- Department of English,
University of Chichester,
Bishop Otter Campus,
College Lane,
Chichester,
PO19 6PE,
UK - 01243 816405
Benjamin Noys
University of Chichester, English and Creative Writing, Faculty Member
- Philosophy, English, Psychoanalysis, Continental Philosophy, Theory, Critical Theory, and 13 moreAccelerationism, François Laruelle, Vitalism, Marxism, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Bruno Latour, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, and Afro-Pessimismedit
- I am Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester. My research is focused in contemporary Continental... moreI am Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester. My research is focused in contemporary Continental theory, cultural politics, literature, and avant-garde and popular culture.
I am a member of the Editorial boards of Film-Philosophy, S, and Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, a corresponding editor of Historical Materialism, and a contributing editor of Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. I lead the Theory Research Group at the University of Chichester.
I am interested in supervising postgraduate work in the following areas: critical theory, particularly contemporary European thought (Agamben, Badiou, Negri, Zizek, Derrida, etc); Lacanian psychoanalysis; contemporary avant-garde and modernist fiction; anti-capitalist and anarchist politics, cinema; horror fiction; and the cultural politics of the image.edit
We are told our lives are too fast, subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more. That’s one familiar story. I want to tell another, stranger, story here: of those who... more
We are told our lives are too fast, subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more. That’s one familiar story. I want to tell another, stranger, story here: of those who think we haven’t gone fast enough. Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production they argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. Rejecting this conclusion, Malign Velocities tracks this 'accelerationism' as the symptom of the misery and pain of labour under capitalism. Retracing a series of historical moments of accelerationism - the Italian Futurism, communist accelerationism after the Russian Russian Revolution, the 'cyberpunk phuturism' of the ’90s and ’00s, the unconscious fantasies of our integration with machines, the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis, and the terminal moment of negative accelerationism - suggests the pleasures and pains of speed signal the need to disengage, negate, and develop a new politics that truly challenges the supposed pleasures of speed.
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Can we find alternatives to the failed radical projects of the twentieth century? What are the possible forms of struggle today? How do we fight back against the misery of our crisis-ridden present? ‘Communization’ is the spectre of... more
Can we find alternatives to the failed radical projects of the twentieth century? What are the possible forms of struggle today? How do we fight back against the misery of our crisis-ridden present?
‘Communization’ is the spectre of the immediate struggle to abolish capitalism and the state, which haunts Europe, Northern California and wherever the real abstractions of value that shape our lives are contested. Evolving on the terrain of capitalism new practices of the ‘human strike’, autonomous communes, occupation and insurrection have attacked the alienations of our times. These signs of resistance are scattered and have yet to coalesce, and their future is deliberately precarious and insecure.
Bringing together voices from inside and outside of these currents Communization and Its Discontents treats communization as a problem to be explored rather than a solution. Taking in the new theorizations of communization proposed by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, Théorie Communiste, post-autonomists, and others, it offers critical reflections on the possibilities and the limits of these contemporary forms, strategies, and tactics of struggle.
Jasper Bernes, John Cunningham, Endnotes, Alexander R. Galloway, Maya Andrea Gonzalez, Anthony Iles, Leon de Mattis, Nicole Pepperell, Théorie Communiste, Alberto Toscano, Marina Vishmidt, and Evan Calder Williams.
‘Communization’ is the spectre of the immediate struggle to abolish capitalism and the state, which haunts Europe, Northern California and wherever the real abstractions of value that shape our lives are contested. Evolving on the terrain of capitalism new practices of the ‘human strike’, autonomous communes, occupation and insurrection have attacked the alienations of our times. These signs of resistance are scattered and have yet to coalesce, and their future is deliberately precarious and insecure.
Bringing together voices from inside and outside of these currents Communization and Its Discontents treats communization as a problem to be explored rather than a solution. Taking in the new theorizations of communization proposed by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, Théorie Communiste, post-autonomists, and others, it offers critical reflections on the possibilities and the limits of these contemporary forms, strategies, and tactics of struggle.
Jasper Bernes, John Cunningham, Endnotes, Alexander R. Galloway, Maya Andrea Gonzalez, Anthony Iles, Leon de Mattis, Nicole Pepperell, Théorie Communiste, Alberto Toscano, Marina Vishmidt, and Evan Calder Williams.
Research Interests:
The Persistence of the Negative offers an original and compelling critique of contemporary Continental theory through a rehabilitation of the negative. Against the usual image of rival thinkers and schools, Benjamin Noys identifies and... more
The Persistence of the Negative offers an original and compelling critique of contemporary Continental theory through a rehabilitation of the negative. Against the usual image of rival thinkers and schools, Benjamin Noys identifies and attacks a shared consensus on the primacy of affirmation and the expelling of the negative that runs through the leading figures of contemporary theory: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou.
While positioning the emergence of affirmative theory as a political response to the corrosive effects of contemporary capitalism, Noys argues that, all too often, affirmation is left re-affirming the conditions of the present rather than providing the means to disrupt and resist them.
Refusing to endorse an anti-theory position that would read theory as the symptom of political defeat, The Persistence of the Negative traverses these leading thinkers in a series of lucid readings to reveal the disavowed effects of negativity operating within their work.
Overturning the limits of recent debates on the politics of theory, The Persistence of the Negative vigorously defends the return of theory to its political calling.
While positioning the emergence of affirmative theory as a political response to the corrosive effects of contemporary capitalism, Noys argues that, all too often, affirmation is left re-affirming the conditions of the present rather than providing the means to disrupt and resist them.
Refusing to endorse an anti-theory position that would read theory as the symptom of political defeat, The Persistence of the Negative traverses these leading thinkers in a series of lucid readings to reveal the disavowed effects of negativity operating within their work.
Overturning the limits of recent debates on the politics of theory, The Persistence of the Negative vigorously defends the return of theory to its political calling.
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'All periods of western philosophy and culture have been obsessed with death, but the horror and banality of modern death calls into question the very nature of our biological existence. Clearly and accessibly written, The Culture of... more
'All periods of western philosophy and culture have been obsessed with death, but the horror and banality of modern death calls into question the very nature of our biological existence. Clearly and accessibly written, The Culture of Death engages with pressing current political issues: the significance of concentration camps, the distinctions and similarities between democracy and totalitarianism, the phenomenon of the refugee, and the medical/philosophical criteria of actual death.' Jonathan Dollimore, author of Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture 'Benjamin Noys has written a thought-provoking book on the cultural change of death in contemporary western culture. Noys is clearly not only well read but equally well informed about contemporary artistic representational culture.' Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Mortality
Western culture has always been obsessed with death, but now death has taken on a new, anonymous form. The 20th Century saw the mass production of corpses through war and the triumph of technology over the human body. The new millennium has opened with global terrorism and the suspension of all human rights in far-flung prison camps. We live in an age of panic, when the fear of death at any time and in any place is present. And we live in an age of apathy towards both science and institutional politics, an age which has sanctioned the rise of techno-medical and political powers which can deny our control over our own bodies and lives and the lives of others. The Culture of Death explores this moment to analyse our exposure to death in modern culture.
Western culture has always been obsessed with death, but now death has taken on a new, anonymous form. The 20th Century saw the mass production of corpses through war and the triumph of technology over the human body. The new millennium has opened with global terrorism and the suspension of all human rights in far-flung prison camps. We live in an age of panic, when the fear of death at any time and in any place is present. And we live in an age of apathy towards both science and institutional politics, an age which has sanctioned the rise of techno-medical and political powers which can deny our control over our own bodies and lives and the lives of others. The Culture of Death explores this moment to analyse our exposure to death in modern culture.
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This is a clear and concise guide to the life and work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille, best known as the author of the celebrated erotic novel, The Story of the Eye. Benjamin Noys introduces Bataille as a writer out of step... more
This is a clear and concise guide to the life and work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille, best known as the author of the celebrated erotic novel, The Story of the Eye. Benjamin Noys introduces Bataille as a writer out of step with the dominant intellectual trends of his day - surrealism and existentialism - and shows that it was his very marginality that accounted in large part for his subsequent importance for the post-structuralists and the counterculture, in Europe and in the United States.
Treating Bataille’s work as a whole rather than focusing, as other studies have done, on aspects of his work (i.e. as social theory or philosophy), Noys’ study is intended to be sensitive to the needs of students new to Bataille’s work while at the same time drawing on the latest research on Bataille to offer new interpretations of Bataille’s oeuvre for more experienced readers. This is the first clear, introductory reading of Bataille in English - challenging current reductive readings, and stressing the range of disciplines affected by Bataille’s work, at a time when interest in Bataille is growing.
Treating Bataille’s work as a whole rather than focusing, as other studies have done, on aspects of his work (i.e. as social theory or philosophy), Noys’ study is intended to be sensitive to the needs of students new to Bataille’s work while at the same time drawing on the latest research on Bataille to offer new interpretations of Bataille’s oeuvre for more experienced readers. This is the first clear, introductory reading of Bataille in English - challenging current reductive readings, and stressing the range of disciplines affected by Bataille’s work, at a time when interest in Bataille is growing.
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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... more
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.
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Contemporary forms of anti-critique take issue with critical distance as the root of critique’s “Olympian” and hierarchical stance. Instead, they constantly call us to get closer: to immerse, network, touch, or skim. Against claims to... more
Contemporary forms of anti-critique take issue with critical distance as the root of critique’s “Olympian” and hierarchical stance. Instead, they constantly call us to get closer: to immerse, network, touch, or skim. Against claims to hidden or encrypted meaning to be revealed, they stress we stay as close to the surface of things as possible. These forms of “surface reading” characterise a common orientation of literary and critical studies at the present moment – from invocations of materialities, networks, and objects, to statistical and cognitive methodologies. Taking issue with these orientations, I explore how such claims falsely characterize critique – notably psychoanalysis and Marxism – as based on distance and exteriority. In fact, these modes of critique constantly insist on our immersion and embeddedness in forms of relation: whether socio-economic or psychic. The forms of anti-critique dispute this form of immersion in the name of an affirmative form of taking a distance, escaping what they see as the problematic space of negativity that binds critique to its objects. So, while claiming to get us close, anti-critique inscribes an affirmative distance. I return to negativity as the inscription of a messy proximity that carves out an internal dissension and distance within the experience of immersion.
