Fatelessness

Autorentext

Ray Brassier is Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut and a founding member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR), which aims to promote critical thought and analysis with a special focus on Lebanon and the Middle East. His first book was Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. He is the translator of Alain Badiou’s St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude. He edited Alain Badiou’s Theoretical Writings (with Alberto Toscano), Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena (with Robin Mackay), and Herbert Marcuse’s Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Philosophy: Five Lectures. He lives in Beirut, Lebanon.

Klappentext

Capitalism is the fatal power driving ecocide and genocide. It bewitches us into accepting it as our fate, promising freedom for all while enslaving the many for the benefit of the few. Breaking this fatal spell requires recognizing capitalism as the work of human hands. Fate is never simply what befalls us; it is the consequence of what we have done. This is why it can be undone. Communism is not a series of historical failures to be condemned, or a future promise in which we should invest our faith. It is simply the abolition of fate, the movement through which we undo the illusion of necessity.

Inhalt

Introduction: It Is Permitted to Subdue Necessity
Capital as Fate
Actuality, Possibility, Necessity
Actualization and Deactualization
Absolute Actuality and Real Oughts
Summary of Chapters

Chapter 1: The Human
Posthuman liberalism
The Ethics of Affirmation
People and Things
The Ends of Man
Form and Presence
Spirit’s Desire
Negativity and History

Chapter 2: The Affinity of Fatality and Freedom
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Second Nature
Double Mediation
Natural History
Freedom and Unfreedom
Impulsive Uselessness
Utopian Freedom

Chapter 3: Final Repression
Progress and Repression
History as Catastrophe
The Contradiction of Progress
Nonidentity
Sublimating Repression
The Perpetuity of Pleasure
Surplus Repression
Primal Repression
Twisting and Bursting Time

Chapter 4: Capital: Form or Flow?
A Spinozism of the Unconscious
The Ontology of Plenitude
Representation and the Subject
Desire as Primary Process
Molar and Molecular
Repression and Suppression
Coding and the Socius
Territorial Coding and Despotic Overcoding
Capitalist Decoding
Credit Money and Payment Money
Limit, Axiomatic, Inversion
Oedipus and Representation
Speculative Leftism
Value as Form of Absence and Absent Form

Chapter 5: The Proletariat as Subject-Object
Reification
Dialectics Beyond Hegel
The Contradiction of Labor-Power
The Standpoint of the Proletariat
Quantity and Quality

Chapter 6: Marx’s Two Logics
Positing and Presupposing
The Double Character of the Commodity
Labour as Not-Capital
Contradiction and Circulation
Elementary Presuppositions and Historical Conditions
The Nexus of Positing and Presupposing
The Moving Contradiction

Chapter 7: The Limits of Critical Pessimism
Revolution and Regression
Reification, Administration, State Capitalism
Formatted Spontaneity
Pseudo-activity
Unreduced Subjectivity
Subjective Detachment and Objective Partisanship
The Two Traditions of Critique

Chapter 8: Politics of the Rift
The Antinomy of Class Struggle
The Disconnection of Valorization and Social Reproduction
Critique of Programmatism and Theory of the Rift
Auto- and Allo-Production

Chapter 9: Lack and Destruction, Anxiety and Courage
The Inseparability of Law and Nonlaw
Torsion
Iteration and Contradiction
The Vanishing Cause
Mastering Lack
Subjectivization and Subjective Process
The Paradox of Resistance

Chapter 10: The Fall of Fate
The Wrong State of Things
Belated Actuality
Finished, Defeated, Destroyed
The Residue of Possibility
The Wretched of the Earth

Conclusion