Introduction 1. Enjoyment as a Category of Political Theory 2. Fascism and Stalinism 3. Democrati... more Introduction 1. Enjoyment as a Category of Political Theory 2. Fascism and Stalinism 3. Democratic Fundamentalism 4. Law: From Superego to Love Conclusion: Revolution Today
Revolution only occurs when people are willing to die for it. The last few days of May 2020 showe... more Revolution only occurs when people are willing to die for it. The last few days of May 2020 showed that thousands of people were willing to risk their lives in the struggle against the racist capitalist system. Rage at four hundred years of oppression, exploitation, and denigration, at the systemic murder of black, brown, and indigenous people, and at wanton, visible, and permissible police violence could no longer be contained. Between the virus and the economy, there was nothing left to lose.
States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist Scenarios, 2017
One of the most notorious remarks circulating as evidence of bankers' arrogant disregard for the ... more One of the most notorious remarks circulating as evidence of bankers' arrogant disregard for the destructive effects of their high-risk financial strategies came in July 2007 from Charles Prince, the CEO of Citigroup. He said "as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." Then he added: "we're still dancing." At the time, the subprime mortgage market was in free fall. Yet over the preceding five months, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had led Wall Street in creating and selling 50 billion dollars in new CDOs (collateralized debt obligations, a kind of derivative backed by mortgage bonds). Prince thought the "pools of liquidity" were deep enough-the amount of available capital big enough-to immunize the big banks from the collapse of subprime. Despite the plummeting subprime mortgage market, Wall Street had kept on issuing CDOs; the total dollar amount for the year 486.8 billion. 1 In the words of one investor, "We knew the collateral for the CDOs had collapsed. And yet everything went on, as if nothing had changed." 2 The International Monetary Fund would subsequently estimate losses related to USgenerated subprime mortgage assets at one trillion dollars. The psychoanalytic term for this keeping on, this repetition, is drive. Drive is a keeping on beyond pleasure, beyond use, beyond desire. In the reflexive turn of the drive, drive's loop back
We have entered the first phase of the revolt of the knowledge class. The protests associated wit... more We have entered the first phase of the revolt of the knowledge class. The protests associated with the Occupy movement, Chilean student protests, the Montreal protests, European anti-austerity protests, some components of the protests of the Arab spring, as well as multiple ongoing and intermittent strikes of teachers, civil servants, and medical workers all over the world, are protests of those proletarianized under communicative capitalism. These are not struggles of the multitude, struggles for democracy, or struggles specific to local contexts. Nor are they merely the defensive struggles of a middle class facing cuts to social services, wage stagnation, unemployment, and declining home values. They are fronts in a class war under the conditions of global communicative capitalism. Mainstream media babble about Facebook and Twitter revolutions was right, but for the wrong reasons. It was right to draw our attention to networked media, to suggest a link between the protests and ubiquitous communication networks. But it was wrong to think that protests are occurring because people can easily coordinate with social media, that they are primarily struggles for democracy, or that they are indications of a push for freedom on the part of networked individuals. 1 These revolts make sense as class struggle, as the political struggle of a knowledge class whose work is exploited and lives are expropriated by communicative capitalism. 2 I am using the term knowledge class very broadly to designate those whose communicative activities generate value that is expropriated from them. 3 I have in mind both the wide field of knowledge labor and the voluntary, unpaid, everyday activities of media use that are traced,
Abstract: This essay argues that the language of privacy in the Obama administration’s discussion... more Abstract: This essay argues that the language of privacy in the Obama administration’s discussion of big data displaces concern from surveillance to social good and from government in its national security role to government in its economic role. This concern is condensed in the figure of the individual whose privacy is to be protected. That concern with big data is condensed into the individual form gives us insight into communicative capitalism’s enclosure and expropriation of the common via capture and analytics. Access to the flows and relations of sociality, is what big data promises. It delivers on that promise by pulverizing it into and tracing it through the ever more granular movements of the individual.