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The Old Weird, weird fiction written between 1890 and 1940, was often reactionary and in the figure of H. P. Lovecraft, racist. Contemporary New Weird writing is characterized by a contrasting politics, which stresses the weird as the... more
The Old Weird, weird fiction written between 1890 and 1940, was often reactionary and in the figure of H. P. Lovecraft, racist. Contemporary New Weird writing is characterized by a contrasting politics, which stresses the weird as the destabilization of normative conceptions of the human. In the work of the UK-based publisher Savoy we find a different strategy: confrontation with and replication of the racist and anti-Semitic strategies of the Old Weird. Their work is centered on the character Lord Horror, a fictionalized reworking of the wartime broadcaster for the Nazi’s William Joyce, who was nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw and executed for treason in 1946. Lord Horror is a multimedia production, appearing in novels, comic books and graphic novels, music, and film. Focusing on the graphic novel, Reverbstorm (2012), this article explores the dense visual and textual “universe” of Lord Horror as a form of weird fiction. This universe is visually indebted to the work of H. P. Lovecraft, develops a visual weird architecture, exacerbates the form of pulp modernism, and intensifies the disintegration of narrative. The neo-weird of Reverbstorm develops a new form of weird fiction in which the instability of the weird becomes problematic and is not simply to be celebrated as a site of liberation.
The global financial crisis of 2008, and its ongoing fallout, poses questions of representation to the narrative form of the postmodern novel in terms of the relation of literary to financial value. Previously the novel struggled with the... more
The global financial crisis of 2008, and its ongoing fallout, poses questions of representation to the narrative form of the postmodern novel in terms of the relation of literary to financial value. Previously the novel struggled with the representation of the mediated complexity of money and capital, now it has to struggle with the crisis of those forms. Drawing on Lukács argument that capitalism in its ‘normal’ functioning operates as differentiated sub-systems that is experienced as a unity, and that capitalism in crisis functions as a unity experienced as disintegration, this intervention tracks recent pre-crisis fiction for signs of reflection on the forms of capitalism and intimations of its crisis. Arguing that the plural and differentiated fiction of postmodernism took for granted the horizon of successful capitalism, it is suggested that the current crisis implies a contraction of fictional space. Taking the work of William Gibson, best known for his science fiction writing and especially the 1984 novel Neuromancer, as a case study we find the ‘crunching’ of this space and the concomitant miring of fiction in the inertial dynamics of crisis. The dependence of postmodern fiction on the horizon of a unified but differentiated capital is probed in light of the effect of contraction of fictional space and a denuding or reduction of that space. Any ‘crisis fiction’ would have to come to terms with this contraction and the decelerative ‘phase’ of capitalism.
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The political question of authority, crucially posed by Lacanian psychoanalysis in terms of a critique of the Master, is here taken-up and displaced through an analysis of Lars Von Trier’s self-declared ‘harmless comedy’ The Boss of it... more
The political question of authority, crucially posed by Lacanian psychoanalysis in terms of a critique of the Master, is here taken-up and displaced through an analysis of Lars Von Trier’s self-declared ‘harmless comedy’ The Boss of it All (2006). The film work of Lars Von Trier has attracted considerable attention from Lacanian critics, who have particularly focused on its melodramatic figurations of female excess, sacrifice, and jouissance, in films such as Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dogville (2003). Here I depart from this consensus through consideration of a ‘minor’ comic work that actually acutely poses the question of authority, including to psychoanalysis. This ‘office comedy’ traces the displacement at the heart of authority, including the cruelty that permeates supposedly ‘soft’ forms of power. It does so by taking the appearance of authority seriously, and so suggests the inadequacy of critiques of ideology which address themselves to pointing to the absence of authority (the ‘emperor’s new clothes’ effect). That ‘there is no Other of the Other’ does not relieve us of the burden of authority, but in fact permits the secretion of authority through the frame of fantasy. Instead the ‘traversal’ of ideology requires attention to the particular forms in which authority incarnates itself in its supposed absence, especially by recourse to the symbolic fiction of law. What The Boss of it All permits then is the beginning of a tracing of what we could call ‘the psychopathology of everyday authority’ and also poses to psychoanalysis the question of its own attachment to authority.
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Accelerationism emerged as the latest theoretical trend with the publication of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ #Accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics in 2013. The book was quickly translated into at least seventeen... more
Accelerationism emerged as the latest theoretical trend with the publication of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ #Accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics in 2013. The book was quickly translated into at least seventeen languages, including German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish and Korean. In 2014 came the publication of #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, edited by Robin Mackay and Arman Avanessian, and during this period a series of public events, seminars and discussions on accelerationism took place, including in Paris, New York, Berlin and London. This appropriately accelerated discussion has often taken place in relation to the art world, including a special issue of the journal e-flux, and has been characterized by heated polemic.
This interview brings together one of the leading critics of accelerationism, Benjamin Noys, who coined the concept as an object of criticism and has just published his critique Malign Velocities (Zero, 2014), with Alexander R. Galloway, an author and programmer working on media theory and contemporary French philosophy. In the discussion they explore the battles over the definition of accelerationism, the role of the negative, questions of abstraction, and the appeal and perils of fantasies of acceleration. The interview was conducted by email and in person between 23 October 2014 and 3 November 2014.
This interview brings together one of the leading critics of accelerationism, Benjamin Noys, who coined the concept as an object of criticism and has just published his critique Malign Velocities (Zero, 2014), with Alexander R. Galloway, an author and programmer working on media theory and contemporary French philosophy. In the discussion they explore the battles over the definition of accelerationism, the role of the negative, questions of abstraction, and the appeal and perils of fantasies of acceleration. The interview was conducted by email and in person between 23 October 2014 and 3 November 2014.
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The drone is the signature object of the contemporary moment, incarnating a quasi-theological power to see and to kill. The danger of trying to analyse the drone is that we reproduce the image of this theological or metaphysical power,... more
The drone is the signature object of the contemporary moment, incarnating a quasi-theological power to see and to kill. The danger of trying to analyse the drone is that we reproduce the image of this theological or metaphysical power, embracing the discourse of techno-fetishism that surrounds it. Here I analyse this discourse primarily through a series of literary, visual, and philosophical discourses that while pre-drone predict and probe the metaphysics of drones. This metaphysics toys with the possibility of a fully-automated or subject-less weapon, which integrates and deploys the human. Counter-drone discourses have tended to emphasise the human element in the “kill-chain” to disrupt this discourse of technological perfection. This is necessary, but my concern is with how notions of integration, acceleration, and “loading” suggest the drone “assemblage” is one which constantly includes the human through transforming the human into a dream of transcendence. The attempt to stress the banality of the drone as just another weapon does not counter this metaphysics, which aims to integrate the messy materiality of the human into “autonomous acceleration.” To resort to messy materiality as a counter remains within the ambit of drone metaphysics and instead, I suggest, we have to attend to the disruption and negations at work within the discourse of transformation and acceleration that surrounds and finds its destination in the drone.
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This essay examines Debord's dialectical thinking of time, as explicated in his last film In girum imus nocte et consimimur igni (1978). Disputing the characterization of Debord as Bergsonian or mystical, I argue his political thinking of... more
This essay examines Debord's dialectical thinking of time, as explicated in his last film In girum imus nocte et consimimur igni (1978). Disputing the characterization of Debord as Bergsonian or mystical, I argue his political thinking of time engages in a critique of the abstract through immersion in the 'bad side' of history.
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The contemporary theoretical moment is dominated by "affirmationism," as the affirming of a superior economy of excess that can inscribe and rupture any actual economy. This article reconstructs and critiques this affirmationism through... more
The contemporary theoretical moment is dominated by "affirmationism," as the affirming of a superior economy of excess that can inscribe and rupture any actual economy. This article reconstructs and critiques this affirmationism through an analysis of how it subordinates negativity as trapped within a restricted economy, and insists on a "savage negativity" that escapes all relation. I do so by retracing the core features of affirmationism and particularly its turn to the forces of creativity and play, figured through literature, posed against the "labor of the negative." Probing this downgrading of "labor," as a result of the collapse of worker’s identity, I suggest that it results in a fatal detachment of negativity from any political or social instantiation. Instead, the return to negativity must be a return to the possible relational forms of negativity that attend to the impossibility of labor within capitalism.
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In Forget Foucault (1977) Baudrillard indicted Foucault’s plural conception of power as a fatal replication of the new micrological and capillary forms of capitalist control. Foucault never responded directly to Baudrillard’s criticisms,... more
In Forget Foucault (1977) Baudrillard indicted Foucault’s plural conception of power as a fatal replication of the new micrological and capillary forms of capitalist control. Foucault never responded directly to Baudrillard’s criticisms, however his 1978-9 lecture course, The Birth of Biopolitics, was actually devoted to an analysis of the new modes of post-war capitalist governance that would later be analysed under the rubric of neo-liberalism. This missed, or delayed, encounter offers the opening to a mutual critique that takes aim at the ‘mutation’ of neo-liberalism and the effect of this formation on theoretical articulations of political critique. While Baudrillard’s critique of Foucault’s ‘power’, and Deleuze and Guattari’s cognate concept of ‘desire’, proved prescient, his own ‘alternative’ conceptuality of fatal outbidding and acceleration of these tendencies of capitalism in a new ‘trans-political’ order also involved a certain ‘endorsement’ or replication of neo-liberalism. In this sense Foucault’s lectures, whether direct response or not, provide a means to refine Baudrillard’s initial critical point and to indicate the difficulties of ‘radical theory’ in the encounter with ‘radical capitalism’. This deflation of the ‘theoretical bubble’, in the wake of the collapse of the financialised capitalism that gave so much resonance to Baudrillard’s formulations in the 1980s and 1990s, suggests the necessity to return to this earlier moment to re-work the elements for a new thinking of political critique post-Baudrillard.
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This essay reflects on the global financial crisis of 2008 as a site from which to assess a number of theorisations of critique and change, based within a broadly-defined Marxism. While the recent crisis has given traction to Marxism as a... more
This essay reflects on the global financial crisis of 2008 as a site from which to assess a number of theorisations of critique and change, based within a broadly-defined Marxism. While the recent crisis has given traction to Marxism as a form of critique, the articulation of that critique to actual change, and especially to the prospective agents of change, has been left hanging. Charting the work of Fredric Jameson, Hardt and Negri, and others, we find an emphasis on the powers of production and life as a point of excess to fuel anticapitalist
politics. However, these images of dynamism are now forced to confront capitalism in a state of inertia and deceleration, and in so doing, they reveal their dependence on replicating or displacing the supposed ‘productive forces’ of capitalism to
their own projects. Models of ‘anti-production’, such as those derived from Georges Bataille, also tend to converge on models of vital powers, although cast in forms of consumption and excess. Criticising this convergence on a mythical vitalism, this essay suggests a deflationary critique of capitalism’s ‘productivism’, and explores the potential for an anti-vitalist analysis that might better grasp the ‘mythological displacement’ of experience that operates within the frame of capitalist social relations.
politics. However, these images of dynamism are now forced to confront capitalism in a state of inertia and deceleration, and in so doing, they reveal their dependence on replicating or displacing the supposed ‘productive forces’ of capitalism to
their own projects. Models of ‘anti-production’, such as those derived from Georges Bataille, also tend to converge on models of vital powers, although cast in forms of consumption and excess. Criticising this convergence on a mythical vitalism, this essay suggests a deflationary critique of capitalism’s ‘productivism’, and explores the potential for an anti-vitalist analysis that might better grasp the ‘mythological displacement’ of experience that operates within the frame of capitalist social relations.
