Looking Back in the Mirror of Production: An Introduction to an Unwritten Book on Deleuze and Guattari and Marx

 

This summer I have a book coming out from the Historical Materialism Book series. You can read more about it here (as well as freak out at its price, but it will be out in paperback from Haymarket in a year). The book is mostly made up of pieces that have appeared before in various journals, some now defunct, although there are a few new pieces, an essay on Sohn-Rethel that I never found a home for, as well as a piece on "Spontaneous ideology" and Deleuze and Guattari's idea of social subjection/machinic enslavement. 

Despair and Indignation: The Inevitable Reflection on Covid (with Marx and Spinoza)

 The last thing anyone needs is another hot take on Covid. At least that is how things appear, in the early months of the pandemic there were a series of reflections that came too soon and undercooked, as everyone reached into familiar concepts such as "biopower"  or "totalitarianism" to make sense of what was happening. It seemed to be in good taste to not say anything, to go on as if things would return to normal, but now, two years in, not saying anything about COVID feels a little like watching one of the films or television shows that have gone in production since the pandemic started, in which the actors inhabit a pre-covid world while the masks and precautions stay off of camera. The reality of these images has begun to appear as fantastic as any CGI trip to a far off planet or the distant past. All television and film, not just those set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the Star Wars Universe, begin to appear as a depiction of an alternate timeline, one in which the COVID pandemic did not take place.