Remembering Moishe Postone II

Abstract

ver more than two decades, Moishe was my teacher, mymentor, my colleague, and my friend. In what follows, I offer my best understanding of the core concerns of his work and his pedagogy. I hope it will be clear how much of a loss his death represents to me and so many of his other former students. I first met Moishe in the spring quarter of my first year at the University of Chicago in1996,when I enrolled in his gnomically titled class, “Marx.”Wespent 10weeks largely committed to reading the first volume of Capital. It was a transformative experience in every way. Moishe led discussions that shifted constantly back and forth between close reading of specific passages and thoughtful reflection on the implicit architecture of the text’s larger expositorymethod. The classwas anything but a freewheeling discussion of the assigned readings: he led a tightly controlled Socratic dialogue. He pressed students to go beyond their immediate responses to what they had read, both in terms of their overdetermined assumptions about what there was to find in Marx’s writings and the near-universal graduate student impulse to criticize first and understand later. He pressed the class to grapple with the possibility that Marx was both entirely a figure of his time and (without contradiction) a theoretician whose thought still speaks powerfully to the present. To some students, his classroom style could seem authoritarian. In fact, Moishe alwayswelcomed all questions in class discussions and engaged with any objections he felt were being offered in good faith. His aim was not to force students into agreement with him but to lead students to think difficult thoughts thatwere not theirs and that they had not already thought before (whether or not these were thoughts they would ultimately agree with). His was a profoundly considered pedagogy, and it has had a profound influence on my own teaching. Moishe understood, I think, that there was a multiplicity of conceptual impulses traceable in the text of Capital. Yet in his teaching andwriting he always emphasized what he construed as its fundamental theoretical coherence. In particular, he highlighted howdifficult it was to pull some sentence or passage out of context andmake it speak the truth ofMarx’s position.Marx, he argued, workedwith a rigorous commitment to immanence. He therefore voiced the logic of political economy as a nec-