'Liberty is not a choice between objects', a paper and presentation of works at the conference 'Marx and the Aesthetic' at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, 10 to 13 may, 2012.

The aim of this conference was twofold: on the one hand, to analyse the role of the aesthetic in the writings of Marx and, on the other, to examine works of art and literature which are based on, or have been directly inspired by, Marx’s writings. At the core of this conference, then, was an attempt to think the immanent relation between the aesthetic and emancipatory conceptions of politics. Kivland took up an insistence on the ‘production ‘ of Marx as an aesthetic event, and proposed a presentation of material, in which politics and aesthetics are inexorably entwined, and indeed, lived in the intersection of public political action and private subjectivity. She remembered that Hannah Arendt said of herself: ‘I don’t fit’, and she also remembered Arendt's idea of ‘l’œuvre’, as that which lasts or remains and is transmitted.