Unemployed Negativity
Wednesday, November 27, 2024
Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men...? On Richard Seymour's Disaster Nationalism
Saturday, November 02, 2024
Working Politics: The Divisions and Unity of Labor
Sunday, October 20, 2024
Why We Write: Or, Blogging as a Philosophical Practice
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
Automatic Against the People: Reading, Writing, and AI
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
Towards a Genealogy of Right Workerism: Notes on the Origin of Bizarro World
Monday, September 02, 2024
Marx's Basement Demo Tapes: On Monferrand's La Nature du Capital
As many readers of this blog probably know, there is a new translation of Capital coming out this month. I am sure that this new translation will have a great deal of new revelations drawn from the work of considering the text in light of its multiple variations and Marx's notes. However, it seems to me that the book that we are in need of reconsidering is not so much Capital but the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
Friday, August 23, 2024
Indentured Fan Service: On Alien: Romulus
I once heard someone remark about Alien that during the Reagan era the capitalist hegemony against workers was so complete that the only way to represent the struggles of working class was to set to set it in space. Such a comment is not entirely accurate about the film, it came out in 1979 after all, but does say something about its place in popular culture. Alien introduced the space worker, worried about the bonus situation and struggle with a company that deemed him or her expendable. The space worker has appeared again and again in film, in Outland, Moon, and The Expanse.
Monday, August 19, 2024
How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland: The Mad Max Films as an Introduction to Political Philosophy
Years ago I was teaching political philosophy and decided to do something interesting with social contract theory. I made the point that the post-apocalypse is our state of nature. Whereas the seventeenth century contemplated the nature of authority and law from the origins of society we confront the same problem from its collapse. In each case human beings outside of the state, whether prior to or post, became the basis for thinking about both human nature, and the nature of the state. I then showed a bunch of clips from The Road Warrior and other films, all of which illustrated the intersecting problem of social contract theory and post-apocalyptic films: how does one go from disorder to order, from violence to authority?
Thursday, August 15, 2024
Just Vibes: A Note on Affect and Politics
Anyone interested in the politics of affect or the connection of affect and politics has to confront the fact that affects are not just a way of making sense of politics, but are increasingly the way politics themselves are presented and talked about. This follows a general tendency to frame not just politics, but all of social life according to the pop affect theory of vibes.
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Parallel Lines: Spinoza and Foucault (by way of Deleuze)