Go West, Young Man: A Lingering Postscript on Nope

 

I was invited to write a piece for the APA's blog about film. I decided to write about Nope a movie that has become one of my favorites of the year. I am generally pleased by how the piece came out. In the piece I generally viewed the film through the way in which it is framed in relation to the science fiction film. I think that one of the way in which the film addresses the dominance of the spectacle is that both the characters in the film as well as the audience views the film from the perspective of the "first contact" film. Of course the film subverts these expectations, illustrating that what we see and understand is itself already dominated by the dead images that overwhelm our vision. We see a silver disc as a flying saucer and expect it to be filled with "viewers' because so many films have taught us to see things that way. That the film ultimately forces us to confront the limitation of that way of seeing suggests that this film is in some sense about unlearning what the spectacle teaches us to see. 

The Imaginary Institution of Society: Spinoza's Version

When I was in graduate school "the imaginary" was one of those words that circulated all the more often because it was untethered to any specific theoretical source. It borrowed bits from Lacan and bits from Castoriadis to suggest some historically specific articulation of the very capacity to imagine. There were multiple imaginaries, political, social, technical etc., As someone who was getting interested in Spinoza at the time I tried to connect his writing on the imagination with this idea to no avail.

The Spontaneous Ideology of Conspiracy: This One on Marx

 

Sometime awhile ago I came up with the idea of doing a trilogy of posts on conspiracy theory, or modern conspiracy thought, read through Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx. I am not exactly sure why the idea appealed to me, in part because I increasingly consider Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx to be the cornerstones of my philosophical thought, even if these cornerstones come through the mediations of Tosel, Jameson, and Althusser (to name a few), but in this case, more specifically it seemed worth asking what would three critics of the mystifications of their day make of our modern mystifications.

A Translation Exercise: The Marxists Uses of Spinoza: Lessons of Method by André Tosel

Plekhanov/Labriola 

As a bit of an experiment, coupling my interest in André Tosel and my work on translation, I have decided to try my hand at a few translations of the former when I get the time. These are totally unauthorized, and rough drafts posted for edification and entertainment purposes only. I started on this piece because it is short, and because it works on an area that I need to learn more about, the history of Marxist-Spinozism before Matheron or Althusser. However, the more I worked on this piece, the more I thought that this split between Plekhanov and Labriola, still exists, in the divide between neo-enlightenment Spinozists and what some might call post-modern, but I prefer to call Marxist Spinozists. 

Strange Bedfellows: On Vaysse's Totalité et Finitude: Spinoza et Heidegger

 

Translation is the closest that I have ever come to demonic possession. Let me explain, I used to think that there were books I read, books I wrote about, and books I taught, each category representing a deeper level of familiarity, even intimacy to the point where it is harder and harder to tell where the book's thoughts end and my thoughts begin. Translation, however, is on a whole different level. It is thinking someone else's thoughts. 

We Have Met the Barbarians and they are...: On Barbarian

 

Every mention of the film Barbarian carries with it the warning to not spoil anything, to experience it completely ignorant so as to be best frightened by its particular twists and turns. [Fair Warning: I will spoil everything here] For that reason it is not entirely clear if the title refers to anything. It could just be a vaguely menacing word. Many horror movies from the last few years seem to take their title from a series of such words, Insidious, Malignant, Terrifier, as if someone was just looking up “evil” or “scary” in a thesaurus. The opening scenes of the film, however, suggest that this title is not just a vaguely scary word, after all, it would be an odd choice suggesting that the we are running out of synonyms for scary, but that the film is very much about what it means to be a barbarian and what it means to be civilized. 

