Lensgrinding: Spinoza on Work

With all of the attention on Spinoza by Marxists is is surprising how little is written about Spinoza and work. Spinoza has provided theories of ideology, of alienation, and even of the relation between forces and relations of production, it is surprising that few have remarked on what Spinoza actually says about labor or work. This is perhaps due to the fact that it would appear that there is little there, Spinoza's interests were elsewhere. There are only a few references to work in Spinoza, but I would argue that they are significant. 

Transvaluation of Values: On Lordon's La Condition Anarchique

A glimpse of the cover, title, and timing of Lordon's latest book, La Condition Anarchique might lead one to suspect that the anarchic condition it refers to has something to do with financial crises. Which goes to reaffirm what they say about books and covers. The anarchic condition that Lordon is writing about not only has nothing to do with anarchism, nor with some kind of chaos, but with the very existence of values and norms. 

We Once Were Ungovernable: On Chamayou's La Société Ingouvernable

Perhaps the best way to make sense of the present order is to consider first the disorder, the contestation of the old order. This could be considered the autonomist hypothesis applied to politics, and it is the underlying method of Grégoire Chamayou’s La société ingouvernable: Une généalogie du libéralisme autoritaire. 

Year of the Wolf, Part Two : On The Howling

Years ago I wrote what I jokingly consider my contribution to "Wolfen Studies."The other contributions to the field being Evan Calder Williams Combined and Uneven Apocalypse and Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle's Cartographies of the Absolute.  In the comments to that post it was pointed out to me that Wolfen was one of three werewolf movies to be released in 1981; the other two films were The Howling and An American Werewolf in London. I initially thought of writing a post on all three, but dropped the idea. Now, years later, I returned to the notion. This October I have been watching a lot of old horror favorites from Hammer films to some classics from the eighties. I decided to rewatch The Howling. 

Halo's Return: Two Versions of the Religion of Capital

Image from They Live 

Sometimes students ask me if I think that Marx was wrong about anything. Marxists are supposedly not known for independent thought. I always have a quick and easy answer, the point of reference is not something deep in Volume Three, but in one of the most well known and most cited passages of all. I am referring to the following passage from The Communist Manifesto. 

The Myth of the Paid Protester

This is probably the worst way to begin a blog post, but I can't shake the figure of the paid protester. I am less interested in the rights fascination with George Soros (something that others could analyze better) than I am with the particular mythology of the paid protester. Although, I will say this about the former, the specter of a billionaire using his money to influence politics seems strange coming from people who ostensibly have no categorical problem with billionaires using their money to influence politics. I guess it could be understood as part of the spectacular division of capital, just as there are "woke" and "MAGA" brands, there are woke and MAGA billionaires, opposition to the specific actions of one circumvents any discussion of the entire system. 

Logic of Alternation: From Mind and Body to Material Conditions and Ideology

Presented at McGill September 2018

This is a longer version of something I posted here, presented for a discussion of Chantal Jaquet's Affects, Actions, and Passions in Spinoza. 

I intend to approach Chantal Jaquet’s interpretation of the mind and body in Spinoza somewhat obliquely, by examining its possible implications for a social theory. In doing so I am following a fairly recent tendency to view Spinoza as not just an important political thinker, but also one whose account of affects, imagination, and knowledge offers profound insight on social and political life. I am thinking here explicitly of Yves Citton and Frédérique Lordon's Spinoza et les science sociales, but also more broadly Jaquet’s own work on transclasses which uses a Spinozist anthropology and ontology to examine the reproduction and nonreproduction of social relations. That is not the book that we are here to discuss, so I would like to begin my remarks on Affects, Actions, and Passions in Spinoza by putting forward something of an axiom, every interpretation of the relation of mind and body in Spinoza necessary has profound implications for how one thinks of social and political relations. 

(In)finitude's Score: On André Tosel

In some sense this is a belated response to André Tosel's passing last year. When Tosel died I was only vaguely aware of his name, I may have read an essay on Spinoza or Balibar here or there, but only knew his work by reputation. It was the initial wave of responses to Tosel's death especially this interview on Revue Période that got me interested in reading Tosel. I started by reading Spinoza ou l'autre (in)finitude and have gone through the little Emancipations aujourd'hui? Études sur Marx (et Engels), Du Retour du Religieux, and Le Marxisme du 20e Siècle, with a few more on the way.

Real World Experience: On Yves Schwartz's Experience et Connaissance du Travail.

Image from the Simpsons and Frinkiac. 

Two thoughts immediately come to mind when considering Yves Schwartz's Experience et Connaissance du Travail. The first, which provides the inspiration for the image above, is the absurdity of dragging around a nearly nine hundred French book on worker's experience and knowledge. The second, somewhat more relevant thought, is that the book in some way feels like a missing element from my education. I never heard it mentioned before I dug deep into some of the writing on work coming out of France, but I know its references from Georges Canguilhem, who wrote the introduction, to Althusser, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and Bourdieu. I partially understand why it never was translated or made it across the Atlantic, aside from the length it is indebted to many figures that never became part of "theory," Lucien Sève for one, but the fact that it is a book on experience written under the direction of Georges Canghuilhem should at least be of interest. Foucault famously posited a line of demarcation between philosophers of experience, existentialism and phenomenology, and philosophers of the concept, Canghuilhem, the philosophy of science. Schwartz is describing an experience that is irreducible to lived experience because it exceeds and situates life, or more to the point, living labor. 

Imaginary But For Real: On Blackkklansman

Blackkklansman has come under criticism for twisting its true story into the shape of a cop film, warping any criticism of the structural violence of racism beyond recognition in the process. As Joshua Clover writes, "It is a police film the way Get Out is a horror film, adopting genre conventions to think through a particular set of problems about blackness." Except whereas Get Out uses horror to drive home the horrors of race, Blackkklansman would seem to defuse any critical force it might have in the morality and politics of the cop film.