Thesis Chapters by Darko Vinketa
This dissertation identifies an anti-theatrical prejudice in theoretical attempts to conceptualiz... more This dissertation identifies an anti-theatrical prejudice in theoretical attempts to conceptualize production shared by otherwise divergent schools of thought. It demonstrates how this 'horror of theatricality' has structured a wide array of philosophical traditions in their thinking through the question of what it means to have effects on the world.
The following thesis focuses on reading Lee Edelman‘s concept of futurelessness against the backd... more The following thesis focuses on reading Lee Edelman‘s concept of futurelessness against the backdrop of Marxist theory. It explores the possibilities for reframing queer negativity, which Edelman understands as an ahistorical condition of possibility of the social as such, in historical materialist terms as negativity inherent in the logic of capital accumulation. It signals the way in which David Harvey‘s notion of dispossession can be recast as an account of that negativity. More specifically, through an engagement with György Lukács‘s understanding of reification‘s subjective moment, combined with regulationist analysis of the historical, objective social structures within which capital accumulation can take place, Edelman‘s sinthomosexual is reconceptualized as a skillhomosexual to whom futurelessness is never individually but rather always collectively ascribed, within a specific social formation brought into being through epistemological, skilled labor of determining counter-hegemonic use-values to subjects and objects produced within capitalist totality. Through combining Edelman‘s death-drive with Butler‘s melancholy we will propose rethinking these negative subjectifications in terms of Harvey‘s spatio-temporal fixes; as instances of capital extending to the level of the body by fixing it as variable capital. Additionally, this thesis will delineate the political significance of rereading negativity in queer Marxist terms within the contemporary neoliberal crisis in which death-drivenness is increasingly exposed as located within capital‘s internal logic, rather than within the historical as such.
Papers by Darko Vinketa
To what extent do contemporary critical theories of money operate under the shadow of Rousseau's ... more To what extent do contemporary critical theories of money operate under the shadow of Rousseau's sentimentalist horizon of natural equality corrupted by the advent of civilization? This article outlines a Derridean reading of Graeber's and Wengrow's recent anthropological study of prehistoric social formations in an effort to demonstrate the unacknowledged influence which Rousseau's disdain for theatricality holds over many present-day assumptions about the social logic of money. In an attempt to repudiate the orthodox theory of money as a medium of exchange, these anthropologists equate the origin of money with a predilection for adornments and self-display. As soon as money becomes a problem of representation, however, the critical discourse immediately shifts towards an anti-theatrical lamentation for lost authenticity which necessarily rehearses the circular logic of Rousseau's thought. Money ultimately becomes indistinguishable from sociality as such.
This article identifies a tension between two opposing
conceptualizations of power within contemp... more This article identifies a tension between two opposing
conceptualizations of power within contemporary political theory:
the vitalist understanding of power as force, friction, and agonism,
and the deconstructivist treatment of power as impressionability,
imitation, and theatricality. It situates this divergence within
Gilles Deleuze’s employment of Nietzsche against the Hegelian
dialectics, and proceeds to excavate a latent shadow of theatricality
running through both Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s respective theorizations
of power as bondage and as tragedy. This rearticulates
the primary operation of power as one that is neither superseded
by Reason as in Hegel, nor entirely exhausted by the excesses of
materiality over and above identity as in Deleuze’s uptake of the
Nietzschean “will-to-power.”
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Thesis Chapters by Darko Vinketa
Papers by Darko Vinketa
conceptualizations of power within contemporary political theory:
the vitalist understanding of power as force, friction, and agonism,
and the deconstructivist treatment of power as impressionability,
imitation, and theatricality. It situates this divergence within
Gilles Deleuze’s employment of Nietzsche against the Hegelian
dialectics, and proceeds to excavate a latent shadow of theatricality
running through both Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s respective theorizations
of power as bondage and as tragedy. This rearticulates
the primary operation of power as one that is neither superseded
by Reason as in Hegel, nor entirely exhausted by the excesses of
materiality over and above identity as in Deleuze’s uptake of the
Nietzschean “will-to-power.”
conceptualizations of power within contemporary political theory:
the vitalist understanding of power as force, friction, and agonism,
and the deconstructivist treatment of power as impressionability,
imitation, and theatricality. It situates this divergence within
Gilles Deleuze’s employment of Nietzsche against the Hegelian
dialectics, and proceeds to excavate a latent shadow of theatricality
running through both Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s respective theorizations
of power as bondage and as tragedy. This rearticulates
the primary operation of power as one that is neither superseded
by Reason as in Hegel, nor entirely exhausted by the excesses of
materiality over and above identity as in Deleuze’s uptake of the
Nietzschean “will-to-power.”