The End? Narrative Incompleteness in the Age of Intellectual Property

The ending of the original The Blob 

I have a distinct memory of watching the original The Blob on a Saturday afternoon movie. I watched a lot of Saturday afternoon movies, Godzilla, all of the Universal monsters, and various giant ants, crabs, and praying mantises. The Blob stood out because it was actually frightening in a way that a giant monster crushing a city was not. It could be anywhere and could get past anything. It is also memorable because its ending, in which the image of  frozen blob dropped someplace north of the Arctic Circle was followed by a giant question mark hovering over the sky. This image lingered in my mind long after everything else was forgotten. At the time it seemed like the perfect way to end a horror movie, with the horror still intact. I must admit as well that Steve McQueen's last line, "As long as the Arctic stays cold," sounds much more ominous in these days of global warming.

The Dialectics of Obedience: Vardoulakis, Balibar, Macherey

Halloween in Houston 

The Following is a response to Vardoulakis book Spinoza, The Epicurean that I gave at SPEP. I previously blogged about the book. 

One of the many merits of Dimitris Vardoulakis’ Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism is that it focuses on the question of obedience as central to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Obedience is what differentiates revelation from knowledge, scripture from philosophy, action from belief. On one side, the first of these terms, there is obedience, that which falls under the control the state, and on the other freedom, the domain of philosophy. However, such an assertion would suggest obedience is a simple matter, that the line between obedience and freedom can be sharply drawn. Vardoulakis suggests that obedience must be understood through a dialectic of authority and freedom. As Vardoulakis describes this dialectic: 

The Subject Supposed to Care: On Masking, Conforming, and The Guilty Remnant

To wear a mask in a store, bus, classroom, or other public space is now to be in a small, and dwindling minority, as much as this might vary from place to place. Aside from a few holdouts, doctors offices, the place where I get my haircut, and so on, there are no mandates requiring masks anymore. That it is a minority, and a choice, is not the way that it often appears, at least to those who do not wear masks.

Dreaming with their Eyes Open: The Sandman, the book, the television show, and memory

Every adaptation mining the vast troves of memory that we recall as our lives as readers of books and comics and watchers of film and television, but is known by its owners simply as intellectual property, always runs up against the singularity of the memory in adapting the generic nature of the property. Much of the politics of culture hinge on the conflict over the singular and generic nature of the memory. At times this politics takes the form as an attempt to retain some singular experience, a memory or attachment, against the commodification of culture  and at other times it takes the form of an attempt to insist on this singular memory or experience as the only correct one.  We are constantly trying to retain what is singular against what is interchangeable, which is, to some extent, a doomed project under capitalism. 

Reading the Menu Symptomatically: On Macherey, Marx, and Symptomatic Reading

What follows is not a review of the entirety of Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production, something that is hard to do with collections of essays in general, trying to find some common theme or thread, but would be easy to do in this case, because not only are the essays excellent on their own they also unify around an important thread of saving Macherey's work in general and his first book on literary production from obscurity. This has also been one of the projects of this blog, and one can follow the links to reviews (or at least posts) on his books on daily life, the university, utopia, norms, Spinoza, and literary production. 

Welcome to Bizarro World: Part Two, Revenge of the Nerds

 

It has taken me a long time to write a follow up to my first post on Bizarro World. That is because once you begin to think about the strange inversions in which the persecuted are made out to be threats, and the comfortable are made out to be threatened, it is hard to not see it. Our entire world seems reversed and inverted, those who are most subject to violence are made into violent threats, and those who are most comfortable have made the threats to their comfort our central concern with the claims of cancel culture. Bizarro world would be one of those "descriptive theories" that Althusser talks about, something that stops thinking because it seems to be such an accurate description of what one is thinking about. 

Unbecoming Saul: Reflections on the Last Season of Better Call Saul (Part Two)

 

How it Started/How it is going

The final episode of Better Call Saul is not just a finale to the series but to the entire Breaking Bad multiverse (to use the parlance of our times). While the first half of the season dealt with Better Call Saul as a separate show from Breaking Bad, dealing with the fates of characters such as Ignacio and Lalo who are named but never appear in the latter, the second half returns to its status as prequel and sequel. This is not just because of the appearances by Walt, Jesse, and Marie Schrader, but because it returns to the fundamental question of both shows and that is personal change and transformation. Was Jimmy always Saul dovetails with the question was Walt always Heisenberg. Or, as Chuck put it, can people really change?

