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Potentia of Poverty: Marx Reads Spinoza

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Published Apr 2023

Margherita Pascucci

Author: Margherita Pascucci
Potentia of Poverty opposes to the surplus-value of capital a surplus-concept of life – of the worker, of the non-worker, of the poor, of the rich: an excess of being with the power to undo capital by using its own mechanism. Antonio Negri writes in the preface that ‘The poor is the powerful, Pascucci tells us. She interprets Marx as a reader of Spinoza; however, maybe there is something more here than there is in Spinoza and Marx themselves. A further passage is necessary to grasp this “more”: namely, to tie the experience of poverty to an ontology of “cupiditas” [desire], that is, of “amor” [love]’.

Biographical Note

Margherita Pascucci, Ph.D. (2003), has published five monographs, including Philosophical readings of Shakespeare.“Thou art the thing itself” (Palgrave, 2013); Macchina Capitale. Genesi e struttura dello sfruttamento (ombre corte, 2022), Causa sui. Saggio sul capitale e il virtuale (ombre corte, 2009), and Potenza della povertà. Marx legge Spinoza (ombre corte, 2006).

Readership

Continental Philosophers, Marxist thinkers, critical thinking scholars, students of philosophy, critical theory and social movements

Table of Contents

Preface to the Italian Edition by Antonio Negri
Author’s Preface to the English Edition

Introduction

1 Self-Cause and Cause through an Other [causa sui-causa ab alio]
1.1 Value and Common Notions
1.2 The Definition of Value and of the Character of Form-Equivalent
1.3 Common Notions as ‘koinai ennoiai’
1.4 How Are Common Notions Linked to Affects?

2 Marx’s Notebook on Spinoza: Imagination and Revolutionary Praxis
2.1 Theological-Political Treatise
2.2 Imagination
2.3 Berlin 1841: Letters: umwälzende Praxis [Revolutionary Praxis]

3 The ‘potentia’ of Poverty: For an Economy of Joy
3.1 Atom of Virtuality and the Anticipatory Abstraction
3.2 The Establishment of a-Conceptual Relations
3.3 The Virtuality of History
3.4 Excursus on the ‘potentia’ (Ontological) and How This Defines Poverty
3.5 How the dunamis-Virtue Is the Spinozan potentia
3.6 The Virtuality of Our Time
3.7 Potentia and Dismeasure

4 The Production of Subjectivity: Labour, Poverty and the Free Man: Or, the ‘potentia’ of Labour
4.1 The Virtuality of Subjectivity
4.2 On Labour and Poverty
4.3 Potentia and the Intensive
4.4 The Plus of Being

Selected Bibliography
Index