Dialectical Hermeneutic

How have Marxist thinkers conceived and theorized the dialectical hermeneutic practice? What assumptions, contradictions, philosophical and political commitments have shaped the modes of interpretation that emerge from the Marxist tradition? How has Marxist thought imagined the relation between reading and history, the production of literary form and the operation of ideology, the work of critique, and the material conditions that sustain it?

This working group explores Marxist hermeneutics not as a stable method, but as a terrain of theoretical struggle. We are interested in how Marxist thinkers have interrogated the act of interpretation itself—its function as a political act, its embedding in class struggle as the great plot of history, and its entanglement with the production and reproduction of ideology. We pay particular attention to conceptions of dialectics as an interpretive strategy, a conceptual commitment, and a way of thinking—one that treats contradiction not as error or failure, but as the very structure through which meaning, form, and historical process unfold. Rather than applying a fixed set of tools to texts, we trace how those tools emerged, shifted, and were contested within the Marxist tradition.

Our aim is to: (a) Rethink interpretation as a political act, historically situated and materially conditioned. (b) Explore the relation between hermeneutics and the philosophy of history within Marxist thought. (c) Consider the singularity of Marxist hermeneutics with respect to other hermeneutic traditions. (d) Analyze how shifting models of base and superstructure have shaped cultural criticism. (e) Consider history as the overarching horizon of interpretation, shaping both cultural analysis and hermeneutic practice as historically embedded. (f) Situate interpretation within capitalist modernity, attending to colonialism and imperialism as historical forces that shape both cultural production and hermeneutic possibility. (g) Draw connections between Marxist hermeneutics and political ecology, especially where interpretation meets environmental crisis, extractivism, and the ideological construction of nature. (h) Study definitions of dialectics as a coherent, distinct, and robust epistemology beyond the empirical positivism dominating mainstream intellectual approaches.

In our meetings, we will focus on three complementary dimensions: (1) the analysis of hermeneutic models developed by Marxist thinkers across historical and geographical contexts; (2) close attention to their concrete interventions in literary and cultural criticism—for example, Jameson reading Balzac, Federici reading the witch hunts, or Mariátegui reading Arguedas; and (3) a sustained engagement with thinkers from the Global South whose work expands and reorients Marxist hermeneutics through critiques of colonialism, capitalism, and epistemology. We will read authors such as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Fredric Jameson, Silvia Federici, José Carlos Mariátegui, and Roberto Schwarz, among others. Readings will span foundational texts and meta-critical reflections, with attention to form, contradiction, utopia, and the dialectics of ideology. We will also engage with thinkers from the Global South—including Aníbal Quijano, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad,

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Angela Davis—whose work challenges the Eurocentric framing of Marxist criticism and rethinks the politics of interpretation in relation to colonialism, race, and epistemic location. In tracing the philosophical genealogy of dialectical thinking, we will also revisit the role of Hegel as a foundational but contested figure in the development of Marxist hermeneutics.

We meet biweekly for two hours. During Fall 2025, we aim to develop a shared conceptual ground for rethinking dialectical hermeneutics as a political and philosophical practice—and for reading critique historically. For Spring 2026, we will expand our focus to examine how thinkers from the Global South have transformed and expanded Marxist hermeneutics through situated critiques of colonialism, capitalism, and epistemology.