En el contexto político global contemporáneo, las diversas luchas sociales se están alienando entre sí hasta elpunto de que la ilusión del capitalismo como único sistema socioeconómico posible está difuminando todos los horizontesdel cambio social. En este artículo, trataremos de redefinir las causas comunes de las luchas sociales, demostrando su interseccionalidad e interdependencia. Para ello, nos ocuparemos de una serie de conceptos de la filosofía de Marx. En la introducción, examinaremos la noción de valor, afirmando que la teoría del valor (...) de Marx no es simplemente una teoría laboral del valor, sino que más bien refleja la estructura paralela de la producción y la circulación, cristalizada en la forma de valor última del dinero. Una vez obtenidas estas ideas preliminares, volveremos al fenómeno del trabajo en el capitalismo, para reinterpretar, en la primera sección del artículo, la distinción marxiana entre trabajo productivo e improductivo. A partir de ahí, se darán los primeros ejemplos concretos de la interseccionalidad de las luchas sociales contra la abstracción del capital: a saber, mostrar que las luchas de género y las raciales tienen ciertas causas comunes, enraizadas en la hegemonía gramsciana. En la segunda sección, examinaremos la distinción que Marx establece entre la subsunción formal y la real. Esta última, afirmaremos, es decisiva para entender cómo el capital estructura la cuasi-totalidad de nuestras relaciones sociales. Tras una interpretación de la película Toni Erdmann de Maren Ade, propondremos algunos medios posibles de lucha interseccional contra la subsunción real, que encontrarán su respaldo teórico en el concepto de universales subversivos. Las observaciones finales abordarán la lógica nuclear de la distribución y la acumulación del capital, un síntoma que pervive a lo largo de la historia preservado e impulsado por la omnipresencia de la ideología, y subrayarán de nuevo implícitamente la importancia de la lucha común en el descongelamiento de la emergencia de un nuevo sujeto revolucionario. (shrink)

This article explores the philosophy of Alain Badiou from the vantage point of the concepts of the localization, delocalization, and relocalization of the void as thematized through literary arts, religion, emancipatory politics, and the subject of psychoanalysis. In short, these moments around the void characterize the processes through which truth is processed and seen through their full realization by a philosophical engagement across the various conditions in which these truths occur. The localization of a void is the naming of an (...) indiscernible element that is incommensurable to the rubric of constructible knowledge, sense and meaning which could saturate the space of truth. Thus, the naming that localizes the void acts as a subtraction of the invariant in the variance of situation such that across various points in space and time, we are still able to subtract the universal as the invariant not just as the fidelity to the localized truth but also as the resurrection of truth upon its relocalization at a different place and a different time. At its core, this article is concerned with truth, why truth is persistent, and why we have to struggle to articulate the truth that we are trying to be faithful to again and again with each instance that truth risks being covered-over and obscured. (shrink)

In the middle of the 18th century, a new fad found its way into the gardens of England's well-to-do: building fake Gothic ruins. Newly constructed castle towers and walls looked like they were already falling apart, even on the first day of their creation. Made of stone, plaster, or even canvas, these "sham ruins" are often considered an embarrassing blip in English architectural history. However, Sham Ruins: A User's Guide expands the specific example of the sham ruin into a general (...) principle to examine the way purposely broken objects can be used both to uncover old truths and invent new ones. Along with architecture, work by Ivan Vladislavić, Tom Stoppard, Alain Mabanckou, Aleksei Fedorchenko, Michael Haneke, and Sturtevant is used to develop this thesis, as well as artifacts such as pre-torn jeans, fake histories, and broken screen apps. Using these examples, one of the key questions the book raises is: What is it that sham ruins ruin? In other words, if real ruins are ruins of what they actually are, then sham ruins should be considered ruins of what they are not. Thus sham ruins are about imposing new meaning where such meaning does not and should not exist. They also can show how things we think are functioning well are actually already broken. Sham ruins do this, and much more, by being lies, ruses, and embarrassments. This is what gives them the power with which we can think about objects in new, unintended ways. (shrink)

Political thrillers often encourage the feeling that a mere individual has the power to make a difference on a large scale. Caught up in a chain of events they wished they had never uncovered, a protagonist can occupy a position in which their actions have far-reaching consequences, with the rookie CIA analyst accidentally bringing down a whole corrupt political system being only one example. Much of the critical attention these films have garnered falls under the rubric of detective work in (...) that the protagonist is seen as exposing a web of corruption which would otherwise have gone on unnoticed. However, this paper is focused on how the scale of the individual comes into contact with other, larger scales of events. Points of contact between scales are important because they are where change can take place, thus allowing an individual to influence the supra-individual. (shrink)

In the _Nichomachean Ethics_, Aristotle defines three kinds of friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. The characters in the films of Sean Baker fit into none of these categories. Friendship is central to all of Baker’s films, but it takes the non-Aristotelian form of “friends, no matter what,” which I interpret as a description of the aporia of friendship, of an impossible friend, or a friend in the realm of fantasy. In other words, friends are only friends when they resist everything (...) friends are supposed to do. Betrayal, lies, and complications sit at the heart of this new definition. One mechanism for this kind of friendship is _mourning_. Friends are only friends when friendship is mourned, or when it is part of a crypt, or a vault for losses that are too traumatic to confront fully, as set out in the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, and developed by Laurence Rickels. This reading of mourning puts a particular spin on fantasy, for if fantasy is generally assumed to be about wish-fulfillment, then when fantasy reaches into the crypt for inspiration, it is retooled into a vehicle for confronting what is too hard to face. This is the function of friendship in Baker’s films: his friends are Judas figures going against their friends in order to keep their friendship alive. In _Tangerine_ (2015), two transgender sex workers in West Hollywood develop their friendship around a fight over a man. In _Starlet_ (2012), a young woman hides a secret from her elderly female friend, and this friendship is only saved when another actress betrays this secret. In these films, friendship is paradoxically formed by attempting to ruin friendship. Thought on fantasy and mourning will help in defining this type of non-Aristotelian friendship, as well as Freud’s work on the “ambivalence of feeling” from his writing on the First World War. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “One Must Die to Know the Truth” “Prayer to the Cloud of Unknowing” Bored, as in Really Bored The Boxing of D'Anna Biers Notes.