Fighting for Infection as if it were Wellness: On the Anti-Vax Moment

There was a moment in the beginning of the COVID pandemic when I thought to myself that surely this would be the end of the anti-vaccination movement. It is one thing to be against vaccines when diseases are rare, and pandemics a distant memory, but another to be against them in the midst of a pandemic in which tens of thousands were dying each week in the US alone. The anti-vax position always seemed like a luxury position, a position of privilege, an individual refusing vaccines is taking advantage of the fact that others are vaccinated around them and cases are rare. Like many things in US politics and culture, individual autonomy is made possible by the existence and occlusion of collective action. It is for that reason that I thought such a position would collapse in the face of an actual pandemic.

Lordon (and Lucbert) Vs. Deleuze (and Guattari): On Pulsion

I am going with images of conflict for this one 

As I have remarked here earlier, and in a published piece, one of the things that it is surprising about Frédéric Lordon's work on the organization of desire in capitalism is that he does not mention Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. The omission is striking because of their shared problem, the organization of desire under capitalism, and even their shared reference, Spinoza. As I wrote in the piece in the Affect Theory Reader 2:

Being Illegal: Ideology and the Law

For the past fifteen years I have been teaching a class on work. This class has undergone many changes throughout the years. Readings have circulated in and out. I always try to add something new, whether this be Elizabeth Anderson, Sarah Jaffe, or Jason Smith and Aaron Benanav.  Somethings remain a constant, like John Locke, Adam Smith, Marx, and Kathi Weeks.  The things that change the most are the movies that I pair with the class. I have taught Office Space, Clockwatchers, Sleep Dealer, Sorry to Bother You, and The Assistant to name a few. 

Interpretation or Innovation: On Macherey's La Chose Philosophique

Photos from Galarie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie comparée

in Paris

I am going with these pictures in honor of Macherey's Histoires de Dinosaurs 

Last March I visited Paris for the first time in years. I had a great time, presenting my book The Double Shift at Chantal Jaquet's Spinoza Seminar at the Sorbonne, and discussed Marx, Spinoza, and Deleuze with Etienne Balibar at the American University of Paris. I also looked for books, and while I did find a few good ones at Librarie Vrin, I also learned that Pierre Macherey had recently uploaded his recent book La Chose Philosophique to his website, La Philosophie au sens large.  I am a huge fan of Macherey's site; for those who can read French it is the best site for learning about contemporary philosophy, basically the lectures from all from Macherey's classes for free. 

Don't Praise the Machine: AI and the Destruction of Three Ecologies

 

I was asked to speak at an AI and Ethics panel at my university. What follows is the outline that I am using for my talk.

Do Your Own Damn Research: The New Episteme of Trump 2.0

I have been thinking a lot about the resonance between the current moment and this book

I am going to state this as clearly and as succinctly as possible. This is my thesis: the administration of Trump 2.0 is attempting to institute a new episteme, a new standard and idea of truth. This can be seen in the assaults on the funding and institution of higher education, on the cuts to funding scientific research through NIH and NSF, and in the undermining of vaccines and public health through RFK jr.'s management of Health and Human Services. All of these actions not only undermine the existing episteme, with its layers of expertise and legitimacy, but effectively enshrine a new one, a new practice of what constitutes truth and how it can be found and established. 

Logic of Alternation: Spinoza’s Prehistory of Ideology (and its Marxist History)

 

