Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Prophets of Rage: Affect and Elections



Since the election of Trump there seems to be a consensus that his surprising victory stemmed from anger and frustration on the part of the electorate. The only question that follows in most analysis is what is the nature of anger. Is it classed based, frustration at globalization the loss of industrial jobs, and a recovery that seems to have only benefited the elite? Or is it race based, anger at changing demographics and a steady decline of the wages of whiteness? Of course most answer that it is in some sense both, either through the mythic "white working class," which merges race and class in a handy formula or, in a more sophisticated way, arguing that Trump always framed class in racist terms, economic uncertainty became immigrants and globalization become China. 

Saturday, November 12, 2016

Nexus Rerum: Spinoza and Marx (again)



I did not really have an image for this post,
so I thought I would just plug the Spanish translation of my first book.



This a paper I wrote awhile ago. I never posted it, but thought I would now because a) I am working on some of the same problems now and b) I have no time for blogging now. b is basically an effect of a. 



“…in the postindustrial age the Spinozan critique of representation of capitalist power corresponds more to the truth than does the analysis of political economy.”

-Antonio Negri

The encounter of Spinoza and Marx is arguably one of the most productive encounters in contemporary philosophy. This encounter has several origins and multiple trajectories, its most recent wave begins with the works of Alexandre Matheron, Gilles Deleuze, and Louis Althusser, continuing into multiple waves, across different variants of Marxism and Spinozism. This encounter is not, as is often the case of the dominant forms of philosophical writing and research, a matter of discerning the influences that descend from one to the other, or the arguments that would divide them. It is rather an articulation of their fundamental points of intersection, points that are not simply given but must be produced by a practice of philosophy.