NAVEL GAZING

In preparation for my brief trip north, to speak at Brown and MIT, I have been turning over in my mind what I shall be saying about my work on the thought of Karl Marx, and I have come to realize that almost everything I have written during the second half of my life is, in one way or another, connected to my attempt to come to terms with the depth and complexity of Marx's great work Capital.  Obviously, the two books and many articles I have published or have written for this blog on Marx's thought are connected.  But so too are other apparently unrelated essays:  Narrative Time,  The Indexing Problem, Notes for a Materialist Analysis of the Public and the Private Realms [which is ostensibly about Hannah Arendt], The Study of Society, and much more.

Perhaps Hegel was right that "the Owl of Minerva only spreads its wings with the falling of the dusk."

If it were not the case, as we are reminded by Ecclesiastes, that "of making many books there is no end," I might attempt a valedictory volume weaving together everything I have done these past forty years.  But then, who on earth would publish it!