RESUMEN En este artículo exploro subversiones caribeñas de la deuda enfocándome en el caso de Puerto Rico. Desde 2016, la Colectiva Feminista en Construcción ha configurado un terreno y un imaginario político novedoso que ejemplifica la subversión de la deuda en Puerto Rico. Las tácticas de la Colectiva se ubican en la deuda para subvertirla, invirtiendo las posiciones de poder distintivas de la deuda. Elaboro esta inversión/subversión como una expresión de resistencia a través del "desvío", como lo entiende Édouard Glissant (...) en El Discurso Antillano. Imprescindible aquí es el trabajo sobre el sistema mundo colonial de género en el Caribe, en particular en la República Dominicana, de Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso y Celenis Rodríguez Moreno. El trabajo de Rodríguez Moreno en torno a la "formación de género mimética", nos permite precisar la interrupción de la operación de la colonialidad en cuanto al deseo, el tiempo, y el espacio clave para las acciones de la Colectiva. ABSTRACT In this essay, Caribbean subversions of debt are explored, focusing on the case of Puerto Rico. Since 2016, the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción has designed a new ground and political imaginary that exemplifies the subversion of debt in Puerto Rico. The Collectiva's tactics subvert indebtedness, reversing the positions of power that debt generates. This inversion/subversion is elaborated as an expression of resistance through "detour", as Édouard Glissant understands it in Caribbean Discourse. The work ofYuderkys Espinosa Miñoso and Celenis Rodriguez Moreno on the colonial/modern gender system in the Caribbean, particularly in the Dominican Republic, is essential. Furthermore, the work of Rodríguez Moreno on the "mimetic formation of gender" allows pinpointing the interruption of coloniality regarding the desire, the time, and the space for the actions of la Colectiva. (shrink)

In this article, I examine what the ethical and political implications of conceptualizing and practicing philosophy for/with children in the neoliberal debt economy are. Though P4wC cannot alone bring about any significant transformation of debt political-economic realities, it can play an important role in cultivating oppositional debt ethics and consciousness. The first half of this article situates P4wC within the current global debt economy. Here, I summarize the analyses made by critical theorists of the ways that debt impacts public institutions, (...) and shapes individual subjectivity. The second half of this article builds on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of “counter-conduct.” For Foucault, counter-conduct is an ethical/political act of resistance against governmentality, one that makes possible alternative social relations and ways of being in the world. I argue in this section that P4wC should be conceptualized, and practiced, as form of counter-conduct that challenges power in the debt economy. Both the form of P4wC pedagogy, and the content that can be taken up in a collective manner in communities of inquiry, make P4wC a potential site for debt counter-conduct practices. Thought of as counter-conduct, P4wC is an educational practice with liberatory promise. I conclude this piece with brief ruminations on practicing P4wC in the time of COVID, and during the uprisings around the world against racial capitalism. It is suggested here that P4wC not only be practiced within formal education settings, but also in the social movements that are fighting to bring into being a world more just for all of us. En este artículo, examino cuáles son las implicaciones éticas y políticas de conceptualizar y practicar la filosofía para / con niños en la economía de la deuda neoliberal. Aunque P4wC no puede provocar por sí solo ninguna transformación significativa de las realidades político-económicas de la deuda, puede desempeñar un papel importante en el cultivo de una ética y una conciencia de la deuda opuestas. La primera mitad de este artículo sitúa a P4wC dentro de la economía de deuda global actual. Aquí, resumo los análisis realizados por teóricos críticos sobre las formas en que la deuda afecta a las instituciones públicas y configura la subjetividad individual. La segunda mitad de este artículo se basa en la conceptualización de la "contra-conducta" de Michel Foucault. Para Foucault, la contra-conducta es un acto ético / político de resistencia contra la gobernamentalidad, que posibilita relaciones sociales y formas de estar en el mundo alternativas. Sostengo en esta sección que P4wC debe conceptualizarse y practicarse como una forma de contra-conducta que desafía el poder en la economía de la deuda. Tanto la forma pedagógica de P4wC, como su contenido adoptados de manera colectiva en las comunidades de investigación, hacen de P4wC un sitio potencial para las prácticas de contra-conducta de la deuda. Pensada como una contra-conducta, P4wC es una práctica educativa con promesa liberadora. Concluyo este artículo con breves reflexiones sobre la práctica de P4wC en la época de COVID y de los alzamientos en todo el mundo contra el capitalismo racial. Aquí se sugiere que P4wC no solo se practique dentro de los entornos de educación formal, sino también en los movimientos sociales que luchan por crear un mundo más justo para todos nosotros. Key Words: Debt, Philosophy for/with Children, Counter-Conduct. (shrink)