Between Legacy and History: On Peele's Nope

Seeing Nope at the Bridgton Twin Drive In 

Movie critics, even amateur ones, love puns, love working the title into their reviews in some sort of play on words. So it takes a certain amount of confidence to call a film "Nope". It just invites too many titles for negative reviews, say "Nope to nope" and so on. In the case of Peele that confidence is earned. It is the third movie by a director who is developing his own vision in an era where such things as vision or style, even directors as auteurs, are increasingly obsolete. The title of Nope recalls the title of Peele's first film, Get Out  which was an homage to Eddie Murphy's bit about how a haunted house movie would never work with a black family, they would Get Out at the first warning.  

Blogging in the age of the Podcast: Some video and audio

 

In the past few months I have done quite a few video lectures and guest spots on podcasts. I decided to post them here for anyone who might be interested, and, at least for a moment, to admit that blogging is increasingly archaic in an age of podcasts and youtube lectures. 

Becoming Saul: Reflections on the Last Season of Better Call Saul (Part One)

 

The prequel is defined by a particular kind of paradox. As much as it aspires to reach the point from which original story began, connecting with the present that it is the past of, the more that the point recedes, and become unreachable. Its very existence means that it can never reach what it aims for, its ending will always be different from the beginning of that which it is a prequel of. Or, more to the point it, overreaches its mark. This is especially true of the some of the worst versions of this, the movie Solo forgets that the name Han Solo is cooler if we never hear its hackneyed origin, that having a wookie as friend and sidekick is more interesting if we never see the first time they meet, and that the Kessel Run sounds cool but that does not mean we need to see it. A character can be defined more by the way the enter the screen in media res than by fleshing out their backstory. More becomes less and the more you add the less it alls seems to matter.

Au Naturel: On Bohy-Bunel's Contre Lordon

It took me awhile to track down a copy but I finally found Benoît Bohy-Bunel's Contre Lordon: Anticapitalisme tronqué et Spinozisme dans l'oeuvre de Frédéric Lordon. Since I have read nearly everything by Lordon and become increasing ambivalent, torn between those elements of Lordon's thought that I completely agree with, such as the economy as an organization of desire, and those that I have issues with, such as the idea of the state and economy as insurmountable conditions for collective life. It is perhaps not accidental that this division more or less separates the earlier from the later work. I had hoped that reading a critique, even a polemic, such as Bohy-Bunel would help orient my own thinking. 

Two Versions of an Extinction: Prehistoric Planet and Jurassic Park

A similar image of dinosaurs in the snow circulated at about the same time from two very different sources. The first, above, was from Prehistoric Planet as series on Apple TV, and the second was from the trailer of the latest Jurassic World film. These images reflect the changing scientific theories of the dinosaur which have shifted from slow scaly reptiles to what are now considered smart, fast, feathered, warm blooded animals. This is especially true of the former which uses CGI and paleontology to produce a kind of Planet Earth for the prehistoric world (complete with David Attenborough providing narration). The latter is less fettered by science, but has used some recent discoveries, smart velociraptors hunting in packs, T-Rex's that walk with its spine parallel to the ground like land sharks, and so on when they have served the story. 

Production and Labor: Two Alienations, Two Liberations

My drawing of Laika and Loukanikos

 

The conclusion of Franck Fishbach's La Production des Hommes: Marx Avec Spinoza ends with a discussion of Heidegger's understanding of production in contrast to the book's focus on the intersection of Marx and Spinoza. A Fischbach argues the contrast could not be more clear, whereas Marx and Spinoza posited a thought of production that broke with idealism and with a philosophy of the subject, Heidegger saw production as the basis and culmination of the metaphysics of subjectivity. According to Heidegger, our conceptions of substance, being, and actuality all stem from humanity's productive comportment and this understanding of being culminates in the idea of a world in which what exists exists to be manipulated, produced, and transformed; all of being exists as an object for a subject. Production is the realization of the metaphysics of subjectivity.

