Arthur Bueno is going to present a working paper on 'Capital, Desire, and Neurasthenia'

This paper reflects on the affective implications of capitalist forms of life by exploring the affinities between Karl Marx’s Capital and Georg Simmel’s writings on money and modern culture. Such an endeavor rests on the assumption that, as stated by a contemporary reviewer of The Philosophy of Money, many of Simmel’s arguments “read like a translation of Marx’s economic discussions into the language of psychology.” In line with this, I suggest that Simmel’s phenomenologically precise description of modern forms of life can be interpreted as a consistent analysis of the affective implications of commodity fetishism. More precisely, this paper develops the idea that money – in particular when it attains the form of capital – is an embodiment of pure, self-referential desire. Contrary to what is often stated regarding the first chapters of The Philosophy of Money, this does not mean that Simmel’s account relies on a merely subjective theory of value, as in orthodox economics. Rather, such a conception of money and capital as pure desire can only be based on a value theory that is at once pre-subjective, subjective, intersubjective and objective. In the context of this systematic reconstruction, some of the most defining features of affective experience in modernity come to appear as expressions of what Simmel, following the psychology of his time, called neurasthenia, i.e. a continuous oscillation between feelings of hyperesthesia and anesthesia.

Arthur Bueno is going to presents a working paper on 'Rationality – Cultivation – Vitality: Simmel on the Pathologies of Modern Culture'

This paper reconstructs Georg Simmel’s writings on money and modernity with a view to outlining a multi-layered diagnosis of the pathologies of modern culture. The resulting framework allows for the distinction of three different perspectives, each of them based on a particular anthropological philosophy and presenting a distinctive assessment of the potentials and problematic features of modern life. In Simmel’s oeuvre, the pathologies of culture are respectively understood as (1) irrational (from the perspective of teleological action); (2) alienating (from the perspective of subjective cultivation); and (3) mechanistic (from the perspective of trans-subjective life). 

Arthur Bueno presents a working paper on 'Simmel and the Forms of In-dividuality'

The work of Georg Simmel is widely known for the case it makes for a strong connection between modernity and individualization. In his sociological theory as in the Philosophy of Money, in his writings on intellectual history as in his aesthetic and metaphysical essays, a perspective on modern culture is advanced according to which the latter is distinguished from other historical epochs by a peculiar accentuation of individuality. Common to all these different endeavours is, moreover, the view that such foregrounding of the individual is an inherently conflictual process. The emergence of modern individuality is thereby regarded not only as the outcome of struggles against previous forms of social organization, but also as bringing forward new tensions of its own. It is for no other reason that Simmel so often presented the forms taken by the modern individual in dualistic terms. Less visible, however, is the fact that those analyses present not only different figures of in-dividuality, with its accentuated sense of independence and self-sufficiency, but also distinct modes of in-dividuality marked by an openness to being permeated by something other than oneself. In fact, when one follows the thread of these dualisms in Simmel’s work it becomes clear that, despite an initial focus on the boundedness of the in-dividual, the in-dividual aspects of personal and social experience come to acquire over time an increasingly significant role, with decisive consequences for his view on modernity.