Crowds and Party extends the energies of the riotous crowds of the last five years into an argume... more Crowds and Party extends the energies of the riotous crowds of the last five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting emphases on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we rethink the collective subject of politics. When crowds appear in spaces unauthorized by capital and the state, such as in the Occupy movement in New York, London and across the world, they create a gap of possibility. But too many on the left remain stuck in this beautiful moment of possibility--they argue for more of the same fragmentation into issues and identities as if this had not been the form of the last thirty years of left defeat. In Crowds and Party, Dean argues that previous discussions of the party have missed its affective dimensions, the way it operates as a knot of unconscious processes, and binds people together. Now, Dean shows how we can see the party as an organization that holds a space for communist political subjectivity and can reinvigorate political practice.
ABSTRACT This lecture looks at the neo-feudalizing tendencies in contemporary capitalism. Expropr... more ABSTRACT This lecture looks at the neo-feudalizing tendencies in contemporary capitalism. Expropriation, domination, and force have intensified to such an extent that it no longer makes sense to posit free and equal actors meeting in the labor market even as a governing fiction. Rent and debt feature as or more heavily in accumulation than profit, and work increasingly exceeds the wage relation. The alternative to neo-feudalism is communism.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2019
This essay considers the political form that is presupposed in questions of resistance and revolu... more This essay considers the political form that is presupposed in questions of resistance and revolution. It situates resistance and revolution in communicative capitalism, a setting characterised by intense winner-take-all inequality, the decline of symbolic efficiency, and the shift from the use to the circulation value of communicative utterances. It draws out the way that this setting inflects the body the question of resistance and revolution presupposes. Is it the world, the individual, the network, or the party? I argue that the party is the form we need to assume when we ask about revolution because it is the party that has the capacity to strategise, to plan and to arrange itself with an eye to revolution. Capitalismo comunicativo y forma revolucionaria
This paper draws from contemporary psychoanalytic theory as well as nineteenth-century crowd theo... more This paper draws from contemporary psychoanalytic theory as well as nineteenth-century crowd theory to critique Louis Althusser’s account of the ideological interpellation of the subject. I argue that rather than ideology interpellating the individual as a subject, bourgeois ideology interpellates the subject as an individual. By “bourgeois ideology” I mean the loose set of ideas and apparatuses associated with European modernity, an instrumental concept of reason, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. The advantage of reversing the Althusserian account is that the subject is not pre-constrained to the individual form, a form that is itself always already as failing and impossible as it is assumed and demanded. In Althusser’s version, the individuality that emerges in history is posited as universal, a given. In mine, the individual form is itself the problem; it’s a coercive and unstable product of the enclosure of the common in never-ceasing efforts to repress, d...
Drawing from Andrei Platonov's Chevengur, I present the figure of the comrade as the zero-level o... more Drawing from Andrei Platonov's Chevengur, I present the figure of the comrade as the zero-level of communism. Platonov's comrades persist in a postrevolutionary zone without workers, without classes, where the remainders of the old order have nothing but each other. Their condition of deprivation, where the persistence of each depends on the persistence of all, supplies the ground upon which to build communism. The comrade is the zero-level of communism because it designates the relation between those on the same side of the struggle to produce a new set of free, just, and equal social relations, relations without exploitation. Their relation is political, divisive. And it is intimate, intertwined with the sense of how desperately each depends upon the other if all are to persevere. I test this account of the comrade through the counter-intuitive case of the
Since the Birkbeck conference reignited communism as a philosophical idea and 2011's demonstratio... more Since the Birkbeck conference reignited communism as a philosophical idea and 2011's demonstrations, movements, and revolts converged in global egalitarian struggle, the question of political organization has posed itself to the Left again. The essays collected in this issue of South Atlantic Quarterly approach the question via three interlocking problematics: history, the subject, and the party. These problematics have long been tied in one way or another to the Marxist project. In the simplest version, what Lars Lih (2008) calls the "merger narrative" of German Social Democracy, history provides a class with its revolutionary task. The specific mission of the working class is the abolition of capitalism and construction of communism. The party, as bearer of the news of this task, galvanizes and leads the working class in political struggle. In contrast, contemporary leftist preoccupations with speculative realisms, objectoriented ontologies, and self-organizing swarms, imply that the problematics of history, subject, and party so crucial to Marxist theory are obsolete. Like so many capitalist commodities, they need to be thrown out and replaced by the shiny and new. Whether they are eclipsed by temporalities South Atlantic Quarterly
Finally, this book has been shaped by the memory of family members no longer alive, especially Co... more Finally, this book has been shaped by the memory of family members no longer alive, especially Corrine Bochan Eichner and Norman Eichner, Gladys Ferguson, and Violet Kennan. And my deepest and most heartfelt gratitude goes to Carolyn J. Eichner, whose guidance, editorship, and inspiration make her a co-conspirator of the ideas herein.
