The Dialectic of Universal Emancipation
Date and Time
Location
FRANCE AND THE WORLD
SPEAKER: Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University
This talk will examine the dialectic of universal emancipation and the radical enlightenment, to argue that while these processes were arguably initiated in the Malian Mande Charter of 1222, demonstrated more geometrico in Spinoza’s Ethics of 1677, and further pursued in the 1793 Jacobin revolution, it was only the coming of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) that constituted the apex of the Age of Revolutions, while foundering upon the neo-slavery of global capitalism in a dialectic of emancipation and subjection that continues into the present.
About the speaker
Nick Nesbitt is a Professor of French at Princeton University and Senior Researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences Philosophical Institute. He is the author most recently of Reading Capital's Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians (Brill 2024, Haymarket 2025), and The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, 2022).