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Book jacket for True Materialism, out September 16 and available for pre-order now!
Jensen Suther
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Jensen Suther
@jensensuther
Unironic believer in the Absolute. Marx in my heart; Hegel in my head. PhD @Yale. Junior Fellow @Harvard. True Materialism @StanfordPress.
- there’s about enough time to read six books seriously in one’s life
- Trying to get into Hegel? Don’t start with the Phenomenology, or the lesser Logic. Start with the entry on Aristotle in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Probably the best and most concise summary of Hegel’s approach to metaphysics, dialectic, and speculative thought.
- all the best philosophy is essentially motivated by love and rage
- Derrida once called Joyce the most Hegelian novelist, and this is true but not for the reasons he thought. To understand "Joyce, the Hegelian," one has to first understand "Joyce, the Aristotelian," especially since Joyce rarely alludes to Hegel, if ever. 1/
- Some news: moving to Leipzig to do a second PhD, in philosophy, under Sebastian Rödl. Cheers!
- Official cover for True Materialism, forthcoming with SUP in Fall 2025:
- It’s worth recalling Adorno’s point that the collapse of the proletarian movement for socialism resulted not in the elimination of class but in the transformation of a class “for itself” into a class merely “in itself.” This creates a contradictory task for critical theory. 1/
- I’ve been reading Aristotle seriously since December 2018, when I first read the Physics and Metaphysics systematically. I was prompted by Korsgaard’s and McDowell’s suite of essays on Aristotle, which I read earlier on the year. Few things have impacted my thinking as much. 1/
- The idea that there is an “ecological” turn in Marx between the Manifesto and Capital, via his engagement with Liebig’s work on soil degradation, rests on a complete neglect of his Aristotelian-Hegelian theory of nature from 1844. This is Marxology at its academicist worst. 1/
- probably the most important line of philosophy in the past 500 years: “Self-consciousness is desire as such.”
- I wrote about the deep significance of Hegel’s thought for current debates surrounding AI and machine learning, for @NewStatesman