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This essay reads Žižek’s oeuvre, and especially his theorisation of the Real, as a form of modern Gothic. The aim is not to reduce his work to a ‘mere’ fiction, but to analyse Žižek’s deployment of Gothic devices as a mode of approaching... more
This essay reads Žižek’s oeuvre, and especially his theorisation of the Real, as a form of modern Gothic. The aim is not to reduce his work to a ‘mere’ fiction, but to analyse Žižek’s deployment of Gothic devices as a mode of approaching truth, and the truth of the Real, in the guise or form of fiction. In particular I trace the transformations of these devices as Žižek refines and develops his conceptualisation of the Real, paralleling and recapitulating Lacan’s own developments, from the Real as unrepresentable ‘outside’ to gradually integrating the Real as the ‘inner curvature’ of the Symbolic. At each point in this shift I trace the formal parallels with different forms of the Gothic, and the concomitant effects on the social and political formulations of the Real. Žižek’s de-reification of the Real is at one with his politicisation of the Real – shifting from inert and unrepresentable horror to potential site of transformation. Here, however, Žižek divests himself of the Gothic to eliminate the risk of posing the Real in mythic terms as unrepresentable horror. Taking more seriously the possible alliance between psychoanalysis and Gothic I instead trace the possibility of a new alliance between them predicated on a ‘geometric’ Gothic that can probe the horror of capitalist reality.
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Giorgio Agamben’s thinking of the image seems to occupy a minor role in his work, confined to occasional essays and remarks. In fact, I argue, his thinking of the image offers the key to grasping the fundamental political and... more
Giorgio Agamben’s thinking of the image seems to occupy a minor role in his work, confined to occasional essays and remarks. In fact, I argue, his thinking of the image offers the key to grasping the fundamental political and philosophical coordinates of Agamben’s work as a whole. The image is the site in which Agamben probes the dual operations of separation, by which the state and capital remove life into the neutral space of circulation and equivalency, and the contrary effect of reversibility, in which the separated image is redeemed for a new politics. This inscribes the image into a fundamentally ambivalent space – at once the site of “danger” and “saving”. Contrary to the pessimistic reading of Agamben’s work, I argue that his work of the deactivation of the image suggests possible strategies for a new politics that would return the political to common use.
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Alain Badiou offers a thinking of aesthetics geared to the invention of the new, against what he regards as the conformism of contemporary cultural production. His conception of a revived modernism, unafraid of 'monumental construction',... more
Alain Badiou offers a thinking of aesthetics geared to the invention of the new, against what he regards as the conformism of contemporary cultural production. His conception of a revived modernism, unafraid of 'monumental construction', challenges the modesty of many contemporary conceptions of art. Badiou remains faithful to the 'modernist moment', at the same time as arguing the need for a re-conceptualisation of the modern. This involves a singular historical periodisation and complicated negotiation with the 'negative' or 'destructive' impulses of modernism, which Badiou claims need to be surpassed by a new 'subtractive' orientation. While undeniably bold, such a re-conceptualisation encounters difficulties in its specification of the new against the background of a capitalism itself dominated by an ideology of production, creation and invention. This difficulty is signalled most prominently by Badiou's refusal to really identify any contemporary forms that would conform to his call for 'monumental construction'.
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The French philosopher Alain Badiou is one of a number of contemporary theorists who have been identified as offering resources for the formulation of post-anarchism. This essay questions that identification by focusing on Badiou’s... more
The French philosopher Alain Badiou is one of a number of contemporary theorists who have been identified as offering resources for the formulation of post-anarchism. This essay questions that identification by focusing on Badiou’s sustained criticism of anarchist and libertarian currents for their failure to fully engage with the difficulties of political power, and in particular their failure to break fully with capitalist and Statist political forms. Although problematic, these criticisms converge with existing debates in the ‘movement of movements’, which have started to address the difficulty of finding egalitarian forms of practice to sustain the movement. These debates lead us towards the often elided problem of the relationship between postanarchist theory and anarchist practice.
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The hegemonic form of contemporary queer theory is dependent on a model of desire as autonomous and deregulated, derived from post-'68 French theory and particularly the work of Michel Foucault. Such a model is at risk of finding itself... more
The hegemonic form of contemporary queer theory is dependent on a model of desire as autonomous and deregulated, derived from post-'68 French theory and particularly the work of Michel Foucault. Such a model is at risk of finding itself in congruence with a deregulated post-Fordist capitalism that recuperates supposedly dissident sexual identities. This article returns to the work of Foucault to identify a largely unacknowledged tendency in his work that contests the valorization of sexuality and calls for an `end of the monarchy of sex'. This possibility is linked to Foucault's controversial exploration of the concept of `spiritual politics' through his engagement with the Iranian revolution. Rather than regarding this as a regression into a reactionary religiosity, I argue that it forms an inquiry into new political possibilities of revolt. These possibilities contest what Alain Badiou has identified as the nihilism of contemporary capitalism, in which desire and sexuality are deployed to constrain the political imagination to a limited bodily `materialism'. Drawing on the work of the later Foucault, it becomes possible to develop this new politics around asceticism, which is not so much withdrawal from the world but the refusal of the mediations of identity through sexuality and the body.
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This essay addresses the question of whether the contemporary British writer J. G. Ballard is reactionary. It uses the work of the psychoanalytic thinker Slavoj Žižek to analyse the ways in which his recent fiction, the novels Cocaine... more
This essay addresses the question of whether the contemporary British writer J. G. Ballard is reactionary. It uses the work of the psychoanalytic thinker Slavoj Žižek to analyse the ways in which his recent fiction, the novels Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006), poses disturbing questions concerning order, community and transgression within contemporary capitalist society. The analysis traces the shifting and ambiguous political effects of Ballard’s attempts to provide warnings concerning emergent cultural pathologies. This leads to an examination of how Ballard puts the generic conventions of contemporary fi ction under pressure by his subversion of the crime/thriller novel. The conclusion focuses on the relative lack of controversy aroused by Ballard’s provocative fiction in Britain.
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Research Interests: Guy Debord and Film
This article is an analysis of the work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and its implications for interrogating the limits of therapy. One of the central concepts of Bataille's thought is transgression and the... more
This article is an analysis of the work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and its implications for interrogating the limits of therapy. One of the central concepts of Bataille's thought is transgression and the destabilizing effects of transgression on any concept of the limit. I explore this thinking through an analysis of Bataille's personal and theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis. Bataille's radicalization of psychoanalysis is then pursued through his use of mythic representations of the 'shattered subject'. These models of the shattered subject offer an interrogation of some of the theoretical and practical limits of therapy, particularly when it is centred on the individual. Drawing on these models it is then argued that Bataille offers a new ethics of abjection, which proposes that we must interrogate the subject in terms of what our culture regards as 'waste'. Comparison is made between Bataille's thought and that of Jacques Lacan, and it is argued that Bataille offers a potential radicalization of Lacan's concept of the Real and his 'ethics of psychoanalysis'. The limits of Bataille's own writing are critically interrogated, drawing on the readings of his work by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
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Research Interests: Ethics and Alain Badiou
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The French intellectual Georges Bataille (1897-1962) developed base materialism in his work during the late 1920s and early 1930s as an attempt to break with all existing materialism. This essay is an explication of base materialism and... more
The French intellectual Georges Bataille (1897-1962) developed base materialism in his work during the late 1920s and early 1930s as an attempt to break with all existing materialism. This essay is an explication of base materialism and its radical implications for contemporary theory. Bataille argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilises all foundations. Then he attempts to use this to develop a radical libertarian Marxism, opposed to both Stalinism and fascism. Although it provided a critique of the emphasis in Marxism on production, the active flux of base matter could not be contained in a political discourse. This means that Bataille's thought has an impact beyond the political and into the wider domain of theory. One example of this is the influence of base materialism on Derrida's deconstruction, and both share the attempt to destabilise philosophical oppositions by means of an unstable 'third term'. This explains why Bataille's materialism does not appear as conventionally materialist, and why it has had little impact within contemporary materialism. Despite attempts to force base materialism into the mold of a new form of materialism it disrupts conventional materialism and the 'radical' politics that often goes with it. Bataille destroys the promise of liberated spaces and offers a more radical and disorienting freedom which inscribes instability into all discourses. It is this that defines the importance and necessity of Bataille's base materialism today.
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Here I consider the ‘withering away of the state’ not in the context of the debate between Marxists and anarchists but in the new context in which neoliberal capitalism both withdraws state functions (especially forms of social support)... more
Here I consider the ‘withering away of the state’ not in the context of the debate between Marxists and anarchists but in the new context in which neoliberal capitalism both withdraws state functions (especially forms of social support) and intensifies others (especially policing). The lived experience of the state is as both absent and intrusive. To grasp this situation I turn to the work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to argue that the state functions as a ‘bad-enough caregiver’. What this means is that rather than providing a secure holding environment to allow development the absence and intrusiveness of the state reinforce a sense of precarity. Radical demands seem to fall into demanding more of the state and demanding less, in trying to manage this malignant ‘care-giving’. I suggest the modest return to the necessity of a holding environment in which we might construct a space to negotiate and resist the ‘bad-enough state’.
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This draft paper consider the uncanny figure of the vampire as a way to grasp the contemporary theoretical forms of vitalism. Vitalism makes a claim to an excessive power of life, but this life has to extracted, vampirically from... more
This draft paper consider the uncanny figure of the vampire as a way to grasp the contemporary theoretical forms of vitalism. Vitalism makes a claim to an excessive power of life, but this life has to extracted, vampirically from mortified life. In this way vitalism plays the role of the vampire. Instead, here I turn to Marx and Freud to suggest the vampire figures the form of capitalist power which vitalism mistakes for the source of life.
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This paper argues that the 'grey goo' scenario, a speculative projection of the world consumed by self-replicating nanotechnology, is not so much an anxiety about the future but about contemporary capitalist consumption of the earth. It... more
This paper argues that the 'grey goo' scenario, a speculative projection of the world consumed by self-replicating nanotechnology, is not so much an anxiety about the future but about contemporary capitalist consumption of the earth. It argues that contemporary fiction is one site engaged with this anxiety concerning materiality and critically analyses Tom McCarthy's Satin Island and Ben Lerner's 10.04. The contention of this analysis is that such works try to grapple with forms of capitalist abstraction, but jump to quickly to the concrete. The paper concludes with reflections on the necessity of thinking abstraction and a critique of performative and post-critical ways of reading.