Boys Becoming Men, Men Becoming Wolves: on The Wolf of Snow Hollow and Werewolves Within

 

Wolves, even werewolves it seems, travel in packs. One hardly gets just one werewolf movie. In nineteen eighty one the pack included Wolfen, The Howling, and An American Werewolf in London.  (As the links indicate I have blogged about each of them, but for a thorough account of the year of the wolf I recommend Drew Strombeck's piece on the LA Review of Books) More recently, we had The Wolf of Snow Hollow and Werewolves Within quickly follow each other in the last two years. Two is less than three, but what is impressive in this case is that they are not only both horror comedies, to varying degrees, but are also both movies that use werewolves to address a different monster, masculinity.

Elites and Capital: or, Foucault and Marx Again

I wrote this review of Jacques Bidet's Foucault with Marx a few years ago for an online review called Contrivers (after having reviewed the French original here) I thought of it the other day as I was reading tweets about two perennial questions on that site, the relation of Marx and Foucault, and the relation of elites, cultural elites, to economic power. For Bidet these are in some sense the same question. Since the review is no longer available and all links to the site seem to be broken I thought that I would repost it here. 

If Althusser was a Spinozist...: on Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop's Althusser et Spinoza

 

One of Althusser's fundamental lessons, and one that remains beyond the controversies about epistemic breaks, the young Marx, and the real Marx, is that Marx's philosophy and politics must be located not at this or that isolated quote or passage, but as traversing the entirety of his work. The condition of immanent causality is a reading of philosophy itself as the immanent unfolding of ideas that are all the more important because they are pervasive, located not in this or that passage, but in the entirety of the work. To some extent Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop's  Althusser et Spinoza: Détours et Retours does a similar work on Althusser, searching for Althusser's Spinozism not just in the few well known passages in the ISA essay, Lire Le Capital, and Elements of Self-Criticism where Spinoza is cited by name, but also in the way that Spinoza's thought or practice of philosophy traverses Althusser's work.

Gonna Leave You All Severed: Initial Reflections on Severance

 

I was slow to get to Severance. Partly this has to do with conditions of contemporary cultural consumption. The shift from movies to television and from television to streaming, accelerated by the pandemic, has raised particular hurdles to watching new television shows even as everything can be viewed from one's home. Every new show comes with the subscription to a new service (or a way to work around it) and the proliferation of these services with their own branding and marketing enough to make me miss the catholic nature of movie theaters. Of the different services I had particular disdain for Apple TV, mostly due to the cross brand marketing and the lingering aftertaste of itunes as an app. Anything that could immediately disseminate a U2 album should not only be shunned but the people who made it should be banished. 

Operation Blue Thunder: Or, First time as Violence, Second time as Action

 

Recently in a bit of odd exhaustion and insomnia I watched, or rather rewatched, the movie Blue Thunder. In case you have not seen it I will tell you the plot. It stars Roy Scheider as a LAPD helicopter pilot and Vietnam vet. He is introduced to a helicopter with the code named "Blue Thunder" which is part of an increased security preparations for the 1984 Olympics. The helicopter is an armored attack and surveillance helicopter complete with a machine gun, powerful directional microphones, and infrared cameras. Over the course of the movie, and I am hazy on the details or may have fallen asleep, Scheider comes to the realization the helicopter is not only an unacceptable militarization of the police but would function as the basis of an intolerable expansion of powers of the state's powers of surveillance. After the requisite helicopter dog fights and car chases he parks the helicopter in front of a freight train and destroys it. 

