Dias event: Marx and the Body by Søren Mau

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. In this “corporeal turn,” Marx and the Marxist tradition has frequently been dismissed as irrelevant and outdated. In this talk, I will argue that Marx's writings on the body have been underestimated and that a critical reconstruction of his analysis, when combined with insights from recent Marxist feminist and eco-Marxist scholarship, can offer valuable perspectives on the relationship between the human body and the historically unique forms of impersonal domination that sustain capitalism and obstruct efforts to address the cascade of contemporary ecological crises.

About Søren Mau
Søren Mau (b. 1989) finished his PhD in Philosophy in 2019 at the University of Southern Denmark and has since held postdoc positions at the University of Copenhagen, Goldsmiths University of London, and Aarhus University. His PhD dissertation was published as Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power (Verso Books, 2023), which has been published in four languages, with three more forthcoming in 2025. His research focuses on critical theories of capitalism, power, the body, 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.

The lecture is organized by the Danish Institute for Advanced Study in collaboration with SDU’s Centre for Human Interactivity and Centre for Mobilizing Post-Anthropocentric Climate Action.

Venue
The DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus Odense

This event is open for all. No registration needed.