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This short text, extracted from a longer article in progress, offers a qualified defence of neurosis as a mode of critique and thought. Tracking through Freud, Barthes, and Adorno it develops neurosis as the marker of an historical wound,... more
This short text, extracted from a longer article in progress, offers a qualified defence of neurosis as a mode of critique and thought. Tracking through Freud, Barthes, and Adorno it develops neurosis as the marker of an historical wound, but also as a possibility of opening and undermining the limits of contemporary capitalist subjectivity.
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This Preface considers the fate of the thought of negativity in the six years since Persistence of the Negative was published. It outlines the continuing dominance of affirmationism, counter-currents of the thinking of the negative, and... more
This Preface considers the fate of the thought of negativity in the six years since Persistence of the Negative was published. It outlines the continuing dominance of affirmationism, counter-currents of the thinking of the negative, and critical problems that remain in the discussion of the negative in this book.
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The work of Marx has often been treated as an ontology and metaphysics of labor, and this ‘ontology’ has often been resisted in the name of life. In particular, in a series of recent theoretical works, the ‘savage ontology of life’, as... more
The work of Marx has often been treated as an ontology and metaphysics of labor, and this ‘ontology’ has often been resisted in the name of life. In particular, in a series of recent theoretical works, the ‘savage ontology of life’, as Foucault names it, has been posed against the ‘limits’ of political economy and Marx. Here I want to reconsider and critique these claims by a return to Marx, especially the early Marx, to explore the complexity of Marx’s probing of the binding of life and labor. This will be completed in the company of Derrida, suggesting a different reading of this ‘metaphysics’, including different to Derrida’s own more critical claims in Specters of Marx.
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This essay is a series of reflections on the exhibition 'Resemblances, Sympathies, and Other Acts” (2011) by the artist Jeremy Millar at the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Art. It probes Miller's practice as a form of 'occult negation',... more
This essay is a series of reflections on the exhibition 'Resemblances, Sympathies, and Other Acts” (2011) by the artist Jeremy Millar at the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Art. It probes Miller's practice as a form of 'occult negation', working with the discourse of the occult and working with the encrypted form of labour and absence.
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If Westerns allegorise a mythical space of gradual resolution and order, the western all'italiana explodes the American dream of stabilsing prosperity with excessive violence and explicit anti-colonial themes. Benjamin Noys argues for a... more
If Westerns allegorise a mythical space of gradual resolution and order, the western all'italiana explodes the American dream of stabilsing prosperity with excessive violence and explicit anti-colonial themes. Benjamin Noys argues for a deeper analysis of intensely political genre cinema
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This paper offers an initial specification of what I would call the “Lovecraft event” – the singularity of Lovecraft’s fiction in its knotting together of art, science, and politics. My guiding hypothesis is that this is an event that... more
This paper offers an initial specification of what I would call the “Lovecraft event” – the singularity of Lovecraft’s fiction in its knotting together of art, science, and politics. My guiding hypothesis is that this is an event that occurs through Lovecraft’s pre-formalisation, in the form of weird fiction, of the effects of Lacan’s later teaching. It is not a matter of a retrospective reduction of Lovecraft to Lacan, but rather the linking together of these two “events” – the rupture Lovecraft inflicts on the Gothic and weird fiction with the rupture Lacan inflicts on psychoanalysis and the stabilisation of his own earlier teaching.
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My argument is simple: that accelerationism is an aesthetics. Accelerationism is the strategy that demands we engage with forms of technology and abstraction to chart a post-capitalist future. While discussion has focused on how this... more
My argument is simple: that accelerationism is an aesthetics. Accelerationism is the strategy that demands we engage with forms of technology and abstraction to chart a post-capitalist future. While discussion has focused on how this strategy might be translated into artistic practice, my claim is that it is already an aesthetics. To substantiate this claim I explore the two dominant forms of contemporary accelerationism – ‘right’ (or reactionary) accelerationism and ‘left’ accelerationism. I argue that their visions of acceleration and the future are fundamentally aesthetic, drawing particularly on electronic dance music and sci-fi imagery. In particular a common use of hyperstitional devices, fictions which produce an effect in reality, leaves both left and right accelerationism as an aestheticized politics of will and so fundamentally irrationalist. In contrast, to develop political and cultural strategies to imagine the future requires, I argue, an emphasis on necessity and already-existing struggles.
https://www.valiz.nl/en/publications/the-future-of-the-new.html
https://www.valiz.nl/en/publications/the-future-of-the-new.html
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Another consideration of the work of Bruno Latour and the evolution of his position on critique. Reflecting on the ways in which critique is associated with destruction by Latour I also turn to the moderation of his anti-critique stance... more
Another consideration of the work of Bruno Latour and the evolution of his position on critique. Reflecting on the ways in which critique is associated with destruction by Latour I also turn to the moderation of his anti-critique stance in the face of Donald Trump and global warning. While a welcome moderation, this new engagement with struggle stops short of more material engagements with critique.
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Punk was the explosion of negation in music, with the Sex Pistols announcing ‘No Future’ and the Stranglers ‘No More Heroes’ in 1977. It was also an explosion of visual negations: in fashion, with the work of Vivienne Westwood, on record... more
Punk was the explosion of negation in music, with the Sex Pistols announcing ‘No Future’ and the Stranglers ‘No More Heroes’ in 1977. It was also an explosion of visual negations: in fashion, with the work of Vivienne Westwood, on record sleeves and posters, with the work of Jamie Reid, and in the new culture of DIY ’zines. These visual forms of ‘expressive negation’ (Isaacson) deployed ephemeral and transitory forms, including that of the comic strip. In terms of the graphic novel, however, the impact of punk was delayed, as these moments of negation are in conflict with the sustained visual and textual narratives that define the graphic novel. Here I trace the late emergence of punk into the ‘underground’ graphic novel, as writers and artists rework ‘expressive negation’ into more sustained works. Central here is the work of the Manchester-based publisher Savoy, with the Lord Horror and Reverbstorm graphic novels of the 1990s. These controversial works probe popular culture and histories of anti-Semitism and fascism, drawing on punk and post-punk engagements with the underside of post-war official culture in the anti-narrative form of a hallucinatory modernism. I also explore the more light-hearted work of Peter Bagge’s Hate, which focuses a jaundiced eye on the Seattle ‘grunge’ scene of the 1990s through a picaresque realism. If punk declared ‘no future’, these works critically probe punk’s gestures of negation and explore the limits of the form of the graphic novel.
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Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘schizoanalysis’ has offered a powerful means of reading and engaging with literary texts. It also draws heavily on literary texts, to formulate its model of desire as flux and flow. This essay examines... more
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘schizoanalysis’ has offered a powerful means of reading and engaging with literary texts. It also draws heavily on literary texts, to formulate its model of desire as flux and flow. This essay examines how writers, particularly American writers, have adapted and engaged with ‘schizoanalysis’ in modelling their own texts. Focusing of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, the essay examines forms of technological acceleration and integration as modes of flight and escape. The limits of the model of acceleration are posed in relation to contemporary forms of power that operate through modulating fluxes and flow. This suggests a new relation to schizoanalysis as a mode of cartography that can map the contradictions of desire and power in the present moment.
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Alain Badiou writes that Slavoj Žižek’s work ‘is the first time that anyone has proposed to psychoanalyze our whole world.’ I want to take Žižek seriously as a reader, even as a reading machine who consumes everything. Of course, Žižek... more
Alain Badiou writes that Slavoj Žižek’s work ‘is the first time that anyone has proposed to psychoanalyze our whole world.’ I want to take Žižek seriously as a reader, even as a reading machine who consumes everything. Of course, Žižek is constantly accused of being a bad reader: sloppy, inaccurate, too rapid, dependent on secondary sources, and otherwise unreliable. Without simply exonerating Žižek from these charges, I want to consider this ‘bad reading’, which violates the protocols of academia and philosophy, as a method. Whereas Žižek seeks his own philosophical credentials as a ‘dialectical materialist philosopher’ in his ontology of incompletion – of the ‘non-all’ – I will argue that the true domain of his ‘philosophy’ is a practice of interpretation and reading. Contrary to the image of Žižek as constantly reterritorializing everything under his conceptual matrix, and more particularly the Lacanian ‘Real’, we find that, as in Žižek’s reading of the Oedipus complex, he deterritorializes philosophy. Reversing the valence of Geoffrey Harpham’s claim that Žižek is ‘the end of knowledge’, I will argue his method is the end of knowledge, but also the birth of truth. This truth is the displacement and reworking of philosophy coincident with the world.
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Considering the widely reported deaths of the avant-garde and epic together, this paper analyses the possibilities of mapping capital as s mode of engaging with the continuation of the avant-garde and epic. Starting with Brecht's 'epic... more
Considering the widely reported deaths of the avant-garde and epic together, this paper analyses the possibilities of mapping capital as s mode of engaging with the continuation of the avant-garde and epic. Starting with Brecht's 'epic theatre' and relation to realism, we then proceed through debates about the epic of capitalism, before considering the tension between poetry and prose as forms to 'write' or narrate capital. Finally, the paper consider the limits and forms of commodity fiction, in the tension between the epic of the origin of capitalism and the less common epic of realised capitalism.
Bruno Latour, according to Andrew Barry, has been ‘extraordinarily influential across the social sciences in Britain’ (2011: 36). Latour’s ‘actor-network theory’ (Latour 2005) has, however, only been influential in literary and cultural... more
Bruno Latour, according to Andrew Barry, has been ‘extraordinarily influential across the social sciences in Britain’ (2011: 36). Latour’s ‘actor-network theory’ (Latour 2005) has, however, only been influential in literary and cultural studies comparatively recently (Latour 2004; Love 2010; Lupton 2011; Lupton 2015). This moment has coincided with and been reinforced by the turn to objects (Harman 2009; Harman 2012), and Latour’s own turn to metaphysical and philosophical questions (Latour 2013). I wish to track and dispute with this turn to Latour by analysing his work as operating by posing matter against materialism. Constant throughout Latour’s work is a suspicion of Marxism and of any ‘reductive’ materialism that would, according to Latour, privilege one dominant form of matter. In place of this Latour calls for an ‘irreduction’ (Latour 1988), which would treat ‘matter’, and ‘objects’, as matters of concern that resist stabilization. Literary studies has extended this point to dispute suspicious readings, which seek some ‘hidden’ explanation, in favour of description and the tracking of ‘objects’. This conforms to the general turn of the humanities towards the historical, conceived of as a site of material density, friction, and resistance. I argue that while this vision may be attractive it occludes the problem raised by Marxian ‘materialism’ concerning the forms of ‘real abstraction’ (Marx 1973; Sohn-Rethel 1978). These are forms of value, incarnated in the commodity-form, that cut across both matter and abstraction. For Marx (2010) the commodity is a ‘sensuous super-sensuous thing’ (innlich-übersinnlich), combining materiality and abstraction. This ‘occult character’ of the commodity is occluded in Latour’s turn to matter, or the recent turn to objects, even when unpacked as a series of relations or a mode of gathering. The desire for the concrete, in the form of matter, in fact composes what Alberto Toscano calls a ‘warm abstraction’ (2008: 58), which misses the force of abstraction. This problem is explored through the analysis and reading of Gordon Lish’s novel Peru (1986). The novel interweaves forms of abstraction and materiality, working between the repetitions of language and the experience of violence, while also engaging with the question of value in literary and economic terms. This intervention troubles the Latourian tendency to reduce abstraction onto a level field of multiple objects, while also suggesting that ‘materialism’ is not simply confined to ‘matter’ or ‘objects’. The result would be a reworked consideration of materialism against matter, which would contest Latour’s ‘matter against materialism’.