The major media event of the first week of April 1997 involved the discovery of thirty-nine bodie... more The major media event of the first week of April 1997 involved the discovery of thirty-nine bodies in a large house in the Rancho Santa Fe section of San Diego. Early reports from traditional media identified the bodies as belonging to web designers, white males in their twenties and ...
Joseph G. Ramsey: How would you trace your own relationship to communism as a cause and a concept... more Joseph G. Ramsey: How would you trace your own relationship to communism as a cause and a concept? You attribute the notion of the communist “horizon” to Bruno Bosteels (who takes up the term from the Bolivian Marxist theorist and rebel turned politician Álvaro Gercı́a Linera). For how long have you viewed communism as your political horizon? How has this horizon shaped your theoretical and practical work? Has communism always defined the end point, the horizon for you?
Introduction 1. Enjoyment as a Category of Political Theory 2. Fascism and Stalinism 3. Democrati... more Introduction 1. Enjoyment as a Category of Political Theory 2. Fascism and Stalinism 3. Democratic Fundamentalism 4. Law: From Superego to Love Conclusion: Revolution Today
Revolution only occurs when people are willing to die for it. The last few days of May 2020 showe... more Revolution only occurs when people are willing to die for it. The last few days of May 2020 showed that thousands of people were willing to risk their lives in the struggle against the racist capitalist system. Rage at four hundred years of oppression, exploitation, and denigration, at the systemic murder of black, brown, and indigenous people, and at wanton, visible, and permissible police violence could no longer be contained. Between the virus and the economy, there was nothing left to lose.
States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist Scenarios, 2017
One of the most notorious remarks circulating as evidence of bankers' arrogant disregard for the ... more One of the most notorious remarks circulating as evidence of bankers' arrogant disregard for the destructive effects of their high-risk financial strategies came in July 2007 from Charles Prince, the CEO of Citigroup. He said "as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." Then he added: "we're still dancing." At the time, the subprime mortgage market was in free fall. Yet over the preceding five months, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had led Wall Street in creating and selling 50 billion dollars in new CDOs (collateralized debt obligations, a kind of derivative backed by mortgage bonds). Prince thought the "pools of liquidity" were deep enough-the amount of available capital big enough-to immunize the big banks from the collapse of subprime. Despite the plummeting subprime mortgage market, Wall Street had kept on issuing CDOs; the total dollar amount for the year 486.8 billion. 1 In the words of one investor, "We knew the collateral for the CDOs had collapsed. And yet everything went on, as if nothing had changed." 2 The International Monetary Fund would subsequently estimate losses related to USgenerated subprime mortgage assets at one trillion dollars. The psychoanalytic term for this keeping on, this repetition, is drive. Drive is a keeping on beyond pleasure, beyond use, beyond desire. In the reflexive turn of the drive, drive's loop back
We have entered the first phase of the revolt of the knowledge class. The protests associated wit... more We have entered the first phase of the revolt of the knowledge class. The protests associated with the Occupy movement, Chilean student protests, the Montreal protests, European anti-austerity protests, some components of the protests of the Arab spring, as well as multiple ongoing and intermittent strikes of teachers, civil servants, and medical workers all over the world, are protests of those proletarianized under communicative capitalism. These are not struggles of the multitude, struggles for democracy, or struggles specific to local contexts. Nor are they merely the defensive struggles of a middle class facing cuts to social services, wage stagnation, unemployment, and declining home values. They are fronts in a class war under the conditions of global communicative capitalism. Mainstream media babble about Facebook and Twitter revolutions was right, but for the wrong reasons. It was right to draw our attention to networked media, to suggest a link between the protests and ubiquitous communication networks. But it was wrong to think that protests are occurring because people can easily coordinate with social media, that they are primarily struggles for democracy, or that they are indications of a push for freedom on the part of networked individuals. 1 These revolts make sense as class struggle, as the political struggle of a knowledge class whose work is exploited and lives are expropriated by communicative capitalism. 2 I am using the term knowledge class very broadly to designate those whose communicative activities generate value that is expropriated from them. 3 I have in mind both the wide field of knowledge labor and the voluntary, unpaid, everyday activities of media use that are traced,
