How much could sexuality cost

Sexuality is not possible without phantasm, phantasm is not possible without the imaginaries maintained by private property. Private property resides in surplus economy. Surplus economy is libidinal. The question would then be: how much could sexuality cost? Or does sexuality vanish if the economy stops to be libidinal?Published versio

Repetition as the performative syndrome of dying

In his Difference and Repetition Deleuze reveals an aporia: repetition is singular, solitary, it is torn away from any original or source; nevertheless it preserves a genetic tie with certain event to which it is a repetition. This solitariness of the repetition is not, however, confined to mere difference between the act of repetition and the repeated source that cancels the original just to differentiate two performative procedures. An act of repetition is solitary only when it evolves in specific time-regime, which even ontically diverges from the regular ontology of time. Deleuze calls such temporality “empty”, Nietzsche defines it as amor fati, Heidegger sees in it convergence of eternity and an instant. The stake in this case is a specific kind of repetitive regime which unfolds as the performative syndrome of ‘dying’ – a “repetition into death” (Deleuze) which paradoxically executes itself as performative plenitude. But who is the Subject undergoing such a syndrome and what should have happened to her/him so as to impose the regime of dying on any act of repetition?Results incorporated in this publication have received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 752417.Published onlin

Who makes revolution in the age of speculative design?

Contemporary theories of social emancipation contend that it is time to dispense with the concept of revolution and leave it merely as the legacy of political struggles belonging to the age of industrial economy. Today’s globalization, semio-capital, speculative design, crypto-economy, and artificial intelligence would engage epistemologically different emancipatory lexicons and techniques of resistance. All new futurisms posit technological solutions for hitherto political stakes. What remains unheeded in them is the existential need for cognitive equality and social continuity with the masses in constructing the collective subject of emancipation. Recent election results in the U.S., U.K., Eastern Europe, and Russia diagnose an immense cognitive rupture between the producers of emancipatory lexicons and disadvantaged workers. Such a split between mind and body was already made apparent in Hegel’s dialectics of lord and bondsman. In order to surpass this split, it is of utmost importance to reconsider the conditions in which the premature construction of the proletariat took place in the context of the October revolution. The proletariat was posited in this case not only as revolutionary subject, but as the principal subject of Enlightenment as well.European UnionPublished versio

Marx against Marxism, Marxism against Marx

A Talk with Valery Podoroga on Soviet Philosoph

Introduction: Antiquity and Modernity of Soviet Marxism

Fredric Jameson once pointed out that the Marxist tradition is already our Antiquity due to its significance and historical distance. This distance allows us to view it from the outside, and to reinvent Marxism for our own time. The same could be said about the most paradoxical version of this tradition's Soviet Marxism. However, there are particular qualities that single it out from the classical antiquity of Marxist tradition. Even internationally known Soviet works (by Vygotsky, Bakhtin, amongst В­others) are not perceived as belonging to a unitary theoretical tradition, and are even less associated with Marxism and the heritage of 1917. It may therefore seem that the October Revolution of 1917, although being recognized as the key event of the short twentieth century has not created a universally recognizable and consolidated body of thought. It is, therefore, a difficult task to outline this field, and this is why the current lens of historical distance might be helpful in attempting to grasp both this unity and the richness of its internal differentiations

Institutes of performativity: towards an institutional ethics

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springerin in Springerin, available online: https://www.springerin.at/en/2018/3/institute-der-performativitat/ The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version

What's Love (or Care, Intimacy, Warmth, Affection) Got to Do with it?

"It is often said that we no longer have an addressee for our political demands. But that’s not true. We have each other. What we can no longer get from the state, the party, the union, the boss, we ask for from one another. And we provide. Let’s see how need and care and desire and admiration have been cross-examined, called as witness, put on parole, made the subject of caring inquiry by e-flux journal authors since 2009." --Publisher's website