I Stood Before the Source

''Capitalism’s representations are ubiquitous; less so are representations of capitalism. I stood before the source traverses varied contemporary scenes of accumulation, from data centres to tar sands, airports, prisons, trading bots, factories, mobile communication, vacant offices inhabited by speculation, earth’s atmosphere, and beyond. The exhibition features work that maps tightly integrated circuits of global political-economic power; tracks vast accumulations of dead labour as technological infrastructure; listens in on the plunge of financial markets; choreographs divisions of labour in commodity production; descends into the open pits of the stock exchange; and stages injuries of accumulation as extinction.'' -- Publisher's websit

Capital (It Fails Us Now): Introduction to a Mini-Symposium on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century

This introduction to Historical Materialism’s mini-symposium on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century places the three contributions by Husson, Mann and Roberts in the context of an exploration of the link between methodology and politics in Piketty’s economic history of inequality. Touching on the role of time and literature in Piketty’s argument, as well as on his difficulty in accounting for the relations of capital – especially ones originating in colonialism and empire – it approaches Piketty’s book, and its success, in terms of its concerted effort to produce a cognitive mapping of contemporary capitalism that can serve as a prelude to its democratic reform

Tragedy

From Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics onwards, tragedy has loomed large in the genealogy of literary theory. But this prominence is in many regards paradoxical. The original object of that theory, the Attic tragedies performed at the Dionysian festivals in 5th century BCE Athens are, notwithstanding their ubiquitous representation on the modern stage, only a small fraction of the tragedies produced in Athens and themselves torn from their context of performance. The Poetics itself and the plays that served as its objects of analysis would long vanish from the purview of European culture. Yet when they returned in the Renaissance as cultural monuments to be appropriated and repeated, it was in a context largely incommensurable with their existence in Ancient Greece. While the early moderns created their own poetics (and politics) of tragedy, and enlisted their image of the Ancients in the invention of exquisitely modern literary and artistic forms (not least, opera), it was in the crucible of German Idealism and Romanticism, arguably the matrix of modern literary theory, that certain Ancient Greek tragedies were transmuted into models of ‘the tragic’, an idea that played a formative part in the emergence of philosophical modernity, accompanying a battle of the giants between dialectical (Hegelian) and anti-dialectical (Nietzschean) currents that continues to shape our theoretical present. The gap between a philosophy of the tragic and the poetics and history of tragedy as a dramatic genre is the site of much rich and provocative debate, in which the definition of literary theory itself is frequently at stake. Tragedy is in this sense usefully defined as a genre in conflict. It is also a genre of conflict, in the sense that ethical conflicts, historical transitions and political revolutions have all come to define its literary forms, something that is particularly evident in the place of both tragedy and the tragic in the drama of decolonisation

Materialism Without Matter: Abstraction, Absence and Social Form

In light of the contemporary theoretical infatuation with ‘new’ materialisms, matter and materiality, this essay revisits the heterodox Marxian thesis according to which materialism may, in Étienne Balibar's formulation, have ‘nothing to do with a reference to matter’. The article explores variants of this materialism without matter: Antonio Gramsci's objections to Bukharin's ‘Marxist sociology’, Theodor W. Adorno and Alfred Sohn-Rethel's critiques of epistemology, and Isaak Illich Rubin's elucidation of the categories of Marx's value-analysis. It foregrounds a shift in this counter-intuitive materialism from subjective praxis to the categories of capital, in which ‘not one atom of matter enters’ (Marx). This recovery of an understanding of materialism as the critical analysis of real, social abstractions concludes with a reconsideration of Louis Althusser's ‘aesthetic’ reflections on the materialism of absence, as featured in his philosophical appreciation of the paintings of Leonardo Cremonini

The Bourgeois and the islamist, or, the other subjects of Politics

here is much theoretical work already underway on the many facets of Badiou's theory of political subjectivation. However, little attention has been directed hitherto to those figures of the subject which cannot be easily identifiable with a universalist or generic orientation. Beginning with Badiou's struggles with the subjectivity of the bourgeois in the seminars that make up his Theorie du sujet (1982), this article tries to track his thinking of the 'other';, non- or anti-universalist subjects of politics, and to think what effects their inclusion within a theory of the subject, and indeed a theory of political praxis, may have. Taking issue with some recent remarks of Badiou on the isomorphies between Islamism and fascism in Logiques des mondes (2006), the article also seeks to develop Badiou's notion of 'reactive' and 'obscure' subjects through a brief engagement with recent interpretations of political Islam

The World is Already Without Us

This article revisits the problematic of the cognitive mapping of capital by probing the affinity between two representational predicaments: the depopulated nature of images of human-altered landscapes in the “new topographics” photography and its epigones, and the current debate over the definition of the Anthropocene. It looks in Fredric Jameson’s treatment of the time of capital, and of the place therein of dead labor, for a clue to critically rethink both these phenomena, revealing their profound affinity in the aporia besetting our thinking of historical agency under capitalist conditions. The article concludes with a brief reflection on what it might mean to define communism in this light as the “resurrection of dead labor.

Symmetry and Solidarity in the Settler Colony Revisiting Albert Camus’s Algerian Writings

In a critical engagement with Marc Crépon\u27s Murderous Consent, this essay revisits Albert Camus\u27s writings on Algeria, from 1939 to the throes of the war of independence. Against the argument that Camus\u27s work can provide a moral and philosophical compass for a critique of violence, it explores the effects that Camus\u27s complex identification with France and its project of settler-colonialism in North Africa has on his understanding of the resistance, and eventually the war, of natives against the pieds-noir and the power of the colonial metropole. Camus toggles between presenting violence in the settler-colony as somehow symmetrical (marked by crimes on both sides), and ultimately assuming a fundamental asymmetry, in which France provides the only legitimate frame for economic development and political emancipation. In Camus\u27s colonial humanism, solidarity for the native\u27s anti-colonial demands and understanding for the violence of resistance can only ever be partial, constrained by a modernising paternalism for which a break with France spells catastrophe and regression