Two Great Tastes Part Two: The Introduction to Fischbach's La Production des Hommes

 

What follows is a draft of the translation of the introduction to Franck Fischbach's La Production des hommes: Marx avec Spinoza which will be published by Edinburgh University Press as Marx with Spinoza: Production, Alienation, History. Posted here in preparation for my forthcoming event with the Marx Education Project, and as part of the process of editing it. 

The relation of Marx with Spinoza has often been driven—most notably with respect to Althusser and the Althusserian tradition—by the project of “giving Marxism the metaphysics that it needs,” according to an expression used by Pierre Macherey specifically with respect to Althusser. The intention was laudable, but times having changed, our project can no longer be exactly that. We begin from the idea that the philosophy specific to Marx or the specifically Marxist philosophy is still largely unknown, that Marx as a philosopher is still largely and for the most part unknown. For a long time this was due reasons largely external to the thought of Marx: initially it was due to the urgency of militant practice, then it remains thanks to theme of the rupture with philosophy that is expressed by the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach or in The German Ideology, any reading of Marx that is resolutely philosophical was suspected as being ideological. Then on the verge of orthodoxy, several authors—and not insignificant ones—both at the heart of the history of Marxism , and outside of it , have maintained that there is a critique of philosophy in Marx , this critique would still be a determinant practice of philosophy. However, the ignorance of “Marx’s philosophy” equally lies in reasons that internal to Marx’s work: the critical relation that Marx enters with philosophy implies in effect that the latter appears in terms of disconcerting new features, which are not those of a doctrine expressed as such (Marx, who never completed any of his grand works, always refused any dogmatic or systematic presentation of his thoughts), but are also not that of fragments. Neither systematic, nor fragmentary, philosophy with respect to Marx, appears diluted, omnipresent but always mixed and everywhere combined with elements of the discourse of history, of political economy, but also the sciences of nature and literature. It is not necessary to reconstruct or reconstitute the philosophy of Marx: that would suggest that it is only present in a fragmentary and dispersed state, and that it is necessary to reassemble and unify—which would lead to dogmatic and systemic presentation that is perfectly alien to the Marxist practice of philosophy. 

Imagination, Fiction, Knowledge: Towards a Spinozist Theory of Cultural Production Part II (This Time it is Mythical)

 

This post is more or less a sequel to this one, and like that first one it is in some sense a commentary on Macherey's A Theory of Literary Production. 

Any Bird Whatsoever: on Fujita's Le Ciné-Capital: D'Hitchcock à Ozu

In his conversations with François Truffaut Alfred Hitchcock insisted that the birds in the film of the same name had to be ordinary birds, seagulls, ravens, sparrows, and not the more spectacular, and arguably more frightening hawks and eagles. This particular anecdote is relayed in Fujita's Le Ciné-Capital and in some sense it functions as the lynchpin that connects Deleuze's understanding of film, Marx's understanding of Capital, and revolutionary politics.

Are Geeks Born or Made: On Nightmare Alley (movies and the book)

 

Let us start with a general question: why should someone interest in philosophy also be interested in film? Granted there are probably as many versions of answers to this as there are philosophical perspectives and orientations. To propose an answer from my, Marxist-Spinozist, perspective is that what is instructive about film is the relationship between the immediacy of their reception and the mechanisms of their construction. In other words, a film is experienced intensely, as fear, joy, sadness, disgust and even boredom, this is its immediacy, but to some extent it can also be viewed in terms of how those reactions are created, how images, sounds, dialogue, and music create these effects. Viewed this way film is not different from other art forms, literature and music could be discussed the same way, but what distinguishes film is the way that this production is both effaced and traceable. This distinguishes it from literature: a reader will perhaps always be able to find the relevant sentences and passages that produce effects on them, might even quote them, but the intensity in the reception of a film is not related to any understanding of its composition. It also distinguishes it from music in that knowing how music is produced requires something of an education in music, but to delve into the construction of the film one often only needs the pause button.

