I found this review while browsing Nate’s always-interesting blog What in the hell… and asked him if we could repost here. (It’s been slightly revised for the khukuri posting.) The book, and review, deal with the question of understanding the relations of production within capitalism, and particularly the role of subjectivity (and its production) therein [...]
Posts under ‘Book Review’
Uses of Fanaticism
Originally published on Unemployed Negativity; thanks to Nate at What in the hell… for pointing to this. There is also a good short review by Richard Seymour at Lenin’s Tomb. Alberto Toscano has translated several works by Alain Badiou, including The Century and Logics of Worlds, and has written The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and [...]
The crisis, financialization, and “cognitive capitalism”
Christian Marazzi, whose recent book on the economic crisis is reviewed below, is one of those (like Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and others) who takes the theoretical legacy of the Italian autonomist struggles of the 1960s as a starting point. Often subsumed under the terms post-Fordist or post-workerist, the theory posits a new capitalist structural [...]
Vern Grey: Questions provoked by Bill Martin’s Ethical Marxism
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Evaluating Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson has been one of the foremost Marxist cultural theorists of our age. The following review of his most recent book, Valences of the Dialectic, is reprinted from the London Review of Books. Into the Big Tent Benjamin Kunkel Fredric Jameson’s pre-eminence, over the last generation, among critics writing in English would be hard [...]
Ethics, human nature, and questions of inevitability
Following is a continuation, parts 3 and 4, of Vern Gray’s essay, “On Some Questions Provoked by a Reading of Bill Martin’s Ethical Marxism.” Parts 1 and 2 were published yesterday here. The final parts of this essay will be posted soon, along with a pdf of the whole. III. Human Nature Contrary to the [...]
Ethical Marxism: some themes and questions
The relation of ethics to Marxism has been a long-discussed and debated question, especially since Marx himself seemed to eschew ethical and moral thinking as necessary to communist reasoning. “The communists do not preach morality at all,” Marx and Engels say in the 1845 German Ideology. “They do not put to people the moral demand: [...]
Zizek, materialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat
It is hard to imagine the last ten years without Slovoj Zizek on the intellectual/ political scene — or should I say it would be painful to imagine his absence. In a flood of books and shorter pieces he has torn up the landscape — in a productive way and with a deeply serious purpose, [...]
What is the meaning of Marx’s theories?
One of the things that becomes clear in any deep study of Marx is that there are “many Marxes” — that is, that it is possible and legitimate, on the basis of the Marxist corpus, of Marx’s texts and writings, to go in several different directions, which will in the end not be compatible one [...]
Some comments on Zizek’s latest book
The following, from The Accursed Share, comments on Zizek’s new book, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. Institutionalizing Revolution By Nick Srnicek While I’ve not always been a fan of Zizek’s political analyses, I have to say, his latest book is terrific. There’s any number of really great ideas by him in it, but I’ll [...]
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