Philosophy MA student Edgar Llamas presented at the Philosophy Department Colloquium

November 22, 2019

Philosophy MA student Edgar Llamas' paper titled “Dwelling and Nothingness: On the Reclaiming of Being in a Post-Industrial City” was attended by 100+ undergraduate students. Mr. Llamas provides a summation of his presentation "As succinctly as possible, the topic of the paper is the phenomenology of capitalism, as it manifests itself in the city of Detroit, Michigan. Drawing from Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and "The Origin of the Work of Art", I aimed to address what I see as a glaring flaw in Marxism: its silence on the matter of subjectivity. Indeed, although Detroit has already been the subject of so many sociological and economic analyses, it has not yet been analyzed existentially nor hermeneutically. The question that we must ask, then, is how material conditions, analyzed via a Marxist lens, affect our concernful engagement with the world. This is tied to my larger thesis project, which will be on Heideggerian Marxism itself."