Cuvier, Totality, Marxism

Last update: 08 Dec 2024 00:49
First version: 6 May 2023

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Actual Notes, hence a mess

Somewhere in the vast, sprawling Marxist corpus there's a passage about how seemingly-trivial details about society provide insight into the whole, buttressed by talking about how Cuvier was able to reconstruct prehistoric "monsters" from a single bone. I'd like to run this fragment of a memory to ground, and think about what role this played in Marxism and cultural criticism more generally. This notebook is, for now, a dump of unread, unevaluated links I found while searching, so I can close tabs.

To read:
• Marcus Bajema, "Marx and the Thesis of the Plurality of Worlds", chapter 5 of Throwing the Dice of History with Marx: The Plurality of Historical Worlds from Epicurus to Modern Science
• David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917--1932
• Norman Levine
  • Marx's Rebellion Against Lenin
  • "Marx's Method", in Marx's Discourse with Hegel
• George Lichtheim, "The Concept of Ideology", History and Theory 4: 1965: 164--195
• Cesare Luporini, "Reality and historicity: economy and dialectics in Marxism, Part I", Economy and Society 4 (1975): 206--231 [Original, 1966]
• William V. Spanos, "Cuvier's Little Bone: Joseph Buttigieg's English Edition of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks", Rethinking Marxism 18 (2006): 23--36 [Obviously this seems the most promising of the lot...]