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The Production of Subjectivity: Marx and Philosophy

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Published Apr 2022

Jason Read

Author: Jason Read
Louis Althusser argued that Marx initiated a transformation of philosophy, a new way of doing philosophy. This book follows that provocation to examine the way in which central Marxist concepts and problems from primitive accumulation to real abstraction animate and inform philosophers from Theodor Adorno to Paolo Virno. While also examining the way in which reading Marx casts new light on such philosophers as Spinoza. At the centre of this transformation is the production of subjectivity, the manner in which relations of production produces ways of thinking and living.

Biographical Note

Jason Read, PhD (2001), University of Southern Maine, is Professor of Philosophy. He has published The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY, 2003) and The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill, 2015).

Readership

Graduate and advanced undergraduate students in philosophy, literary theory, and contemporary politics, as well researchers interested in continental philosophy, neoliberalism, and the Anthropocene.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part 1 Becoming Contingent: Philosophy, Violence, History

1 Primitive Accumulation: The Aleatory Foundation of Capitalism

2 The Present as Pre-History: Adorno and Balibar on the Transformation of Labor

3 The Althusser Effect: Philosophy, History, and Temporality

4 To Think the New in the Absence of its Conditions: Althusser and Negri on the Philosophy of Primitive Accumulation

Part 2 Putting the Capitalism Back into Capitalism and Schizophrenia: On Deleuze and Guattari

5 A Universal History of Contingency: Deleuze and Guattari on the History of Capitalism

6 The Age of Cynicism: Deleuze and Guattari on the Political Logic of Contemporary Capitalism

7 The Fetish is Always Actual, Revolution is Always Virtual: Marx and Deleuze

8 The Affective Economy: Producing and Consuming Affects in Deleuze and Guattari

9 Beyond Enslavement and Subjection: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari

Part 3 Between Marx and Spinoza: Philosophy and Ideology

10 The Potentia of Living Labour: Negri’s Practice of Philosophy

11 The Order and Connection of Ideas: Theoretical Practice in Macherey’s Turn to Spinoza

12 Desire is Man’s Very Essence: Spinoza and Hegel as Philosophers of Transindividuality

13 The Order and Connection of Ideology is the Same as the Order and Connection of Exploitation: Or, Towards a Bestiary of the Capitalist Imagination

14 Conscienta Sive Ideologica: On the Spontaneity of Ideology

Part 4 Returns of Philosophical Anthropology: New Subjections/New Transformations

15 A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Foucault, Neoliberalism, and the Production of Subjectivity

16 Abstract Materialism: Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the Task of Materialist Philosophy

17 The Production of Subjectivity: From Transindividuality to the Commons

18 Man is a Werewolf to Man: Capital and the Limits of Political Anthropology

19 The ‘Other Scene’ of Political Anthropology: Between Transindividuality and Equaliberty

20 Anthropocene and Anthropogenesis: Philosophical Anthropology and the Ends of Man

Bibliography
Index