The Seductions of Karl Marx

Murzban Jal

Murzban Jal is Professor at the Centre for Educational Studies, Indian Institute of Education, Pune and author of the Seductions of Karl Marx, Zoroastrianism: From Antiquity to the Modern Period and The New Militants. Jal is both a classical Marxist and as well as a Freudian critical theorist who bases his research on Marx and Freud's theories of alienation in the late capitalist society. Then he combines the Marxist theory of objectification of humanity with Freud's theory of Neurosis and Psychosis. His recent claim is that the old stages theory of Psycho-Analysis where Neurosis and Psychosis are divided into two distinct stages of mental illness is now redundant. Instead, he claims that both Neurosis and Psychosis are integrated as neurosis-psychosis. Combining the understanding of the neurosis-psychosis as the new disorder of contemporary society, he argues for a model of mass politics where the idea of humanity as humanity is kept at the centre of an alternative society where the programme of de-alienating humanity is hurled as a new philosophical and scientific discourse.