The purpose of this paper is to re-read Marx’sEighteenth Brumaireby highlighting the political meaning of a materialist historiography. In the first part, I consider Marx’s historiographical and political intention to represent the history of the aftermath of the revolution of ’48 as a farce in order to liquidate ‘any faith in the superstitious past’. In the second part I analyse the theatrical register chosen by Marx in order to represent the Second Empire as a society without a body, a phantasmagoria (...) in which the Constitution, the National Assembly and law – in short, everything that the middle class had put up as essential principles of modern democracy – disappear. In the third part I argue that Marx does not elaborate a theory of revolution that is good for every occasion. What interests him is a historiography capable of grasping, in the various temporalities of the revolution, the chance for a true liberation. (shrink)

The review assesses first and foremost the capability of Mezzadra and Neilson’s book to radically tackle some urgent issues concerning both capital’s regulation of migratory movements and the subjective autonomy these latter incessantly express. The main original contribution of the text is a conception of the border as an epistemic device through which to address and act upon a variety of social processes, from migration policies to labour transformations, from capital’s restructuring to governmental regulations. Subsequently, two crucial topics are critically (...) discussed: 1) the methodological link between epistemology and conflictual subjectivity ; 2) the compelling – but problematic from a practical perspective – way in which the issue of political organisation is situated against the current phase of capitalist development by means of concepts such as translation and the common. (shrink)

Insurgent Universality offers a novel attempt to access history through a problematisation of the notion of universalism. Its main argument is based on three notions articulated in revolutionary events: temporalities, universality and insurgency. In this article we review their theoretical aspects, comment on their limitations, and outline potential reformulations.

This thesis explores the concept of subsumption in the work of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx in order to construct a distinct theoretical problem resting on the articulation of conceptual and social relations. Each of these authors develops a ‘logic’ within which subsumptive relations are operative: Transcendental logic, dialectical logic and finally Marx’s ‘logic of the body politic’; these are investigated in turn. The thesis opens with a close reading of subsumption in Kant’s philosophy, arguing that it is (...) here that the concept first attains its modern or critical sense. This critical sense distinguishes it from the classical notion of subsumption and gives rise to a novel philosophical account of how synthetic subsumption acts unite heterogeneous elements within a compositional totality. In Hegel’s philosophy this account takes on a series of new determinations, as social, historical and developmental aspects to subsumption are introduced. Nonetheless, Hegel’s concept of subsumption remains within the ambit of a ‘closed’ idealist discourse, just as Kant’s does. The second section of the thesis explores how this closure is thrown into crisis by Marx’s materialist attack on philosophy as a self-sufficient branch of knowledge, altering the stakes of conceptual relations as such, and therefore subsumption. Drawing on the work of Mexican-Ecuadoran philosopher Bolívar Echeverría, Marx’s materialism is reconstructed as a theory of social reproduction, encompassing the practical process of social life in its entirety. This then provides the basis for an analysis of subsumption in its specifically capitalist form, which, the thesis argues, must be thought as operative at three levels of social activity: exchange, production and reproduction, each with their own distinct but interconnected logics of power and resistance. Grasping these three dimensions in their unity, the thesis finally outlines an original framework for comprehending capitalist domination in its concrete specificity. In order to do so it goes beyond Marx’s own theory of subsumption as well as interpretations of it that reinstate theoretical closure to historical contingency. Instead, a dynamic theory of capitalist subsumption is proposed in order to register the diverse mechanisms of control through which capitalist power shapes the course of social reproduction and historical development. (shrink)

Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti make the case for the critique of energy by arguing that “the core contradiction of today’s economic system is and always has been tied to its facility with energy.” A critical standpoint on our ongoing economic and ecological crises demands a new historical account of energy.

Stacey Balkan reviews Shelley Streeby’s Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making Through Science Fiction and Activism.

Turning to the ways immaterial forms of “accumulation and material forms of labor intersect” under postcolonial capitalism, Katherine Lawless maps the relation between cultural media and the flow of energy and asks: “What happens if we map the emergence of global memory cultures alongside the transition to nuclear energy?”.