Book Review Janae Sholtz, The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015)

A book review of Janae Sholtz, The Invention of a People (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015)

Proletarianization, Deproletarianization, and the Rise of the Amateur

In this article, I present the three forms of proletarianization found in Bernard Stiegler's work: the proletarianization of the producer, the proletarianization of the consumer, and generalized proletarianization. In the lectures included in this special issue, Stiegler refers to the proletarianization of sensibility, which belongs to this last form of proletarianization. I attempt to contextualize this new work in relation to Stiegler's past work on political economy, as well as some of his political positions about capitalism as a social organization. I explain where the notion of proletarianization gets muddled, and I also compare his position on new forms of capitalism to the influential work of André Gorz. Following Stiegler, I call the underlying political project of deproletarianization that he has developed “protentional politics.” I turn more specifically to the underdiscussed notion of “tertiary protention” and question its place in Stiegler's thought. Finally, I also explain why Stiegler's turn to the figure of the amateur, especially in the third lecture in this issue, is strategic in thinking of deproletarianizing practices.</jats:p

“Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant all over again in its brand new same old way”: imagination, agitation, and raging against the machine in Ali Smith’s Spring

This paper explores the third novel in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, Spring. Using Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics as a conceptual frame, I analyze Smith’s rendering of a Britain grappling with Brexit in times of transnational populism. As with Autumn and Winter, Smith’s prose is saturated with intertextual borrowings from pop and “high” culture, also interrogating the links between “nanoracism” and the “immunity and community” knot (Dillet). This paper reads Spring alongside Smith’s contribution to and advocacy of the Refugee Tales project regarding the diverse discourses surrounding migration, xenophobia, and indefinite detention. Smith’s writing traces the darkness of our populist present with its rhetorical and material violence, as well as the possibilities for creative response and resistance. I argue that her seasonal quartet to date and her work with Refugee Tales aesthetically and ethically defend the principle that human dignity, both individual and collective, rests on the ability to tell stories