Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. On the Edge of Affirmation: Derrida -- 2. Adieu to Negativity: Deleuze -- 3. The Density and Fragility of the World: Latour -- 4. Immeasurable Life: Negri -- 5. On the Edge of the Negative: Badiou -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index

"Crisis and Criticism is a series of interventions from 2009 to 2021 engaging with the literary, cultural and political responses to the capitalist crisis of 2007-8. Challenging the tendency to treat crisis as natural and beyond human control, this book interrogates our cultural understanding of crisis and suggests the necessity of ruthless criticism of the existing world. While responses to crisis have retreated from the critical, choosing to inhabit apocalyptic fantasies instead, only a critical understanding of the causes of crisis within capitalism itself can promise their eventual overcoming"--

Introduction: Exposed to death -- A new time of death? -- The space of death -- Politicising death -- Bioethics and death -- Transgressive death -- Resisting death -- Conclusion: The meaning of death

The work of the late Foucault, especially the turn to the care of the self and the problem of subjectivity, has often been regarded as a narcissistic withdrawal from politics. Instead, this essay argues that such a charge ignores how Foucault was responding to arguments highly-critical of individualism developed in the late 1970s, especially Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism (1979). Not only was Foucault concerned with rehabilitating a notion of individualism, his historical reconstruction of the care of the self emphasized that this philosophical practice was not a withdrawal from public space but a new way of conceiving ethics and politics. Focusing on the issues of crisis and transition this essay reconstructs Foucault's historical reflections on Greek and Roman practices of the care of the self as mediated responses to the crisis of politics in the late 1970s and as re-conceptualizations of the practice of philosophy. In particular, Foucault's late work is read as the attempt to reconstruct or construct a sense of the vocation of philosophy. The philosophical vocation developed by Foucault is one concerned with the intensification of experience within the subject conceived of as the possibility for a new engagement with the world.

This essay responds to Frederic Jameson's Allegory and Ideology by arguing that this book is centrally concerned with the masses. By developing Jameson's own model of allegorical reading the pressure of the masses on the text is explored. This is demonstrated through a reading of Albert Camus's The Plague, Jameson's central example of 'bad' allegory. While this novel is 'bad' for implying a one-to-one allegory between the plague infection and the occupation of France during World War Two or to the human condition, a reading of the text as biopolitical allegory reveals the complex presence of the masses. Finally, this response considers the 'immortality' of the masses as the utopian moment traced within Allegory and Ideology.

Abstract
This essay responds to Frederic Jameson's Allegory and Ideology by arguing that this book is centrally concerned with the masses. By developing Jameson's own model of allegorical reading, the pressure of the masses on the text is explored. This is demonstrated through a reading of Albert Camus's The Plague, Jameson's central example of 'bad' allegory. While this novel is 'bad' for implying a one-to-one allegorical relationship between the plague infection and the Occupation of France during World War Two, or to the human condition, a reading of the text as biopolitical allegory reveals the complex presence of the masses. Finally, this response considers the 'immortality' of the masses as the utopian moment traced within Allegory and Ideology.

In his discussion of the transition from the cinema of the movement-image to the cinema of the time-image, Deleuze famously makes way for the traumatic intrusion of history. This transition, he writes, is not purely internal to cinema, but the result of the emergence of ''any spaces whatever', deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaceswhatever a new race of characters was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers. (1989: xi) ' These spaces are the result of the destruction caused by the Second World War, creating new forms of anonymous or empty space: bombed cities, abandoned villages, the chaos of what Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, called "the zone" (1975: 281-616).1 It is these spaces, especially in Italian neo-realism, which will break up the movement-image and release "a little time in a pure state" (Deleuze 1989: xi). Due to the stark emptiness of these spaces and their anonymity, characters or images will no longer be embedded in movement but instead become detached into time.

The essay considers how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies embody a desire for a purely virtual money and a secure and stable form of money. This seeming paradox encodes a politics that both embraces the force of the market and demarcates hierarchies in terms of access and of technical capacity, which are often then linked to social categories. In this way cryptocurrency becomes aligned with a reactionary or 'alt right' politics. The suggestion of the essay is we need to critically consider issues of mediation and grasp how the 'hybridity' of cryptocurrency is a political and social problem.

The decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, to 'Brexit', appears as a traumatic shock. Here this shock is examined in the context of the national imaginary of 'Englishness' and its relationship to theory. I focus on the theoretical tendency known as accelerationism, which suggests we embrace abstraction and modernity to transcend the limits of contemporary capitalism into a new post-capitalist society. Accelerationism embraces the future and modernity, in contrast with the seemingly backward-looking imaginaries of Brexit. The desire of accelerationism to transcend national limits, including these backward-looking imaginaries of Englishness, is actually shaped by these imaginaries. In this way, accelerationism and the debates around it offers ways to unlock the social, psychic and theoretical formations that condition Brexit as well. What they reveal is the way in which Brexit is shaped by a particularly 'English' form of modernisation.

Utopias of the text are the moments of the emergence of a new and radical concept of the text as overflowing all limits and boundaries. Here these utopias are traced in the writings of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. They often emerge at the margins of these texts, in fragments or boundaries at which the utopia can be glimpsed before disappearing. These utopian moments can be reconstructed as a form of thinking the post-literary and its limits. They can also be traced to the explosion of speech during May 1968 and Maurice Blanchot is a key figure who links together this political moment with the 'neutral' form of writing. This article explores the fading of these utopias of the text alongside this draining of political energies. These processes of critique and waning suggest the inversion of utopias of the text into dystopias of the text. Now the sign or signifier appears dispersed or even insignificant compared to the powers and forces of post-literary domination. In this situation, however, the article suggests, the persistence of the utopias of the text as a critical horizon that can still inform how we grasp the equivocations of our post-literary moment.

In this intervention, I reflect on Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism as a work better known for its title, as a phrase or slogan, than for the substance of the book. While indicative of the success of Fisher's diagnosis, one borne out through the experience of capitalist crisis and austerity, I want to turn to the problem of the alternative and the future that was a constant concern of Fisher's writing. In particular, probing the "realism" in "capitalist realism," I want to consider Fisher's interest in the breakdown of capitalist realism. This "breakdown" is indicated negatively by psychic suffering and collapse, but also positively by the cultural forms of the weird and eerie as markers of a consciousness beyond "capitalist realism," the mapping of capitalist crisis, and the futures that might positively emerge through breakdown. At stake in the substance of Fisher's work, I suggest, lies a class phenomenology concerned with not only grasping the suffering inflicted by capitalist culture, but also the possibilities of a breakdown of realism that would imagine a future oriented to a new collective experience beyond the existing limits of psychic and social formations.

Abstract
Francis Mulhern's Figures of Catastrophe argues for the existence of a hitherto-unnoticed generic form: the condition of culture novel, which offers a metacultural reflection on the conditions for the existence of culture and for access to culture. Mulhern's analysis is located within the framework of Marxist reflections on culture, the history of British cultural Marxism, and Mulhern's own project of the critique and analysis of 'metaculture' in Britain. In particular, this review focuses on Mulhern's contention that the 'condition of culture novel' offers a catastrophic or even nihilistic vision of the access to culture by the working class. Mulhern's argument is that the 'condition of culture' novel accompanies the emergence, solidification and collapse of the British culture of 'labourism'. This review explores the consequences of this argument for the assessment of 'culture' and the future of the novel as a site of reflection on the condition of culture.