Principal Investigator: Zachary Samalin, Assistant Professor, English, UChicago

Theories of the Nineteenth Century had two overarching goals:

1) To produce a genealogical account of the formation of two important branches of the tradition of critical theory, namely, psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, as each developed out of historical circumstances and contradictions specific to nineteenth-century European culture. In both cases, Samalin tracked how specific concepts that were foundational to these systems—repression and sublimation, on the one hand, and ideology and exploitation/alienation, on the other—emerged from intellectual problems and unique social conflicts that cannot be assimilated to the present, even while these concepts continue to influence and to exert pressure on the way that social scientific and humanistic knowledge are produced today. Fundamentally, Samalin's project positioned itself in relation to the still-unresolved challenge posed by Michel Foucault’s influential critique of the repressive hypothesis in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. While Foucault’s deep skepticism that sexual repression is “truly an established historical fact” has had a profound impact on the study of modern culture, Samalin believes important work remains to be done in accounting for the consolidation of discursive knowledge contained within the repressive hypothesis, and that much of this work is adjacent to but distinct from the study of sexuality.

2) The second goal of Theories of the Nineteenth Century complements the first, seeking to give an account of how and why the historical terrain of the nineteenth century has figured so centrally in the project of critical theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether in Walter Benjamin’s arcades, Jürgen Habermas’ public sphere, or in C.L.R. James’ recasting of the Haitian revolution, one of theory’s main preoccupations has been to return to the historical scenes of its own emergence, looking for answers. Samalin investigated the consequences of this double dependency on the social transformations of the nineteenth century, at once as the too-often forgotten source of contemporary theoretical paradigms, and as a historical object whose redescription has been indispensible for producing methodological innovation in the present.