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. 

Get Meta With Me: On Matrix Resurrections

 

The Matrix is a film about work. Long before Neo escapes the matrix he has to break out of a much more mundane space of confinement, the office cubicle. The film is thus part of that odd series of films that came out in 1999 that were about the confines of the cubicle and the working day, a list that includes Office Space, Fight Club, and American Beauty (and Being John Malkovich). It was an odd year, in the midst of the dot-com bubble and the Clinton third way, a year that on the surface was good for capitalism, the movies were telling a different story, a story in which work and the office was sucking the life out of people. An idea which The Matrix made literal in its dystopian future of energy sucking pods, in other words, cubicles 2199. 

Red Spinozism II: Lordon Vs. Fischbach

My Spinoza and Marx finger puppets 

 This is a follow up to a few previous posts, most importantly my previous post on alienation in Marxist-Spinozist Thought. It is also an effect of my continuing work translating Franck Fischbach's La Production des hommes: Marx Avec Spinoza. I have never translated a whole book before and the experience is a little like some kind of possession or mind meld, in the best possible way, where I find myself thinking in and through another person's writing. Of course this is often the case when writing on someone, but translation takes it to a different level. To update a hierarchy familiar to a lot of people, there are books that I have read, books that I have read and taught, books that I have read and written about, and now, standing above the rest, a book I have translated. 

Homework: Three Recent Books on Work

 

Because I regularly teach a class on work, and have my own book on work coming out, I make it a habit to keep up on all of the writing on work, from theoretical studies and polemics, to ethnographies and studies of contemporary political economy. It is getting to be quite a lot to keep up with, what seemed like a slow trickle a decade or so ago when Kathi Weeks The Problem with Work came out, has become a steady stream of books. Perhaps this is a sign of changing ideas about work, but at the very least it means that there is a lot to keep up with in reading critical studies of work. What follows is a short review of three of the recent ones.

Shine On: We Are All in Room 237 Now

 

Danny Lloyd rocking the same haircut I had as a kid

Of all of the various concepts and neologisms that populate A Thousand Plateaus that of the "regime of signs" is one that never really caught on. It has not had the same effects as nomadology, rhizome, virtual, assemblage, body without organs, become etc., If I had to offer a quick explanation of  this it is perhaps because the idea of the sign, and of a regime of signs, still seems like a remnant of an earlier period, more structuralist than post-structuralist. It is for that reason that it has remained something of a B-side or a deep cut, taking a clue from Deleuze and Guattari's assertion that the book is more like album with different plateau songs than a linear progression. 

Other Scenes: Balibar and Tosel on Class Struggle and the Struggle over Identity

Intersection of base and superstructure 

 

One of the pressing issues of recent years has been the relationship between class struggle, or the struggle against capitalism more broadly and the struggle over identity. While this relationship has taken on ridiculous, and almost caricatured forms in the left quasi-public sphere in the US, becoming the split between Bernie Bros and the supposed identity politics of the democratic party, or between “the dirtbag” and “woke left.” It raises serious issues about the relationship between the state, as the manager of ethnic and racial identities, and the economy as the hidden abode of exploitation. What I propose here is less an entry into the fray of current debates between identity politics and class struggle, but to look at the way in which two Marxist philosophers, Etienne Balibar and André Tosel, tried to think both the interrelation and irreducibly of identity struggle and class struggle. Balibar and Tosel do so by drawing from the philosophical resources of Marx and Spinoza, but in different ways. For Balibar it is a matter of thinking of “the other scene” of economic struggle, the imaginary constitution of national identities that all economic struggles necessarily pass through. There is no class struggle that does not pass through the struggle of identities, just as there is no struggle over identities that does not pass through economic relations. In a different manner, Tosel focuses less on the relation between imaginary and real, taken as the state and the economy, than on the relation between what could be considered generic struggles over the very conditions of subjectivity, and conflicts over the very nature of identity. The first have to do with struggles over our basic capacities, to live, work, and speak, while the latter has to do with the way in which living, working, and speaking are always actualized in specific identities and communities. The two struggles cannot be separated. I argue that read together, Balibar and Tosel’s political anthropologies offer a way to not only theorize the intersection of class conflict and identity conflict, but a way to think the relation between the state and economy.

