Library Chat: Nick Nesbitt and Jana Ndiaye Berankova
In this Library Chat, architecture theorist, publisher, and philosopher Jana Ndiaye Berankova speaks with Nick Nesbitt, professor in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University, about his two recent books: The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022) and Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians (2024).
Their conversation explores the concept of race in the writings of the “real” Marx, the universalism of Toussaint Louverture, and the different forms of dialectics in the thought of Louis Althusser and Alain Badiou.
Jana was a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in 2024–25. She has collaborated with Nick Nesbitt and fellow members of the Prague Axiomatic Circle on book projects such as Revolutions for the Future: May ’68 and the Prague Spring (2020) and Alain Badiou: Sometimes, We Are Eternal (2019), both published by her own Suture Press.
Their books can be ordered at: https://shop.suturepress.com
Jana Ndiaye Berankova is an art and architecture theorist, philosopher, writer, and publisher. She studied art history and comparative literature at the École normale supérieure and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris, France) and architecture at Columbia University, where she completed her PhD dissertation on architecture theory and French philosophy.
Nick Nesbitt is a professor in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University. His research interests include Marxism, the thought of Alain Badiou and Louis Althusser, and Caribbean thinkers. He is the author of Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic, Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians (2024), The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022), Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (2013), and Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (2008).