Of all of the different trajectories and intersections that frame the relation of Marx to Spinoza, one recurring motif posits Spinoza as a precursor with respect to a specifically Marxist concept, that of ideology. Spinoza’s investigations of the imagination and superstition, the illusions that people are subject to, and their role in sustaining political authority and power, are the precursors if not the preconditions of Marx’s theory of ideology. If Spinoza is considered a precursor it is an odd one, because many of the thinkers who have turned to Spinoza for a theory of ideology have done so on the basis that as much as Spinoza comes before Marx chronologically, his understanding of ideology goes beyond what Marx wrote, in the way that constructs a theory that encompasses not just ideas, but affects, not just the thoughts of the mind but the striving of the body, and not just knowledge but imagination. The extent to which Spinoza goes beyond Marx has to be combined with the extent to which he falls short. There is nothing like a theory of not only the capitalist mode of production in Spinoza, but, aside from a few suggestive remarks the constitution of political bodies through common affects, there is nothing like a materialist theory of social relations in Spinoza. In some respects Spinoza goes beyond Marx, while in others Marx goes beyond Spinoza, this movement is less a back and forth, a vacillation, than it is a circle in motion because in between the proper names of Spinoza and Marx and their respective histories and conjunctures there is the question of the relation between the social order and the order of thoughts and desires, to put it in Spinoza’s terms, or the mode of production and the production of subjectivity to put it in Marxist terms. This is no stationary object of contemplation, but an ongoing transformation. We are perhaps as far from nineteenth century idea of ideology as the ruling ideas of the ruling class as Marx was from the question of superstition in the seventeenth century, but in the relation between the two we can perhaps make better sense of the world that produces us, and how it can be produced differently.

Workers of the World, Divide! Work and the Constitution of the People

 

Pictures from Princeton (where this paper was presented)

This might be the worst place to begin, but in February Marjorie Taylor-Greene stated the following about the Department of Government Efficiency's cuts of the jobs of government workers across a broad swath of office and programs, from USAID to the NOAA, “Those are not real jobs producing federal revenue, by the way. They're consuming taxpayer dollars. Those jobs are paid for by the American tax people, who work real jobs, earn real income, pay federal taxes and then pay these federal employees." This is a terrible place to begin, because as is often case during the Trump years, we have a statement which seems so outlandish, so beyond the pale of what generally counts as political discourse, that it is tempting to discount it entirely as hyperbole if not insanity. However, I would like to argue that this extreme point can be situated in a broader logic that is at the core of right wing populism, both here in the US, and elsewhere. This core is what I would call “right workerism,” a claim for the virtues of work, for both the individual, people are worthwhile because of their ability to work, and as the constitution of the people, the people, the nation, is defined as a nation of workers. I am calling this right workerism, to contrast it , in the sharpest terms possible with left workerism, in which work, labor, functions as a point of antagonism between workers and capitalists. Work no longer functions as a point of division, between capitalists and workers, exploiter and exploited, but draws new lines of demarcation between “true” and “false” workers. I will return to this point, but first I would like to situate Representative Greene’s statement within this a larger logic, offering both a historical genesis and a conceptual genesis of right workerism.

The Work of Philosophy: Spinoza, Hegel, and Macherey on Theoretical Practice

 

I wanted to illustrate this post with images of simple machines,

but couldn't find any I liked. I then remembered the great collection of records 

that Simple Machines put out. 

Althusser and the students and collaborators who made up his circle have perhaps never been forgiven for developing the concept of “theoretical practice.” Their critics have argued that the concept attempted to grant an importance to philosophy, seeing it as immediately practical and effective, without the need of organization or materiality. Thus reversing Marx’s famous dictum, that “philosophers have only interpreted the world.” Philosophy became a practical act in itself. To dismiss such a concept is to not only misread what is at stake in Althusser’s attempt to the think philosophy as a particular practice, as something which is both limited, as all practices are, but as something which has effects, even if these effects are only on philosophy. One of the central threads running through Pierre Macherey’s thought is an attempt to think through both the implications and conditions of theoretical practice. The problem of theoretical practice, of what philosophy is and does, runs through all of Macherey’s research from his writing on Spinoza, to the question of literature, and the history of philosophy. It also defines his particular practice, his teaching through the seminars on Philosophie au sense large, and the books on utopia, everyday life, the university, and the essay, all of which are defined by an attempt to think the conditions and limitations of philosophy as a practice. Furthermore, this reflection on philosophy as a transformative activity can be found in one of Macherey’s earliest philosophical works, Hegel or Spinoza. Read through Macherey’s later work it is possible to see Hegel and Spinoza as two different ideas of theoretical practice, of what it means to do philosophy.