A Citizen Public Debt Audit is an emancipatory praxis that can mobilize citizens to make legible public debt that has been accrued in their name. Ideally, it should hold creditors accountable for debt that is determined to be odious. This study examines the public debt crisis in Puerto Rico to illustrate the historically unjust circumstances under which public debt was accumulated on the island in the context of US federal taxation and economic policies. It explains how citizens are mobilizing via (...) a CPDA to make these circumstances legible and argues that citizens should not be obliged to service debt that was accrued contrary to their own welfare, especially if conditions of repayment threaten their current and future well-being. (shrink)

Automated algorithms are silently making crucial decisions about our lives, but most of the time we have little understanding of how they work. To counter this hidden influence, there have been increasing calls for algorithmic transparency. Much ink has been spilled over the informational account of algorithmic transparency—about how much information should be revealed about the inner workings of an algorithm. But few studies question the power structure beneath the informational disclosure of the algorithm. As a result, the information disclosure (...) itself can be a means of manipulation used by a group of people to advance their own interests. Instead of concentrating on information disclosure, this paper examines algorithmic transparency from the perspective of power, explaining how algorithmic transparency under a disciplinary power structure can be a technique of normalizing people’s behavior. The informational disclosure of an algorithm can not only set up some de facto norms, but also build a scientific narrative of its algorithm to justify those norms. In doing so, people would be internally motivated to follow those norms with less critical analysis. This article suggests that we should not simply open the black box of an algorithm without challenging the existing power relations. (shrink)

Austerity in Greece resulted in poverty, political and social turmoil and intense debates about collective identities, citizenship and the future. One of the main arguments has been that the Greeks should re-evaluate their relationship with the past and their over-reliance on national narratives. The task of re-evaluation can only be accomplished in the public spheres of politics and culture, where individual and collective voices gradually transform the imaginary significations that animate the social body. One such voice is Rhea Galanaki, a (...) novelist with a long and distinguished presence in Greek and European literature. The present article draws on her 2015 novel I Akra Tapeinosi in order to flesh out a feminist political vision for the future. This vision draws inspiration from women’s struggles against patriarchy in past decades, and resonates with the concepts of vulnerability and care, contributing to thinking a compassionate alternative to the politics of despair within and beyond the Greek borders. (shrink)

The fight for emancipation takes place on different levels, and one of them is the level of contemporary financial capitalism as debt-economy. Debt can be a major tool of control and exploitation in that it produces subordinate subjects situated in exchange relations of debt and credit. Recent work on financial debt and the debt-economy has, however, not taken gender adequately into account in philosophical definitions of indebted subjects. Gender analysis discloses how the debtor–creditor relationship is based on a contractarian idea (...) of the indebted subject as an autonomous moral agent, and on a masculine, that is, a-relational understanding of what counts as debt and what does not in the contemporary debt-economy. In contrast to atomistic notions of the subject in liberal, contractarian theories, relational notions of the subject as advanced in care ethics are a better point of departure for capturing the interdependence of subjects within a debt-economy as a core feature of a nonsustainable monetary system. On the basis of such analysis, care ethics also offers means for imagining ways of emancipation from private and public problem credit in order to make financial systems more sustainable and more just. (shrink)

Four new publications provide an overview of the relationship between Nietzsche’s philosophical thought and his political commitments. Together they highlight the true complexity of Nietzsche’s politics, since some of his ideas can be adapted to anarchist and right-wing positions as much as, for instance, to Frankfurt School critical theory. At the same time, these contributions underscore the limitations of a strictly positivist, or philological approach, since any assessment of Nietzsche’s politics cannot be detached from the political faultlines of the present.

