only one based on the last German edition that Marx himself revised, enables us to read Capital anew. Reitter’s fresh interpretation conveys the experimentalism of the text, the subtlety of its play on words, the vastness of the literary, philosophical, and scientific archives it mobilizes in its essential critical analysis of capitalist production. Marx’s ambitious and unfinished project emerges as a daring amalgam in search of a form that will match the maddening complexity, singularity, and reach of its subject—capital as a system. 

The program is hosted by the Whitney ISP in partnership with the Whitney’s Public Programs and Academic Engagement Department. . 

Wendy Brown is the UPS Foundation Chair in the School of Social Science at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West and Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Marx Weber, among others.  

Paul North is the Maurice Natanson Professor of German at Yale University. His books include The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation and Bizarre Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness.  

Sara Nadal-Melsió is the Associate Director of the Whitney ISP. She is the co-author of Politically Red, written with Eduardo Cadava, and of Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Figure.