Jan L. Overwijk

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I am a social philosopher currently working on a critical theory of value. The riddle that I am trying to solve is how economic value is constituted at the intersection of economy and ecology. How is biophysical stuff transformed into monetary units? To address the riddle, I stage an encounter between eco-Marxism, ecological economics, and ecofeminism. This project was initiated with the NWO Rubicon postdoctoral project “Turning the Priceless into Price” at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main. 

Before that, I worked on critique, cybernetics and capitalism. In 2025, I published the monograph Cybernetic Capitalism: A Critical Theory of the Incommunicable in the Meaning Systems series at Fordham University Press. This book philosophically details the cybernetic logic of neoliberal capitalism. On the basis of a new “critical systems theory” (a synthesis of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and Frankfurt School style critical theory), I show how neoliberal valorization operates paradoxically—through freedom and power, politics and technics, perfect communicability and incommunicability.

From 2020-2023, I was a lecturer in the interdisciplinary study program Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht University. From 2015-2020, I completed my PhD at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam (supported with an NWO-grant from the Netherlands School for Cultural Analysis).

For my recent publications, please click ‘View full profile’.