The current global economic crisis concerns the way in which contemporary capitalism has turned to financialisation as a double cure for both a falling rate of profit and a deficiency of demand. Although this turning is by no means unprecedented, policies of financialisation have depressed demand (in part as a result of the long-term stagnation of average wages) while at the same time not proving adequate to restore profits and growth. This paper argues that the current crisis is less the (...) ‘normal’ one that has to do with a constitutive need to balance growth of abstract wealth with demand for concrete commodities. Rather, it marks a meta-crisis of capitalism that is to do with the difficulties of sustaining abstract growth as such. This meta-crisis is the tendency at once to abstract from the real economy of productive activities and to reduce everything to its bare materiality. By contrast with a market economy that binds material value to symbolic meaning, a capitalist economy tends to separate matter from symbol and reduce materiality to calculable numbers representing ‘wealth’. Such a conception of wealth rests on the aggregation of abstract numbers that cuts out all the relational goods and the ‘commons’ on which shared prosperity depends. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores the discursive configuration of paid work by Greek employees, shedding light to the symbolic pores they mobilize in order to craft its meaning as well as to the micro- and macrosocial implications of their argumentation strategies. Building upon a social constructionist epistemology, 22 in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed using tools and techniques provided by critical approaches to discourse analysis. The ‘school’, the ‘journey’, and the ‘slavery’ repertoires, as I named them, were the three discursive (...) patterns identified, each one grounded in different assumptions about the social universe and thus legitimizing or challenging the hegemonic fixations of the meaning of work. (shrink)

Review of Maurizio Lazzarato Capital Hates Everyone. Fascism or Revolution. Los Angeles: Semiotext Interventions.

Carl Schmitt’s critical insights into ‘economic-technical thinking’ and the dominant role that a ‘magical technicity’ is said to assume in the social horizon of his times offers an opportunity to reframe contemporary debates on political and economic theology, exposing a theological core behind technocratic administration. Starting from this premise, the article engages with recent inquiries into so-called ‘debt economy’, assessing the affective function that ‘deferment’ and ‘confession’ perform as dominant operators in the social imaginary of neoliberal governance.

In this article a reference to Jacques Lacan’s ‘capitalist discourse’ will help highlight the bio-political workings of neo-liberalism in times of austerity, detecting the transition from so-called ‘debt economy’ to an ‘economy of anxiety.’ An ‘il-liberal’ turn at the core of neoliberal discourses will be examined in particular, which pivots on an ‘astute’ intersecting between outbursts of renunciation; irreducible circularity of guilt and satisfaction; persistent attachment to forms of dissipative enjoyment; and a pervasive blackmail under the register of all-encompassing regulations (...) and evaluations — all of which elevates the production of success up to the point of a production and consumption of failure. (shrink)

The article explores a range of social scientific representations of credit and debt in the United States and Britain and how these have been organized around the problem of freedom. On the one hand, credit is projected as productive, embodying and securing liberal values of individual autonomy and self-determination. On the other, debt is portrayed as consumptive, ensnaring the individual, subverting her or his will and undermining the capacity for self-determination. The classic cultural injunction against consumer borrowing is captured under (...) the rubric of the Puritan ethic which portrays indebtedness as contrary to the values of individual freedom and autonomy; however, it is shown here how the meanings attached to credit and debt have always been ambiguous in practice. Over the 20th century, and continuing today, a number of economic writers have attempted to legitimize the development of consumer credit by demonstrating how it contributes towards freedom and security. However, it is shown how these accounts shift in response to changing economic discourses as well as credit’s growing pervasiveness. In contrast, sociological writers have tended to criticize the accumulation of debt as damaging to both individual autonomy and societal welfare. Again, these accounts also manifest a notable change in emphasis over time in response to shifting constructions of the problem of social change. Finally, recent empirical work is drawn upon to demonstrate the ways in which freedom itself can be a contingent and contextual element in the production of consumer credit. (shrink)

