Plenary Abstracts

Joshua Clover
No without Ontology: Absorption and Coloniality”

The revolutionary subject is history’s Big No. The transformations in our understanding of revolutionary subjects are in turn conditioned by historical transformations. One fundamental cleavage within materialist analyses opens a gap between, on the one hand, Marx’s account of the laboring proletariat as revolutionary subject, and on the other Frantz Fanon’s, developed most incisively in Wretched of the Earth, which proposes contrarily the lumpenproletariat.

Rather than preferring one to the other as a general matter and risking an ontology of revolution, we might understand each as proper to overlapping, but distinct, political-economic dispensations: “absorptive capital” with its liberal-democratic managementality, able to expand via continuous absorption of subjects as labor inputs; and colonial regimes premised on exclusion from both the political and the productive. However, the distinction between absorption and coloniality has been eroding since the 1960s, as western capitalism has become less able to absorb and expand—a transformation legible in the pairing of Return to Work at the Wonder Factory (Willemont, 1968) and The Spook Who Sat by The Door (Greenlee, 1969). The core of the world-system has relied increasingly on colonial-style management at home; this has developed dialectically in concert with the growth of a lumpen or surplus population in the West, whose No is premised not on internalization to, but exclusion from, the regime of capital, bringing Fanon’s account ever more to bear on the home counties of global capitalism.

Background reading and viewing: Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence,” in The Wretched of the Earth; Sam Greenlee, The Spook Who Sat by the Door; Return to Work at the Wonder Factory (YouTube).

 

Katerina Kolozova
“Auto-Acceleration of Capitalism through Dematerialization: A Non-Marxist and Feminist Perspective”

The acceleration of capitalism, which takes place through what Marx called “the credit system”—i.e., the ever-growing distance between actual paying and buying of a commodity—divulges the spectrality of capital and money. Acceleration through the “credit system” as the final stage of capitalism is announced and elaborated by Marx in Volume III of Capital. The illusion of capital’s materiality and of material property has become apparent through the phenomenon of finance economy. Acceleration is immanent to capitalism. Capitalism is unstoppably accelerated by the inherent laws of speculation itself, and therefore of dematerialization as well. One does not need the enactment of a “process of acceleration” of capitalism aimed at its demise simply because it is a process generated by the very laws of capitalist economy itself. The contradiction created by the divorce of the speculative from the material is a jarring demonstration of the imminent collapse of the current politico-economic regime whose life can be prolonged only by means of authoritarian rule. The non-philosophical perspective of Marxism presents a possibility to reclaim the material and the realism of Marx at the dusk of the neoliberal era enveloped in emerging forms of fascism.

Background reading: Katerina Kolozova, Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism: Marx and Laruelle

 

François Laruelle
“The Big and the Small No”

 

Ariana Reines
“No, Father: A Vocation Talk”

1. No roots (On Rabbi Ya’akov Reines)
2. No melancholy (On Verse)
3. No breath (On Breaking the Line)
4. No speed (On Confrontation)
5. No words (On Performance)
6. No parents (On Revelation)
7. No future (On Duration)
8. No blood (On Menstruation)
9. No medium (On Possession)
10. No Problems (On Prayer)

 

Frank B. Wilderson III
“Violence and the Limits of Redemption”

Variations in structural violence mark the essential point of departure for theorizing the disparate positions of worker and slave in civil society. For political economy’s (Human) worker, consent is supplemented by violence held in reserve. For libidinal economy’s (Human) analysand, violence is contingent upon transgressions against proper cathexis in the symbolic order—the consent of primary processes. For Afro-Pessimism, on the other hand, Blacks are subject to violence without reservations—violence is gratuitous, “prelogical” (Patterson) and necessary for Human psychic integration. These irreconcilable regimes of structural violence are at the heart of a structural antagonism between Blacks and Human, and are also at the heart of a systemic crisis in critical theory.