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Drugs and other intoxicants are often condemned for detaching us from the world, leaving us anti-social and unproductive. Here I want to trace and critique a discourse that celebrates intoxication, and especially drugs, as the means for... more
Drugs and other intoxicants are often condemned for detaching us from the world, leaving us anti-social and unproductive. Here I want to trace and critique a discourse that celebrates intoxication, and especially drugs, as the means for immersion into immanence and acceleration. Originating in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, they explore a desire for acceleration into immanence in which drugs are merely one component to achieve a state of absolute deterritorialisation. Deleuze and Guattari equivocate on the use of drugs, arguing that they are secondary means only to achieve immanence. The work of Nick Land, articulated in Britain in the 1990s, tries to remove this equivocation. Land, influenced by post-rave dance culture and its use of multiple intoxicants, aims for a deterritorialisation that aligns itself with the most extreme forms of capitalist nihilism. Beatriz Preciado’s recent Testo Junkie (2008) recounts her experience of attempting to undo the binding of gender and capital through the ‘gender bioterrorism’ of taking testosterone. The work suggests the necessity of the extinction of the self into a ‘platform being’, at once indistinguishable from capitalist subjectivity and its exacerbation to the point of collapse. In all cases the gambit is to endorse acceleration into immanence, but this aim is problematic. First, while endorsing immanence the struggle to accelerate into that state leaves it as a receding aim. Second, this falling back leaves such desire for immanence equivocally linked to the ‘forces’ of capitalist acceleration.
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This brief intervention considers the problem of acceleration in relation to capitalist time. While capitalism is often taken as imposing a linear time of progress, it has also been theorised as imposing a cyclical time of 'eternal... more
This brief intervention considers the problem of acceleration in relation to capitalist time. While capitalism is often taken as imposing a linear time of progress, it has also been theorised as imposing a cyclical time of 'eternal recurrence'. In relation to this deadlock of time I critique the turn to impose further acceleration as a solution, which remains within the tracks of capitalist time.
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This chapter considers the temporal mapping of communisation in relation to art across the sequence of the avant-garde and the contemporary moment.
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The politics of the present is often cast as a fight for the future. Whether visions of post-capitalist technological utopia, nativist retrenchment, or apocalyptic disaster, the struggle for the future aims to resolve the deadlocks of the... more
The politics of the present is often cast as a fight for the future. Whether visions of post-capitalist technological utopia, nativist retrenchment, or apocalyptic disaster, the struggle for the future aims to resolve the deadlocks of the present. I take a sceptical stance on these ‘inventions of the future’, arguing that they risk detachment from the present and create substitute satisfactions to compensate for current weakness. Instead, in a more sober mode, I suggest de-inventing the future to assess the limits and tensions of contemporary forms of struggle. I speculatively consider the seeming absence or crisis of current forms of class struggle and the resulting inertia that results in the present moment. The fight for the future, I suggest, is fought now, but in a situation characterised by fragmentation and desperation.
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I want to examine the problem and discourse of resilience, the capacity of a system to recover from crisis or trauma, through the notion of fragility. Resilience is a highly contested term, often seen as consonant with the neoliberal... more
I want to examine the problem and discourse of resilience, the capacity of a system to recover from crisis or trauma, through the notion of fragility. Resilience is a highly contested term, often seen as consonant with the neoliberal agenda that holds individuals responsible for their well-being and capacities. In this sense austerity, which imposes shocks and traumas, and resilience, as the capacity to ‘bounce back’, seem to go together. I want to explore fragility as the other side of resilience. To do so I want to turn to an unlikely figure, the Anglo-Welsh modernist poet and painter David Jones (1895–1974). Jones was hardly a radical, his politics tending to a reactionary Catholicism, but his painting and his poetry offer something to a thinking of fragility. His own mental suffering, largely as a result of his service during the First World War, haunted him throughout his life. Here I want to speculatively reconstruct Jones’s work as a practice of fragility that can speak to our moment of austerity. My aim here is not to recommend or endorse such a practice of fragility, but rather to explore Jones’s writing and painting as attempts to negotiate through institutional, social and artistic forms to articulate a fragility that might engage us.
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The forgotten word is on the tip of our tongue, tantalisingly present and resolutely absent. In this moment of forgetting, we can taste the absence of language and it matters. Here I want to explore this strange experience of material... more
The forgotten word is on the tip of our tongue, tantalisingly present and resolutely absent. In this moment of forgetting, we can taste the absence of language and it matters. Here I want to explore this strange experience of material absence, of the matter of language, in the moment of forgetting. Freud’s forgetting of the painter Signorelli is such a moment. At this moment language matters and the unconscious appears as death and sexuality. Lacan remembers this moment and suggests that Freud could not go far enough and fully account for this moment of language. Sebastiano Timpanaro argues that these slips are merely material, effects of lexical corruptions and errors familiar to philologists. Catherine Malabou suggests the more radical forgetting of the erasure of psychic functions and character in severe neurological trauma. At stake is matter and the matter of language, which strangely disappears into the material when it had appeared as an absence. I return to this forgotten absence, to the forgetting of the forgotten words, as the site at which we might grasp, negatively, ‘that language matters’.
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Guy Debord, political militant and leading theorist of the Situationist International, is an anomaly to the discourse of philosophy. Debord self-identified as a ‘strategist’, yet his thinking of the spectacle and praxis remain not only... more
Guy Debord, political militant and leading theorist of the Situationist International, is an anomaly to the discourse of philosophy. Debord self-identified as a ‘strategist’, yet his thinking of the spectacle and praxis remain not only influential on philosophy but also profoundly philosophical in inspiration. It might seem obvious to locate Debord as what Alain Badiou calls an ‘anti-philosopher’, one who puts forward their own life as the theatre of their ideas, and place Debord alongside Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Kierkegaard, and other ‘moralists’ and thinkers. While Debord does make his own life emblematic, in his autobiography Panegyric and his film In Girum, I want to suggest we take Debord seriously as a thinker of life. This is not individual life, but collective life, and life posed against capitalism as the accumulation of ‘dead labour’ in the form of the spectacle. To return to Debord, as an anomaly, is to return to the attempt to think the dialectics of life and non-life, life and pseudo-life, which has, ironically, become occluded by the contemporary thinking of biopolitics.
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This brief paper responds to Gregor Moder's recent book Hegel and Spinoza. I argue that Moder's insightful work suggests a peaceful image of the contemporary theoretical field by arguing for a common negativity at work. In contrast, I... more
This brief paper responds to Gregor Moder's recent book Hegel and Spinoza. I argue that Moder's insightful work suggests a peaceful image of the contemporary theoretical field by arguing for a common negativity at work. In contrast, I suggest the pertinence of my previous diagnosis that contemporary theory is dominated by affirmationism.
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This talk considers and criticises the speculative imagination of the future at work in accelerationism. It argues that while dependent on the city for images of speed, contemporary forms of accelerationism either adopt a science fiction... more
This talk considers and criticises the speculative imagination of the future at work in accelerationism. It argues that while dependent on the city for images of speed, contemporary forms of accelerationism either adopt a science fiction version of the city detached from actual cities or overplay the global at the expense of engaging with the city. I suggest the city be viewed as a terrain of struggle, rather than a site of acceleration.
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We are all neurotic. This, at least, is Freud’s conclusion. In this lecture I want to suggest we embrace our own neuroses as the way to think about the predicaments of the present. Instead of seeing neurosis as a delaying tactic, after... more
We are all neurotic. This, at least, is Freud’s conclusion. In this lecture I want to suggest we embrace our own neuroses as the way to think about the predicaments of the present. Instead of seeing neurosis as a delaying tactic, after all neurotics, including myself, like to delay and postpone, I suggest neurosis might help unlock our deadlocks. While other forms of mental disorder have been celebrated as subversive, notably psychosis and perversion, neurosis gets a bad name as the most conventional psychic disorder. Touring through a range of neurotics, from Stephen King to Theodor Adorno, this lecture argues that neurosis can map our disturbances in, ironically, a productive way. If 2016 was crazy, which we can all agree, if we are all neurotics, then long live neurosis!
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It might be obvious to assume that the sex of drones (unmanned automated vehicles) would be male. In line with the masculine ideologies of militarism, in which anxieties and insecurities are bolstered by phallic identifications and the... more
It might be obvious to assume that the sex of drones (unmanned automated vehicles) would be male. In line with the masculine ideologies of militarism, in which anxieties and insecurities are bolstered by phallic identifications and the stigmatisation of female bodies and femininity, the drone would be another metaphorically masculine military technology. In contrast, however, the piloting or 'riding' of the drone, which involves male and female pilots, suggests a more complex gendering of this 'assemblage'. Tracing a series of interactions and genderings of drones and their preceding technological forms this inquiry aims to unsettle the 'security' of gender.
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Language is broken. The complaint that language is broken, that language has degenerated into jargon or chatter, has been a nearly perpetual feature of thinking about language. Contemporary theoretical work sees language as broken in a... more
Language is broken. The complaint that language is broken, that language has degenerated into jargon or chatter, has been a nearly perpetual feature of thinking about language. Contemporary theoretical work sees language as broken in a more radical sense, as something to be surpassed to enter the ‘great outdoors’ (Meillassoux) of a materiality that is beyond the human and beyond language. Here I return to broken language as the broken ground of our critical work. I focus on Marx’s analysis of commodity-language, Freud’s analysis of hysteria as a language of the body, and the attempt to write a language adequate to the experience of the factory. In each case a broken language is something we have to work with to write or speak our experience, rather than something to be surpassed for a true language or a beyond language. In different ways Marx and Freud try to recover an adequate language, while also suggesting that such a language is a broken measure of a broken experience. This is condensed in the factory. While the factory is often treated as a site that has been surpassed in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries, the return to the factory is a return to a broken language as the site of our critical work. Instead of the various ‘jargons of authenticity’, the inauthentic experience of the factory can speak still to our experience of capitalist society as a society of violent abstractions.
