CCS Colloquium: Vivification: Animation in Kant and Marx – Benedikt Kuhn

Leuphana University Lüneburg I Cental Building C40.530

The Center for Critical Studies hosts a colloquium three times a semester where members of the Center present their research in progress. Colloquium meetings are open to all members of the university.

Colloquium. Mi. 16.12.2026. 18:15 Uhr. C 40.530.

The concept of life, and specifically that of the living organism, becomes central in Kant's late philosophy. Situated at the juncture of practical and theoretical cognition, the concept emerges in Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment as the bearer of hope for bridging the "incalculable gulf" between nature and freedom that the first Critique had established. The concept of the living organism is fundamental in Marx’s philosophy as well. Whereas in the early writings it still appears primarily as the other of the alienating forces of mechanized industrial labor, in Capital it plays a highly ambivalent role. Both the seemingly self-sufficient process of capital's "measureless drive" and its opposite, a successful realization of genus-being, are expressed through metaphors of the living organism. Crucially, however, both Kant and Marx understand the concept of life not as the expression of an empirical fact of the biological world, but as a form of presentation (Darstellung) – ultimately, as a trope. The talk will show how an aesthetics of vivification between Kant and Marx grounds their respective relations to a philosophy of freedom and of liberation.