Abstract: This essay argues that the language of privacy in the Obama administration’s discussion... more Abstract: This essay argues that the language of privacy in the Obama administration’s discussion of big data displaces concern from surveillance to social good and from government in its national security role to government in its economic role. This concern is condensed in the figure of the individual whose privacy is to be protected. That concern with big data is condensed into the individual form gives us insight into communicative capitalism’s enclosure and expropriation of the common via capture and analytics. Access to the flows and relations of sociality, is what big data promises. It delivers on that promise by pulverizing it into and tracing it through the ever more granular movements of the individual.
Crowds and Party extends the energies of the riotous crowds of the last five years into an argume... more Crowds and Party extends the energies of the riotous crowds of the last five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting emphases on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we rethink the collective subject of politics. When crowds appear in spaces unauthorized by capital and the state, such as in the Occupy movement in New York, London and across the world, they create a gap of possibility. But too many on the left remain stuck in this beautiful moment of possibility--they argue for more of the same fragmentation into issues and identities as if this had not been the form of the last thirty years of left defeat. In Crowds and Party, Dean argues that previous discussions of the party have missed its affective dimensions, the way it operates as a knot of unconscious processes, and binds people together. Now, Dean shows how we can see the party as an organization that holds a space for communist political subjectivity and can reinvigorate political practice.
ABSTRACT This lecture looks at the neo-feudalizing tendencies in contemporary capitalism. Expropr... more ABSTRACT This lecture looks at the neo-feudalizing tendencies in contemporary capitalism. Expropriation, domination, and force have intensified to such an extent that it no longer makes sense to posit free and equal actors meeting in the labor market even as a governing fiction. Rent and debt feature as or more heavily in accumulation than profit, and work increasingly exceeds the wage relation. The alternative to neo-feudalism is communism.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2019
This essay considers the political form that is presupposed in questions of resistance and revolu... more This essay considers the political form that is presupposed in questions of resistance and revolution. It situates resistance and revolution in communicative capitalism, a setting characterised by intense winner-take-all inequality, the decline of symbolic efficiency, and the shift from the use to the circulation value of communicative utterances. It draws out the way that this setting inflects the body the question of resistance and revolution presupposes. Is it the world, the individual, the network, or the party? I argue that the party is the form we need to assume when we ask about revolution because it is the party that has the capacity to strategise, to plan and to arrange itself with an eye to revolution. Capitalismo comunicativo y forma revolucionaria
This paper draws from contemporary psychoanalytic theory as well as nineteenth-century crowd theo... more This paper draws from contemporary psychoanalytic theory as well as nineteenth-century crowd theory to critique Louis Althusser’s account of the ideological interpellation of the subject. I argue that rather than ideology interpellating the individual as a subject, bourgeois ideology interpellates the subject as an individual. By “bourgeois ideology” I mean the loose set of ideas and apparatuses associated with European modernity, an instrumental concept of reason, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. The advantage of reversing the Althusserian account is that the subject is not pre-constrained to the individual form, a form that is itself always already as failing and impossible as it is assumed and demanded. In Althusser’s version, the individuality that emerges in history is posited as universal, a given. In mine, the individual form is itself the problem; it’s a coercive and unstable product of the enclosure of the common in never-ceasing efforts to repress, d...