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Adorno writes, in the dedication of Minima Moralia, that if life should be effaced ‘then the monstrosity of absolute production will triumph’. The contemporary partisans of accelerationism can be characterised as refusing this notion of... more
Adorno writes, in the dedication of Minima Moralia, that if life should be effaced ‘then the monstrosity of absolute production will triumph’. The contemporary partisans of accelerationism can be characterised as refusing this notion of the monstrosity of production, to instead suggest the embrace of production. To critically analyse this ‘new productivism’ I want to locate the debate in a longer historical consideration of the ‘productive forces’, from Marx to the present moment. While the accelerationists retain a certain fidelity to the Marx, who stressed the development of the productive forces, they underestimate the complex ways in which such ‘forces’ embed and register the seismic shifts of class struggle. In particular, I want to focus this debate around the issue of the machine and around noise: the monstrous noise of industrial production, and the various ways in which this ‘noise’ has been figured aesthetically and politically. This involves reconstructing a brief history of the fraught engagement with the machine and noise, tracing the various attempts to ‘master’ and reconfigure that ‘noise’, as well as how such struggles register the noisy clash of what Marx calls ‘industrial battle’. Contrary to an image of the ‘neutrality’ of such forces, or their availability to simple reconfiguration, they bear the violent marks of class struggle. This suggests the need to rethink the notion of ‘productivism’, which can slide into conformity with the capitalist mode of production, by listening to the sounds of struggle that remain silenced in contemporary debates.
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This talk entitled The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, will interrogate Goldin + Senneby’s ‘Headless’ project as an imagination of exteriority: the peculiar attempt to escape and excavate the structures of financial capital in an act of mimicry.... more
This talk entitled The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, will interrogate Goldin + Senneby’s ‘Headless’ project as an imagination of exteriority: the peculiar attempt to escape and excavate the structures of financial capital in an act of mimicry. They play the role of what Georges Bataille called ‘the sorcerer’s apprentice’: the one who unleashes forces they cannot control in such a way as to find oneself caught-up in those same forces. In this situation there is no exteriority, no offshore, as the speculative force of finance leaves nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. At the same time, this force immunizes itself by inhabiting a space at once subject to and exterior from state sovereignty. This particular structure, at once real and abstract, grounded and free-floating, threatens the claims of critical immunity. It also threatens the speculative and imaginative claims of the artist to a power that exceeds capitalist forms of value. Goldin + Senneby’s ‘Headless’, I suggest, forces us to inhabit a global territoriality of capitalism without reserve.
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This is a reflection on the 'conclusion' of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer project. I consider how Agamben explores biopolitics between the figures of de Sade, prophet of totalitarian biopolitics, and St Francis, who offers a 'use of... more
This is a reflection on the 'conclusion' of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer project. I consider how Agamben explores biopolitics between the figures of de Sade, prophet of totalitarian biopolitics, and St Francis, who offers a 'use of bodies' detached from property. In particular, I assess Agamben's strange fusion of metaphysics and politics as a response to the condition of 'total subsumption' in contemporary capitalist society.
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This is my introduction and presentation to the Roundhouse event on 15 July debating the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation conference. The introduction briefly sketches the issue of time and memory of the radical past, while the presentation... more
This is my introduction and presentation to the Roundhouse event on 15 July debating the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation conference. The introduction briefly sketches the issue of time and memory of the radical past, while the presentation discusses abstraction and the fantasy of the end of fantasy in contemporary culture.
The turn to theology has been striking in contemporary Continental thought, a turn that often expresses an envy at the motivational powers of religion and tries to reclaim those powers for a radical politics. One of the stranger variants... more
The turn to theology has been striking in contemporary Continental thought, a turn that often expresses an envy at the motivational powers of religion and tries to reclaim those powers for a radical politics. One of the stranger variants of this turn has been the fascination with Christ, and particularly Christ’s passion, as the means to think the birth of a new life out of extreme destitution. The religious phenomenology of Michel Henry, the non-philosophy of François Laruelle, and the dialectical thought of Slavoj Žižek, have all turned to what Žižek calls the “monstrosity of Christ”. Here I wish to explore and critique this turn to Christ as an image of the future.
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The turn to theology has been striking in contemporary Continental thought, a turn that often expresses an envy at the motivational powers of religion and tries to reclaim those powers for a radical politics. One of the stranger variants... more
The turn to theology has been striking in contemporary Continental thought, a turn that often expresses an envy at the motivational powers of religion and tries to reclaim those powers for a radical politics. One of the stranger variants of this turn has been the fascination with Christ, and particularly Christ’s passion, as the means to think the birth of a new life out of extreme destitution. The religious phenomenology of Michel Henry, the non-philosophy of François Laruelle, and the dialectical thought of Slavoj Žižek, have all turned to what Žižek calls the “monstrosity of Christ”. Here I wish to explore and critique this turn to Christ as an image of the future.
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This lecture will explore our immersion in the domain of images and strategies of resistance and engagement, both theoretical and artistic. If there is no point outside of this immersion one response has been strategies of exacerbating... more
This lecture will explore our immersion in the domain of images and strategies of resistance and engagement, both theoretical and artistic. If there is no point outside of this immersion one response has been strategies of exacerbating and exceeding the flow. Such strategies appear to welcome the image in a joyous affirmation, but often inhabit a cynical acceptance of things as they are. Instead I explore the possibilities of friction, interruption, and disruption within the immersive field of images.
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This talk explores the geopolitical and geophilosophical imaginaries of accelerationism - the desire to accelerate forces of abstraction and technology to punch through the limits of capitalism. I trace the geographical imaginaries of... more
This talk explores the geopolitical and geophilosophical imaginaries of accelerationism - the desire to accelerate forces of abstraction and technology to punch through the limits of capitalism. I trace the geographical imaginaries of accelerationism as articulated by Nick Land and by contemporary accelerationism. I argue that these imaginaries tend to occlude their own site of production - the UK, and the space of Europe - as they aim to transcend to a global intervention.
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Introducing my book Malign Velocities, this talk explores the fantasy structure of accelerationism in a series of moments: the financialized present, the texts of Marx, the Soviet Avant-Garde, and "Manhattanism". In probes the effects of... more
Introducing my book Malign Velocities, this talk explores the fantasy structure of accelerationism in a series of moments: the financialized present, the texts of Marx, the Soviet Avant-Garde, and "Manhattanism". In probes the effects of deceleration, congestion, and sedimentation on which accelerationism tries to operate and transcend.
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Our present moment could be summarized in the belief that objects and things should not be feared, but loved. They are more loveable than humans because they are livelier, more animate, better connected, and deeper than humans. All the... more
Our present moment could be summarized in the belief that objects and things should not be feared, but loved. They are more loveable than humans because they are livelier, more animate, better connected, and deeper than humans. All the qualities we used to find in subjects are now better found in objects. In an ironic reversal, humans are reified, objects are not. This invocation of liveliness permeates the present moment. Our desire is for the animate and the accelerated. Here I critically probe this desire for animation by posing it in the context of a vitalist capitalism, which draws-on the forces of life and bestows on objects power and ‘magical’ qualities. Instead of the alternative of a parasitic capitalism and a vitalist ‘life’, whether of objects or the flux of forces, I consider capitalism as posing a series of objectifications that embed life, in the form of living labour, into objects. In this way capitalism is radically anthropocentric, what counts is value congealed in objects as a result of the expenditure of living labour, and capitalism is radically anthropomorphic, generating a field of ‘living’ objects. To resist this ‘objectification’ requires the probing of a different metabolism of labour and the object, and the various encrypted and contradictory forms of animation and de-animation which we confront.
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A critical discussion of the current forms of accelerationism, focusing on problems with the conception of substance at the heart of accelerationism.
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Drugs and other intoxicants are often condemned for detaching us from the world, leaving us anti-social and unproductive. Here I want to trace and critique a discourse that celebrates intoxication, and especially drugs, as the means for... more
Drugs and other intoxicants are often condemned for detaching us from the world, leaving us anti-social and unproductive. Here I want to trace and critique a discourse that celebrates intoxication, and especially drugs, as the means for immersion into immanence and acceleration. Originating in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, they explore a desire for acceleration into immanence in which drugs are merely one component to achieve a state of absolute deterritorialisation. Deleuze and Guattari equivocate on the use of drugs, arguing that they are secondary means only to achieve immanence. The work of Nick Land, articulated in Britain in the 1990s, tries to remove this equivocation. Land, influenced by post-rave dance culture and its use of multiple intoxicants, aims for a deterritorialisation that aligns itself with the most extreme forms of capitalist nihilism. Beatriz Preciado’s recent Testo Junkie (2008) recounts her experience of attempting to undo the binding of gender and capital through the ‘gender bioterrorism’ of taking testosterone. The work suggests the necessity of the extinction of the self into a ‘platform being’, at once indistinguishable from capitalist subjectivity and its exacerbation to the point of collapse. In all cases the gambit is to endorse acceleration into immanence, but this aim is problematic. First, while endorsing immanence the struggle to accelerate into that state leaves it as a receding aim. Second, this falling back leaves such desire for immanence equivocally linked to the ‘forces’ of capitalist acceleration.
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This paper analyses a politics of nihilism that runs through the Western, moving from Joseph Conrad to Cormac McCarthy to Ulzana's Raid.
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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 of the existence of culture and of access to... more
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 of the existence of culture and of access to culture. Mulhern's analysis is located within the framework of Marxist reflections of 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 nihilist 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.
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In this review I discuss the proximity and 'small differences' between Laruelle and Badiou as they contest or affirm the role of philosophy.
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This review considers Michel Henry's intervention as a statement of his immanent philosophy of life and as an attempt to engage, problematically, with the force of abstraction in contemporary life.
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Research Interests: Art and Negativity
Abstract This review essay analyses the proposed synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, which often presents itself as a critique of the kind of utopianism associated with 'Freudo-Marxism'. In Yannis... more
Abstract This review essay analyses the proposed synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, which often presents itself as a critique of the kind of utopianism associated with 'Freudo-Marxism'. In Yannis Stavrakakis's The Lacanian Left (2007) this anti-utopianism ...
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This review considers the collection Political Writings, 1953–1993 by Maurice Blanchot as a means to assess the relatively little-known political odyssey of this writer and theorist. Noting the absence of his earlier right-wing political... more
This review considers the collection Political Writings, 1953–1993 by Maurice Blanchot as a means to assess the relatively little-known political odyssey of this writer and theorist. Noting the absence of his earlier right-wing political texts from the 1930s in this collection, it attempts to probe Blanchot’s idiosyncratic ‘ultra-left’ turn represented in his texts of the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, I analyse how Blanchot develops a communism that focuses on the problem of abstraction: both the abstraction intrinsic to social reality, and the necessity to negate and contest that abstraction through a ‘communist writing’. The review reconstitutes this unusual form of Marxism, and analyses the possible resources it offers and its limits.
