Asad Haider examines the ambiguity of the contemporaneity concept through the criticism of Marxist teleology.
Asad Haider will begin his speech with the problem of historical causality—that is, what might be understood as a linear and progressive sequence of causation driven by an originary subject, which seeks to meet a goal at the end of history. This conception was put into question by Karl Marx, even while residual teleologies continued to appear in his work and were repeated by figures of the Second International. Emphasizing the critique of teleology as the fundamental materialist component of Marx’s thought, Haider will look at two ways of relating to the past: the prehistory of capital, and the survivals of older relation of existing social formations. Both of these elements of the past point to a plural contemporaneity.