The Dialectic of Conspiracy and Trust: Hegel and Conspiracy Theories

 

Don't worry I will explain why I picked this image

This post is an immediate follow up or even sequel to an earlier post on Spinoza and conspiracy theories. In a more oblique way it is also a follow up to something that I have said repeatedly on this blog, that not only is there more to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit than the master and slave, but that other dialectical scenes or figures can also be wrested from the linear progression of Hegel's thought to become the basis of social and political criticism. Kojeve can't have all of the fun.

Coming Soon (well soonish): The Double Shift

 

I have submitted the (hopefully) final changes of the manuscript of my third book* to Verso. As an answer to the question, What is your book about? and as part of the labor of self-promotion that is required of all of us in the twenty-first century, even those published with radical presses, I am posting part of the introduction here: 

Reworking Hegel: Philosophies of Work in Macherey's Petit Riens

 

Images from Property is No Longer Theft 

There is a line that I used to attribute to Roland Barthes, "those who do not reread are doomed to read the same book over and over again." I liked the riddle like nature of the phrase, and the way it seemed to posit a first read which is often a restating of one's already existence preconceptions, hence the rereading of the same book under different covers, against a rereading that discovers difference in repetition. 

Fighting for Subjection as if it was Rebellion: Spinoza and Servitude Today

 

I am illustrating this post with images of the Punisher as a symbol of authority as rebellion

As I have already indicated on this blog more than once, Spinoza's formulation of subjection remains in some sense a guiding question for me. 

"...the supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear with which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation, and count it no shame but the highest honour, to spend their blood and lives for the glorification of one man…" --Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus 1670

So much so that I would be willing to agree with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari when they repeated it three hundred years later. 

"That is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” --Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1972

However, I have begun to think that it is time to update the question, or at least change its formulation, it increasingly seems to me that in the current era it is not so much servitude that is fought for as salvation, but subjection that is fought for as rebellion, or misrecognized as rebellion. 

The Use and Abuse of Alienation for Life: A few Remarks on Marx

I give twitter credit for making this joke, 

but if you ask me the movie did not do enough with this great title

What follows are a few reflections on "alienation" drawn in part from a paper I presented at Wabash College last Spring in a virtual campus visit.  Posted as a response to the current debate about the concept online. 

What Does it Mean to be a Materialist: Thoughts After Spinoza after Marx

 

Of all of the zoom events, conferences, and presentations that I have attended (zoomed?) this year the one dedicated to Spinoza after Marx was the most engaging, the one most capable of breaking through the zoom screen that makes everything feel further away even as it is so close, inches away even. This is in part because of the participants, but it was also due to the work of the organizers who, in an interesting variation on organizing around a common theme, presented a common set of theses that were discussed and debated over the course of the three days. Of course as great as this was as an online event it is hard not to think about how those conversations would have continued over dinner, at bars, and coffee shops. The event did create a collective act of thought, of thinking in common, but as Spinoza and Marx both know there is no thinking together, thinking in common, without acting and feeling in common.

Self-Interest is the Sincerest Form of Flattery: On No Sudden Move

Posted in memory of Lauren Berlant who once took time out of her busy schedule to debate a previous post about Soderbergh. 

 

After a mercurial career Steven Soderbergh seems to have more or less settled into the heist film. The three Oceans films, Logan Lucky (dubbed Oceans 7-11 for the way it transposed those films into a different class milieu), and now No Sudden Move. The return to the same genre does not dispense with the shifts and shimmers through other genres and styles, the latest is a noir period piece set in fifties Detroit, and with that shift comes another shift. Jameson states that heist films are in some sense about the representation of work. Or, more to the point, he states that they are about unalienated work. However, I would like to turn his assertion, as offhand as it is, into a question. How does the heist film represent work, and how does this representation relate to the question of how work is undertaken and understood in capitalism.