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Gregory Elliott’s Ends in Sight (2008) argues that Marxism is no longer a ‘real movement’ grounded in the historical tendencies of the present, but has retreated into being a utopian idea. Refusing to embrace anti-Marxism, Elliott... more
Gregory Elliott’s Ends in Sight (2008) argues that Marxism is no longer a ‘real movement’ grounded in the historical tendencies of the present, but has retreated into being a utopian idea. Refusing to embrace anti-Marxism, Elliott controversially argues that such a position is the only realistic one that can be held by the Left in the wake of the defeat of historical socialism. In assessing this claim, this review-essay re-traces Elliott’s indebtedness to the work of Perry Anderson, and notes the tension Elliott reproduces from Anderson between resignation to defeat and a realism that would scan for new signs of resistance. Elliott’s closing embrace of a full-blown pessimism is criticised as inconsistent with the necessity of some consolatory ‘illusions’ to any radical political mobilisation. The crucial question that Elliott raises concerns the motivational power of Marxism as a political discourse, particularly once shorn of its grounding in the ‘tide of
history’.
history’.
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This review essay analyses the proposed synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, which often presents itself as a critique of the kind of utopianism associated with ‘Freudo-Marxism’. In Yannis Stavrakakis’s The Lacanian Left... more
This review essay analyses the proposed synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, which often presents itself as a critique of the kind of utopianism associated with ‘Freudo-Marxism’. In Yannis Stavrakakis’s The Lacanian Left (2007) this anti-utopianism slides towards a left reformism, in which the emphasis on constitutive lack prevents any thinking of transformation. Ian Parker’s Revolution in Psychology (2007) presents a bracing but reductive polemic, in which psychology and psychoanalysis seem to function as mere reflections of capitalist ideology. What goes missing in both accounts is the possibility of a re-thinking of subjectivity, both individual and collective, posed between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism.
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This review essay considers Debord's practice as a 'political' filmaker.
Research Interests: Guy Debord and Film
The problem of libidinal economy can be summarised in two axioms: 1. Every economy is libidinal 2. Every libido is economic If both these axioms are accepted then we accept libidinal economy. In fact, as this presentation traces, the... more
The problem of libidinal economy can be summarised in two axioms:
1. Every economy is libidinal
2. Every libido is economic
If both these axioms are accepted then we accept libidinal economy. In fact, as this presentation traces, the tendency is to choose or modify one of other axiom to produce a less distressing form of libidinal economy. In this case, we witness a moralism of libidinal economy, either for or against, rather than a thinking of libidinal economy. This presentation wants to sketch, by working through the permutations, the consequences of a thinking of libidinal economy. Also, this presentation aims to work towards a thinking through of libidinal economy by suggesting we grasp how these axioms might appear in an ethical substance and culture. Instead of the moral or ethical as an external judgement, how might we form the ethical culture of the libidinal?
1. Every economy is libidinal
2. Every libido is economic
If both these axioms are accepted then we accept libidinal economy. In fact, as this presentation traces, the tendency is to choose or modify one of other axiom to produce a less distressing form of libidinal economy. In this case, we witness a moralism of libidinal economy, either for or against, rather than a thinking of libidinal economy. This presentation wants to sketch, by working through the permutations, the consequences of a thinking of libidinal economy. Also, this presentation aims to work towards a thinking through of libidinal economy by suggesting we grasp how these axioms might appear in an ethical substance and culture. Instead of the moral or ethical as an external judgement, how might we form the ethical culture of the libidinal?
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In response to the risks of the future it appears we are faced with a choice: to ‘slow down’ and so resist new technological possibilities for danger, or to ‘speed up’ and welcome or even exacerbate such risks. Yet, it might actually be... more
In response to the risks of the future it appears we are faced with a choice: to ‘slow down’ and so resist new technological possibilities for danger, or to ‘speed up’ and welcome or even exacerbate such risks. Yet, it might actually be hard to tell the difference. Resistance and exacerbation may blur or meld and so questions of resistance, disconnection, and dystopia become harder to answer than we imagine. I explore these problems through Heidegger's analysis of technology as site of danger and saving, and Ernst Junger's melding of technology and nature. I argue contemporary accelerationism inherits these forms of melding and while attempting to re-purpose technology can succumb to its reification.
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The debate about accelerationism has been violent and vituperative. Here I want to consider the battle over the notion of the future. Accelerationism, in its various forms, has often claimed a monopoly on the future. The argument is that... more
The debate about accelerationism has been violent and vituperative. Here I want to consider the battle over the notion of the future. Accelerationism, in its various forms, has often claimed a monopoly on the future. The argument is that only by engaging with capitalist forms of technology and abstraction can we envisage a future beyond capitalism. Neoliberal capitalism only provides more of the same, while accelerationism can force a new future into being or even invent the future. Restating and developing my critiques of these claims I probe the problems of the subject, time and politics in left and right accelerationism. I also consider the difficulties on coming to terms with reactionary, if not fascist, alternative 'futures' as one of the stakes of the present moment. In conclusion I try to develop a left response to these problems.
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This works considers neurosis and fantasy as means to probe the problem of mediation, which is often voided in contemporary theoretical work (thinking here of new materialism, speculative realism, and certain forms of communisation theory... more
This works considers neurosis and fantasy as means to probe the problem of mediation, which is often voided in contemporary theoretical work (thinking here of new materialism, speculative realism, and certain forms of communisation theory and Marxist periodisation). The essay turns to Melanie Klein, as read by Derrida and Deleuze, to consider the violence at work in fantasy and mediation. It also analyses the practice of cursing or hexing in the work of three contemporary British poets (Sean Bonney, Keston Sutherland, and Verity Spott) as "performative" practices that engage with fantasy to try and give form to the abstract operations of power.
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This paper is a reworking of considerations of the attempt by contemporary accelerationism to grasp the present moment, epistemically and politically. It takes issue with these claims through a consideration of the problematic nostalgia... more
This paper is a reworking of considerations of the attempt by contemporary accelerationism to grasp the present moment, epistemically and politically. It takes issue with these claims through a consideration of the problematic nostalgia for the future at work in contemporary accelerationism and the tensions of how relations of production are embedded in forces of production.
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The Manchester (UK)-based publishing house Savoy has produced a series of multi-media forms of neo-Weird fictions centred around the character of Lord Horror – a fictionalized version of the wartime broadcaster for the Nazis William... more
The Manchester (UK)-based publishing house Savoy has produced a series of multi-media forms of neo-Weird fictions centred around the character of Lord Horror – a fictionalized version of the wartime broadcaster for the Nazis William Joyce, known as “Lord Haw-Haw” – since 1989. These fictions deliberately court offence in their use of anti-Semitism, racism, misogyny, and the breaking of the taboo on the representation of the Holocaust. Savoy have suffered continual police persecution in the UK for their publications, and in 1991 the novel Lord Horror and the comic Meng and Ecker no.1 were found obscene in court and ordered to be destroyed. Later the destruction order against the novel was lifted, but the judgement against the comic upheld.
Using popular forms, such as comics and music, Savoy have created a “weird” universe that excavates the toxic elements of British cultural identity and the counter-currents of avant-garde transgression. I want to assess this “neo-Weird” as a provocative re-activation of the reactionary and racist political themes that often dominated the “old Weird”. Inhabiting a profound political and cultural ambiguity, this “excavation” re-charges the most offensive tropes possible. In this way, I will argue, it questions the general tendency to “de-toxify” the weird and the political claims made around acceptance and celebration of the chaotic and the hybrid. While not endorsing the cultural strategy of Savoy, which I regard as profoundly problematic, it raises key critical questions about the politics of the “weird” and suggests a central ambivalence at the heart of the genre.
Using popular forms, such as comics and music, Savoy have created a “weird” universe that excavates the toxic elements of British cultural identity and the counter-currents of avant-garde transgression. I want to assess this “neo-Weird” as a provocative re-activation of the reactionary and racist political themes that often dominated the “old Weird”. Inhabiting a profound political and cultural ambiguity, this “excavation” re-charges the most offensive tropes possible. In this way, I will argue, it questions the general tendency to “de-toxify” the weird and the political claims made around acceptance and celebration of the chaotic and the hybrid. While not endorsing the cultural strategy of Savoy, which I regard as profoundly problematic, it raises key critical questions about the politics of the “weird” and suggests a central ambivalence at the heart of the genre.
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This paper consider the experience of intoxication as one of immersion in immanence, rather than transcendent escape from reality. It critically traces the attempt to achieve experiential immanence in Deleuze and Guattari, Nick Land, and... more
This paper consider the experience of intoxication as one of immersion in immanence, rather than transcendent escape from reality. It critically traces the attempt to achieve experiential immanence in Deleuze and Guattari, Nick Land, and Beatriz Preciado. My claim is such attempts involve the fantasy of the dissolution of fantasy in immersion in 'real' production.
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This paper analyses the ideology of nihilism as it runs through the Western, in particular the late US revisionist Western of the 1970s. It identifies a politics of nihilism that stresses a 'will to effeciency' as a bluwark against the... more
This paper analyses the ideology of nihilism as it runs through the Western, in particular the late US revisionist Western of the 1970s. It identifies a politics of nihilism that stresses a 'will to effeciency' as a bluwark against the 'will to nothingness' in the works of Joseph Conrad, Cormac McCarthy, and Sam Peckinpah. I argue that Robert Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid interrogates this politics through a stress of error and the ruination of any synthesis in labour.
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The politicisation of melancholia has become something of a commonplace, if not a banality, in contemporary critical and cultural theory. This intervention takes as its focus Andrew Gibson’s proposal, in his book Intermittency: The... more
The politicisation of melancholia has become something of a commonplace, if not a banality, in contemporary critical and cultural theory. This intervention takes as its focus Andrew Gibson’s proposal, in his book Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy (2012), that we adopt a ‘melancholic-ecstatic’ conception of history able to take the measure of the rare eruption of events and the ability to persist in their absence. His ‘anti-schematics of historical reason’ is explicitly posed against any ‘progressivisms’, most notably Marxism, and he commends the embrace of a minimal melancholia in the intervals between events. My aim is not simply to dismiss this proposal, but to interrogate it immanently as a response to the experience of defeat registered both politically and theoretically by the left. What I wish to analyse is how Gibson’s work forms an accurate gauging of a mood or style of thought, how it registers lucidly a particular situation, but how it then inflates this moment (along the line of Lukàcs jibe to Adorno that he had taken up residency in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’). This inflation produces melancholia as a consolatory affect, one attuned to an ‘anti-politics’ that resists any instantiation as betrayal and failure. The aim of my deflationary critique is to localise melancholia at a more precise historical time, and to suggest, pace Gibson, that a critique derived from Marxism can engage and re-politicise melancholia.