Post-Orwellian: From 1984 to Project 2025

 

Apple's famous 1984 ad

Etienne Balibar titled one of his first essays on Spinoza to appear in English, "Spinoza, The Anti-Orwell." George Orwell is not really discussed in the essay, and the title is only referenced once in the final paragraphs. Balibar writes, 

Nothing Less: On Death, Knowledge, and Affects

 

We all know Spinoza's famous line, "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death." (EIVP67) I have turned to the line again and again, in graduate school it draw a line of demarcation if not a line in the sand between Heideggerians and neo-Spinozists, and, as I have argued, made possible different ways of thinking of finitude.  It makes for a great slogan, but, as they say in graduate school, let's unpack that.

An (Éminence) Gris Area: Thinking and Acting in Miller's Crossing

 

The one two punch of Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink are probably peak Coen brothers for me. They have other films that are considered classics (No Country for Old Men, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, etc.), but they are two films that typify everything that comes to mind when one thinks of the Coen Brothers, the obsessions with classic Hollywood films and the culture that produced them; the attention to dialogue that turns every line into both an archive and a poem; and a dark sense of humor. A few years ago, thanks to the Maine International Film Festival I got to see the film with Gabriel Byrne speaking afterwards. One of my best movie going experiences.

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?

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. 

Parallel Lines: Spinoza and Foucault (by way of Deleuze)

 

The pile that I am working through

I think that it is safe to say that Foucault never really got that interested in the revival of Spinoza that took off in France in the late sixties. As far as I can tell the only sustained reference to Spinoza appears in his lectures on the Will to Know, and there in that text, he considers Spinoza much in the same way that Nietzsche did, as someone who named the will to knowledge, but did not criticize or problematize it. As Foucault writes,

Draft Translation: For a Systematic Study of the Relation of Marx to Spinoza by André Tosel

 

Draft Translation: Not for Citation

What follows is another attempt at a translation of an important text by André Tosel on the Marx/Spinoza relation. It is not a finished, or polished translation, but a rough sketch put forward to help people get a sense of this overlooked articulation of the relation between Marx and Spinoza.

The Concept Worker Doesn't Wear a Hardhat: Spinoza, Marx, Nesbitt and Common Notions

 

"They would not agree with one another any more than do the dog that is a heavenly constellation and the dog that is a barking animal." Spinoza

"The concept dog doesn't bark." Louis Althusser 

Ever since reading Margherita Pascucci’s Potentia of Poverty I have been thinking about the relation between Marx’s thought and Spinoza’s common notions. The question I am asking is not did Marx write Capital in and through common notions, as an application of Spinoza’s thought. Although I am not entirely discounting such influence. Rather, what would be at stake in reading Marx through the common notions? 

Two Thesis on the Limits of Philosophy: Marx and Spinoza

 

I once contemplated getting my favorite Spinoza proposition 

as a Vanity Plate 

In the past few months, longer even, but before the recent wave of student occupations (more on that later), I have found myself in the grips of a kind of depression that stems in part from what can only be described as a gap between theory and practice. How this works is like this, all day, or at least part of it, I read books, and get into discussions understanding how the world works, and what could be done to change it and yet the world goes on unchanged, or, more to the point, it just seems to get worse and worse. (I will let the reader fill this in with whatever ecological, political, or economic calamity that comes to mind) The disconnect between the classroom and the world creates not just division but despair.

One, Two, Many Spinozist-Marxisms: A Postscript to The Double Shift

 

This post is illustrated by some of the promo work 

I have done for the book

I have commented before, more than once even, that the intersection of Spinoza and Marx is less a position, something like Spinozist Marxism, than a field of intersecting problems and questions. In some sense it is possible to even map out the way in which different Marxists draw from different elements of Marx (and Spinoza) creating different articulations of the relations which intersect with different problems in the critique of capitalism. 

The Production of Ignorance: Ideology or Agnotology?

Bento and books

With all of my writing and translating about Spinoza and Marx as of late I am embarrassed to admit that there is a moment of their encounter that I have overlooked. The passage in question is in Chapter Eleven of Volume One of Capital (and I am indebted to Nick Nesbitt for pointing it out). In that passage Marx writes, 

"Vulgar economics, which like the Bourbons 'has really learnt nothing,' relies here as mere semblance as opposed to the law which regulates and determines the phenomena. In anthesis to Spinoza, it believes that 'ignorance is a sufficient reason."