Theological Breaks: Tosel on Marx's Critique of Religion

 

I never really knew what to do with this meme, but it fits the topic. 

Also sorry. 

At the beginning of his trajectory of criticism Marx wrote, "the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism." There is perhaps no contemporary philosopher who has taken up that challenge than André Tosel. Tosel has returned to the question not just of Marx and religion, but more broadly of the role of the critique of religion in radical thought from Spinoza onward. Tosel's trajectory in some sense begins and ends with the question of the critique of religion, beginning with Spinoza ou le crépuscule de la Servitude : Essai sur le Traité Théologico-Politique and nearly ends with Nous citoyens laïques et fraternels? : dans le labyrinthe du complexe économico-politico-théologique (I realize that the book on Gramsci and the little book on Emancipation came out afterwards). Throughout his life Tosel was interested in thinking through the relationship between religion and capitalism, and to what extent the critique of religion could be used to make sense of our subjection and attachment to capitalism. 

Anti-Hobbes: Waging War on the War of All Against All

 

Top Image The Road Warrior, bottom image people in the US putting gasoline in plastic bags

I am going to assume that most readers of a blog like this are familiar with Hobbes' description of the state of nature as "nasty, brutish, and short." His assertion that without an overwhelming authority human beings will engage in a life of perpetual strife and war, killing each other for whatever their desire. Hobbes gives what could be considered three proofs for this state of nature, the first is the new world, or at least an armchair speculative colonial imagination of it, the second is the behavior of kings and states towards each other, but the third, which actually appears first, is the presence of this state of nature in civilized state breaking through, like weeds through concrete. As Hobbes writes, 

Put Your Halo On: Marx’s Critiques of Moralism

Not a good episode, but a great observation

There are those that claim that Marx’s criticism of capitalism is ultimately grounded in a moral or ethical consideration of humanity, that notions such as alienation, exploitation, and so on, only make sense against the backdrop  of some kind of morality, of a picture of an ideal life, in which human beings are treated more or less as ends in themselves. Marx investigations of the horrendous working conditions of early capitalism, from child labor to deadly working conditions, would seem to have as its critical basis a moral understanding of human flourishing However, what I would like to propose is that Marx’s thought, at least at its most provocative, is less a moral criticism of capitalism, than a materialist criticism of moralism. 

Woke Capital and Twilight of the Bourgeoisie (How is that for a title?).

 

For anyone who has any historical memory whatsoever the controversies around woke seem like just a remake, or possible a reboot, of the panic around political correctness a generation before. It is a matter of the same fears, the same threats, and the same bad guys and good guys. College campuses and postmodernism are once again to blame, and the same hallowed traditions are threatened. On one reading, and it is a fairly plausible one, is that this is just a repetition. The only reason that the names have been changed, the only reason terms like "woke" have replaced "political correctness" is that repeating the old name would be admitting that this new threat is quite old. Political correctness came and went, but the skies did not darken and the rivers did not run red with blood. New logo, same package. There are, however, some differences and these differences have something to say about the changing nature of culture and power.

Go Figure: On Lordon's Figures du Communisme

 

Frédéric Lordon has published four books since Capitalisme, désire, et Servitude in 2010, not counting collections of essays, edited volumes and even a play. I have reviewed them all here, and continued to use Lordon's writing in my research on the intersection of affect, imagination, and work in capitalism. I remain profoundly influenced by his interventions. However, I will be honest, prolific authors make me skeptical, even nervous. Sometimes publishing overtakes thinking and one ends up with a kind of diminishing returns as later books only put finishing touches on earlier innovations.