Drawing from Andrei Platonov's Chevengur, I present the figure of the comrade as the zero-level o... more Drawing from Andrei Platonov's Chevengur, I present the figure of the comrade as the zero-level of communism. Platonov's comrades persist in a postrevolutionary zone without workers, without classes, where the remainders of the old order have nothing but each other. Their condition of deprivation, where the persistence of each depends on the persistence of all, supplies the ground upon which to build communism. The comrade is the zero-level of communism because it designates the relation between those on the same side of the struggle to produce a new set of free, just, and equal social relations, relations without exploitation. Their relation is political, divisive. And it is intimate, intertwined with the sense of how desperately each depends upon the other if all are to persevere. I test this account of the comrade through the counter-intuitive case of the
Since the Birkbeck conference reignited communism as a philosophical idea and 2011's demonstratio... more Since the Birkbeck conference reignited communism as a philosophical idea and 2011's demonstrations, movements, and revolts converged in global egalitarian struggle, the question of political organization has posed itself to the Left again. The essays collected in this issue of South Atlantic Quarterly approach the question via three interlocking problematics: history, the subject, and the party. These problematics have long been tied in one way or another to the Marxist project. In the simplest version, what Lars Lih (2008) calls the "merger narrative" of German Social Democracy, history provides a class with its revolutionary task. The specific mission of the working class is the abolition of capitalism and construction of communism. The party, as bearer of the news of this task, galvanizes and leads the working class in political struggle. In contrast, contemporary leftist preoccupations with speculative realisms, objectoriented ontologies, and self-organizing swarms, imply that the problematics of history, subject, and party so crucial to Marxist theory are obsolete. Like so many capitalist commodities, they need to be thrown out and replaced by the shiny and new. Whether they are eclipsed by temporalities South Atlantic Quarterly
Finally, this book has been shaped by the memory of family members no longer alive, especially Co... more Finally, this book has been shaped by the memory of family members no longer alive, especially Corrine Bochan Eichner and Norman Eichner, Gladys Ferguson, and Violet Kennan. And my deepest and most heartfelt gratitude goes to Carolyn J. Eichner, whose guidance, editorship, and inspiration make her a co-conspirator of the ideas herein.
The major media event of the first week of April 1997 involved the discovery of thirty-nine bodie... more The major media event of the first week of April 1997 involved the discovery of thirty-nine bodies in a large house in the Rancho Santa Fe section of San Diego. Early reports from traditional media identified the bodies as belonging to web designers, white males in their twenties and ...
Joseph G. Ramsey: How would you trace your own relationship to communism as a cause and a concept... more Joseph G. Ramsey: How would you trace your own relationship to communism as a cause and a concept? You attribute the notion of the communist “horizon” to Bruno Bosteels (who takes up the term from the Bolivian Marxist theorist and rebel turned politician Álvaro Gercı́a Linera). For how long have you viewed communism as your political horizon? How has this horizon shaped your theoretical and practical work? Has communism always defined the end point, the horizon for you?
The question of demands infused the initial weeks and months of Occupy Wall Street with the endle... more The question of demands infused the initial weeks and months of Occupy Wall Street with the endless opening of desire. Nearly unbearable, the absence of demands concentrated interest, fear, expectation, and hope in the movement. What did they want? What could they want?
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Papers by Jodi Dean