The review assesses first and foremost the capability of Mezzadra and Neilson’s book to radically tackle some urgent issues concerning both capital’s regulation of migratory movements and the subjective autonomy these latter incessantly express. The main original contribution of the text is a conception of the border as an epistemic device through which to address and act upon a variety of social processes, from migration policies to labour transformations, from capital’s restructuring to governmental regulations. Subsequently, two crucial topics are critically (...) discussed: 1) the methodological link between epistemology and conflictual subjectivity ; 2) the compelling – but problematic from a practical perspective – way in which the issue of political organisation is situated against the current phase of capitalist development by means of concepts such as translation and the common. (shrink)

This article explores left critiques of neoliberalism in light of the Black Lives Matter movement’s recourse to the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ in their analyses of anti-Black oppression. Taking a cue from BLM, I argue for a critical theory of racial capitalism that historicizes neoliberalism within a longue durée framework, surfacing racialized continuities in capitalism’s violence. I begin by revealing how neo-Marxist and neo-Foucaultian approaches to neoliberalism, particularly that of David Harvey and Wendy Brown, respectively, partition race from the workings (...) of contemporary capitalism. Such analyses obscure neoliberalism’s differential impact on non-white racialized populations, while simultaneously casting anti-racist struggles as divisive. In contrast, I then trace how the Movement for Black Lives policy platform invokes Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, investigating the utility of this framework for the movement’s demands. Building on BLM’s turn to the concept of racial capitalism, I finally offer an outline of a critical theory of racial capitalism to better theorize neoliberalism. By historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s historical arc, such a theory unravels the qualitatively different mechanisms through which racialized populations are pressed into circuits of capital accumulation. It also paves the way to move past the entrenched class-versus-identity debate on the American left. (shrink)

This chapter examines the relation between citizenship and orientalism under the new conditions of indebtedness resulting from austerity. Taking its departure from a condition of precarity under debt economy, the crisis of Europe is described as the anxiety produced by a reversal of those paradigms that have sustained the image of Europe so far. This reversal coincides with a return in Europe of that which for a long time was ejected outside in order for Europe itself to be constituted as (...) a unified symbolic reality. The chapter illustrates how this new economy has exposed a certain ‘disorienting’ effect of austerity, contributing to rekindling the ambiguities of Europe and therefore reconfiguring the image of the European self against its others. It concludes that this reconfiguration forms the background against which a new relationship between citizenship and orientalism in contemporary Europe should be examined. (shrink)

Basado en un trabajo de once meses de investigación etnográfica comprometida con la Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca en Barcelona y en Sabadell, este artículo argumenta que la financiarización de la vivienda va de la mano de la financiarización de la vida misma, la cual incluye la subjetividad y el cuerpo. La financiarización de la vida tiene lugar cuando esta se incorpora a los mecanismos de extracción de rentas a través de los circuitos de acumulación de capital, es decir, (...) a través de un proceso de proletarización. Este artículo muestra cómo, ante la imposibilidad de pagar, esta vida proletarizada en la relación hipotecaria se convierte en una vida fallida. Desarrollo estos argumentos de forma teórica en relación a la economía política y desde la experiencia de personas afectadas por la hipoteca. (shrink)