Research Interests: Politics and Melancholy
This paper reflects on the attraction of Bruno Latour's work in the current conjuncture and the limits of his 'anti-critique'.
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This paper locates a convergent origin of insurrectionalist anarchism and neo-vitalist currents of contemporary theory in the 'savage ontology' (Foucault) of vitalism formed in 19th century post-Hegelian currents. It critically probes the... more
This paper locates a convergent origin of insurrectionalist anarchism and neo-vitalist currents of contemporary theory in the 'savage ontology' (Foucault) of vitalism formed in 19th century post-Hegelian currents. It critically probes the limits of this 'energizing' ideology in regards to the biopolitical status of 'life' as contradictory source of value and experience of poverty.
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The paradox of the artist’s self-valorisation is simple: on the one hand, it coincides with capitalism’s self-valorisation – artistic practice has become the model for contemporary labour: fluid, precarious, creative, mobile, etc. On the... more
The paradox of the artist’s self-valorisation is simple: on the one hand, it coincides with capitalism’s self-valorisation – artistic practice has become the model for contemporary labour: fluid, precarious, creative, mobile, etc. On the other hand, the artist seems to exceed capitalism and prefigure non-capitalist or communist social relations: the refusal of alienated work, an excessive creativity, and play. The emergence of ‘aesthetic capitalism’ seems to have tipped the balance of this paradox towards subordinating the artist to capitalism. Tracing the analysis of this situation through the theorisations of Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Rancière, I explore the contradictions and tensions of their explorations of the ‘communist moment’ in artistic self-valorisation – from Negri’s model of the reversible moment of subjection to creation, Badiou’s thesis of the moment of subtraction from capitalist through independent affirmation, and Rancière’s suggestion of aesthetic dissension and refiguring that rejects the absolutisation of capital. While such theorisations attempt to retain the communist moment of artistic self-valorisation, I suggest that they find their limit in a tendency to not fully engage with the ‘real abstractions’ that generate the paradox of value. It is these forms of abstraction, revealed through the denuding effects of the contemporary financial crisis, that require traversal to engage with the capillary effects of capitalist power.
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This brief intervention offers a reconsideration of questions of measure in the context of current struggles over education and the university. It contests the invocation of the 'immeasurable' as solution, instead proposing forms of... more
This brief intervention offers a reconsideration of questions of measure in the context of current struggles over education and the university. It contests the invocation of the 'immeasurable' as solution, instead proposing forms of counter-measure.
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The characterisation of the contemporary ‘political moment’ is dominated, across the political spectrum, by an emphasis on the disorientation, neutralisation, and the ‘hollowing-out’ of politics and the political. Concomitantly, we then... more
The characterisation of the contemporary ‘political moment’ is dominated, across the political spectrum, by an emphasis on the disorientation, neutralisation, and the ‘hollowing-out’ of politics and the political. Concomitantly, we then find a call for the re-orientation, re-enchantment, and re-figuration of a ‘concrete’ or possible politics.
Such diagnoses often mix the epochal and metaphysical – Nietzsche’s ‘European nihilism’, Heidegger’s globalised ‘Ge-Stell’, or Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘administered society’ – with the local and conjunctural – the collapse of ‘actually-existing’ socialism, the war on terror, the rise of a new mediatised post-politics – to postulate a singular moment of radical ‘disorientation’. They also seek solutions in an act of orientation that can at once grasp and refuse this dispersion and disorientation through the figuration of the ‘new’.
While not disavowing the crisis of contemporary politics, at least for radical anti-systemic movements, this essay aims to take some critical distance from this trope. It examines the drive to figuration and orientation in philosophical treatments of the political, and how the political, identified with the conjunctural, contingent, and ‘the concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ (Lenin), exerts pressure in the space of the philosophical text. In particular, in relation to the contemporary ‘political moment’, this analysis is concerned with the limits of opposing or constructing a ‘concrete politics’ from within a supposedly ‘abstract’ philosophy. The sedimentation and proliferation of capitalist ‘real abstractions’, the ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ of the commodity and the value-form, pose acute difficulties to the temporal and spatial ‘grasp’ of both philosophy and politics. Rather than a call to a new ‘concrete’ politics, or philosophy, instead I argue for a philosophy and politics of abstraction, which can think the sociogenesis of ‘real abstraction’ and, in the style of Marx, think the concrete as a result rather than a starting point.
Such diagnoses often mix the epochal and metaphysical – Nietzsche’s ‘European nihilism’, Heidegger’s globalised ‘Ge-Stell’, or Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘administered society’ – with the local and conjunctural – the collapse of ‘actually-existing’ socialism, the war on terror, the rise of a new mediatised post-politics – to postulate a singular moment of radical ‘disorientation’. They also seek solutions in an act of orientation that can at once grasp and refuse this dispersion and disorientation through the figuration of the ‘new’.
While not disavowing the crisis of contemporary politics, at least for radical anti-systemic movements, this essay aims to take some critical distance from this trope. It examines the drive to figuration and orientation in philosophical treatments of the political, and how the political, identified with the conjunctural, contingent, and ‘the concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ (Lenin), exerts pressure in the space of the philosophical text. In particular, in relation to the contemporary ‘political moment’, this analysis is concerned with the limits of opposing or constructing a ‘concrete politics’ from within a supposedly ‘abstract’ philosophy. The sedimentation and proliferation of capitalist ‘real abstractions’, the ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ of the commodity and the value-form, pose acute difficulties to the temporal and spatial ‘grasp’ of both philosophy and politics. Rather than a call to a new ‘concrete’ politics, or philosophy, instead I argue for a philosophy and politics of abstraction, which can think the sociogenesis of ‘real abstraction’ and, in the style of Marx, think the concrete as a result rather than a starting point.
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The film work of Lars Von Trier has attracted considerable attention from Lacanian critics, which has been particularly focused on his melodramatic figurations of female excess, sacrifice, and jouissance, in films such as Breaking the... more
The film work of Lars Von Trier has attracted considerable attention from Lacanian critics, which has been particularly focused on his melodramatic figurations of female excess, sacrifice, and jouissance, in films such as Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dogville (2003). Here I want to depart from this consensus by considering Von Trier’s self-declared ‘harmless comedy’ The Boss of it All (2006). Appearances can not only be deceptive but they also have their own reality, as the film demonstrates. I trace the film’s probing of the ‘outsourcing’ of authority as a particular ideological form. The supposed displacement of authority to the Other – which is also its supposed ‘softening’ – in fact reveals the inner cruelty of authority. This suggests the inadequacy of critiques of ideology which address themselves to pointing to the absence of authority (the ‘emperor’s new clothes’ effect). That ‘there is no Other of the Other’ does not relieve us of the burden of authority, but in fact permits the secretion of authority through the frame of fantasy. Instead the ‘traversal’ of ideology requires attention to the particular forms in which authority incarnates itself in its supposed absence, especially by recourse to the symbolic fiction of law. What The Boss of it All permits then is the beginning of a tracing of what we could call ‘the psychopathology of everyday authority’.
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This paper explores the possibilities of the work of the later Lacan for providing an analysis of the Gothic text. It focuses particularly on the work of the American writer H. P. Lovecraft, a relatively unknown and little-regarded figure... more
This paper explores the possibilities of the work of the later Lacan for providing an analysis of the Gothic text. It focuses particularly on the work of the American writer H. P. Lovecraft, a relatively unknown and little-regarded figure of early 20th century gothic / horror fiction. I draw on his texts to exemplify Lacan’s revision of the symptom to the new form of the ‘sinthome’, a construction that allows the individual to supplement or repair the fundamental rupture at the basis of subjectivity. I argue that Lovecraft’s texts produce a particular form of Gothic sinthome, which allows him to gain a position as a subject while also creating a new singular form of horror fiction. His new cosmic non-supernatural horror fiction pushes at the limits of the gothic. This fiction is taken up by the contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq to produce a post-gothic fiction in which the effect of horror is located in the inconsistency of the social bond.
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This is a talk for 16-18 year old college students designed to introduce them to political approaches to literature. The talk focuses on poetry and protest, beginning from Brecht and the political reading of literature, then primarily... more
This is a talk for 16-18 year old college students designed to introduce them to political approaches to literature. The talk focuses on poetry and protest, beginning from Brecht and the political reading of literature, then primarily focusing on William Blake as a radical poet who both reveals ideology and reworks language to political effect. Finally, the talk considers occupy protests and recent poetics of protest.
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This is a preliminary reading list of work in the area of Afro-Pessimism, and responses and critiques. It is not definitive and classifications of works could be disputed.
Critical reflections on accelerationism for the new German translation of Malign Velocities
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This interview, with Ramin Alaei, of Culture Today Magazine (Iran), is the English original of the Persian translation. The interview considers issues around the representation of the proletariat and working class in cinema. It focuses... more
This interview, with Ramin Alaei, of Culture Today Magazine (Iran), is the English original of the Persian translation. The interview considers issues around the representation of the proletariat and working class in cinema. It focuses around the films of Pasolini, Mike Leigh, contemporary horror cinema, and Godard. The interview explores the blurred line between the proletariat and the working class and the struggle within cinema to 'represent' the proletariat.
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This essay considers Brad Anderson's 2001 " horror " film Session 9 as an allegory of the end of the American working class. It focuses on the absent figurations of insurgent femininity as signs of the 'horror' of precarity and the... more
This essay considers Brad Anderson's 2001 " horror " film Session 9 as an allegory of the end of the American working class. It focuses on the absent figurations of insurgent femininity as signs of the 'horror' of precarity and the anxieties of collapsing labour regimes.
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This brief intervention considers the neo-Victorianism of contemporary theory, with its emphasis on density and historicism, through a number of figures of the 'Victorian': fog, mud, and dust
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Some thoughts on why people hate theory and why they shouldn't, or why they should because theory really does undermine what they do.
This paper considers the phenomenon of 'negging', the dating practice of attacking a woman's self-worth, as a signature form of neoliberal capitalist manipulation. These practices adapt and exploit negativity as a mode of violence, but... more
This paper considers the phenomenon of 'negging', the dating practice of attacking a woman's self-worth, as a signature form of neoliberal capitalist manipulation. These practices adapt and exploit negativity as a mode of violence, but they also find themselves at the limits of negativity, which comes to inhabit the 'negger'.
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Crises tend to generate apocalyptic dreams and nightmares. Through a reappraisal of 20th century anti-capitalist thought, Benjamin Noys urges us to critically re-think how such an apocalyptic tone operates within radical analyses of the... more
Crises tend to generate apocalyptic dreams and nightmares. Through a reappraisal of 20th century anti-capitalist thought, Benjamin Noys urges us to critically re-think how such an apocalyptic tone operates within radical analyses of the current crisis.