One of the key concepts in autonomist Marxism is the ‘general intellect’. As capitalism develops, labour and its products become increasingly ‘immaterial’, inasmuch as the physical side of production is taken over by automated systems. The result is that all aspects of the collective worker's affective, desiring and cognitive capabilities are now brought to bear on production itself. This problematises capitalistic notions of proprietary control, because it raises the possibility that the mass ‘cognitive worker’, and the inherently co-operative principles it (...) embodies, can detach itself from neoliberal mechanisms of subsumption and valorisation and lay the foundation for a new communalistic ethos. What is intriguing is that several autonomists evoke the work of Mikhail Bakhtin vis-à-vis the ‘general intellect’. Bakhtin did maintain that dialogism is an irreducibly collective phenomenon, and that we all contribute to the continuous making and remaking of language. We do not ‘own’ the words we use; as such, meaning is necessarily plural and heterogeneous, the product of the interaction of many texts and voices that can only be pragmatically and contingently unified. The present article seeks to explore the connection between Bakhtin and autonomism, focusing on the insight that communication is always ‘more than myself’, and hence integral to the ‘social brain’ that is a shared legacy, our ‘commonwealth’. It also raises the possibility of a more ‘troublesome’ Bakhtin than is generally countenanced by the liberal academy, and a concomitantly ‘dangerous’ dialogism that haunts a digitalised and networked world marked in equal measure by tremendous emancipatory promise and catastrophic threat. (shrink)

In the early twenty-first century, liberal democracies have witnessed their foundational norms of critique and deliberation being disrupted by a combination of populist and technological forces. A distinctive style of dispute has appeared, in which a speaker denounces the unfairness of all liberal and institutional systems of equivalence, including the measures of law, economics and the various other ‘tests’ which convention scholars have deemed core to organisations. The article reviews how sociologists of critique have tended to treat critical capacities as (...) oriented towards consensus but then considers how technologies of real-time ‘control’ circumvent liberal critique altogether. In response, a different type of dispute emerges in the digital public sphere, which abandons equivalences in general, instead adopting a non-representational template of warfare. This style of post-liberal dispute is manifest in the rhetoric of populists but does not originate there. (shrink)

This paper considers how science, philosophy, and “the virtual” inform the political potential of the communism that emerges within capitalism. It looks to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in particular What is Philosophy?, to set the terms of an anti-capitalist science and philosophy. Their understanding of the contrasting roles of the virtual in science and philosophy is then used to draw points of distinction between the theories of Manuel DeLanda, Jason Read, and Maurizio Lazzarato. DeLanda's work demonstrates (...) the uses of science, specifically the non-linear tracking of emergent phenomena. Read's work demonstrates the uses of philosophy, specifically the historical tracing of the capitalist mode of production. And Lazzarato's work demonstrates a combination of philosophy and science, specifically the theoretical identification of becomings not captured by capitalism. Throughout, the paper employs Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the “the virtual” to map the potentiality of commu.. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the relationship between the production and the value of Big Data. In particular I examine the concept of social media ‘prosumption’—which has predominantly been theorized from a Marxist, political economic perspective—to consider what other forms of value Big Data have, imbricated with their often speculative economic value. I take the example of social media firms in their early stages of operation to suggest that, since these firms do not necessarily generate revenue, data collected through user (...) contributions do not always realize economic value, at least in a Marxist sense, and that, in addition to their speculative value, these data have value beyond an economic valence. Instead I argue that in addition to their function as systems for accumulation, social media and their associated data have an affective value, related closely to their economic value, and demonstrate the efficacy of social media as systems designed for the appropriation and circulation of user attention. (shrink)

Friedrich Hayek’s defense of neoliberal free market capitalism hinges on the distinction between economies and catallaxies. The former are orders instituted via planning, whereas the latter are spontaneous competitive orders resulting from human action without human design. I argue that this distinction is based on an incomplete semantic history of “economy.” By looking at the meaning of “oikonomia” in medieval providential theology as explained by Giorgio Agamben and Joseph Vogl, I argue how Hayek’s science of catallactics is itself a secularization (...) of providential theology. This exposes Hayek to three criticisms: he unjustifiably neglects the possibility of tendencies toward spontaneous disorder in free markets, he condemns the “losers” of neoliberal competition to being providential waste on the road to general prosperity, and he imposes on people the duty to consent to a neoliberal order that hinders them from cultivating their inoperativity. (shrink)

In the beginning of the 1970s, Michel Foucault dismisses the terminology of ‘exclusion’ for his projected analytics of modern power. This rejection has had major repercussions on the theory of neoliberal subject-formation. Many researchers disproportionately stress how neoliberal dispositifs produce entrepreneurial subjects, albeit in different ways, while minimizing how these dispositifs sometimes emphatically refuse to produce neoliberal subjects. Relying on Saskia Sassen’s work on financialization, I argue that neoliberal dispositifs not only apply entrepreneurial norms, but also suspend their application for (...) groups that threaten to harm the population’s profitability. Neoliberal dispositifs not only produce entrepreneurial subjects, but also surplus populations that are expelled from the overall population to maintain its productivity. Here, the concept of ‘exclusion’ is appropriate if understood in Agamben’s sense of an inclusive exclusion. The surplus population is part of neoliberal dispositifs, but only as the element to be abandoned. (shrink)

The recently rising field of Critical Data Studies is still facing fundamental questions. Among these is the enigma of digital subjectivation. Who are the subjects of Big Data? A field where this question is particularly pressing is finance. Since the 1990s traders have been steadily integrated into computerized data assemblages, which calls for an ontology that eliminates the distinction between human sovereign subjects and non-human instrumental objects. The latter subjectivize traders in pre-conscious ways, because human consciousness runs too slow to (...) follow the volatility of the market. In response to this conundrum Social Studies of Finance has drawn on Actor-Network Theory to interpret financial markets as technically constructed networks of human and non-human actors. I argue that in order to develop an explicitly critical data study it might be advantageous to refer to Maurizio Lazzarato’s theory of machinic subjugation instead. Although both accounts describe financial digital subjectivation similarly, Lazzarato has the advantage of coupling his description to a clear critique of and resistance to finance. (shrink)

‘Time’ has been central to Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of modernity and his subsequent account of its solid and liquid variants. The experience of time in these accounts announces the coming of new opportunities, but it also signals a corrosion of our moral sensitivity. In this article, I assess Bauman’s contribution to the sociology of time and the centrality of our temporal character for his philosophical anthropology. There is a unique chance to be moral in liquid modernity, by unshackling the outdated (...) and habitual ethics of the past. The danger, however, lays in an increasingly ‘hurried life’, where a ‘nowist’ culture demands endless answers to the most banal of choices, often before these choices have even arrived. I argue that for Bauman the historical power of culture is to raise the ‘ought’ above the ‘is’. This results from our character as temporally-aware creatures. In our liquid modern times, the haste of life and its individualizing forces shift the character of that temporal awareness, endowing us with a false set of needs crafted by the market. The project of humanity itself has become, in Bauman’s diagnosis, subservient to maintaining the goals of the market. (shrink)

As an intellectual, economic, political and legal project, neoliberalism is not directed towards the rolling back of the state as an aim in itself. While its deregulatory tendencies, its commodification of public services and the undermining of systems of social welfare superficially suggest a generalised reduction in state power, it has been clear from the early 1980s that one of neoliberalism’s primary concerns has been the authoritarian reshaping of state power to engineer particular social outcomes, whether in criminal justice, the (...) disciplining of organised labour, the militarisation of national territory and migration, or the extension and deepening of regimes of austerity. This article introduces the recent work of Maurizio Lazzarato, who has argued that the asymmetrical creditor-debtor relationship is now the archetype of contemporary, neoliberal social relations. Ultimately, Lazzarato’s perspective tends to exaggerate the totalising powers of finance capital and leads him to endorse a form of political voluntarism, which fails to address the role of the neoliberal state as a site for forms of authoritarianism which are not solely generated by the debt relation. As a response, it will be suggested that aspects of Nicos Poulantzas’s concept of ‘authoritarian statism’ can be used to both strengthen our understanding of the authoritarian characteristics of the neoliberal state, and to imagine possibilities for resisting its expressions of power. (shrink)

Critical legal scholarship has recently turned to consider the form, mode and role of law in neoliberal governance. A central theme guiding much of this literature is the importance of understanding neoliberalism as not only a political or economic phenomenon, but also an inherently juridical one. This article builds on these conceptualisations of neoliberalism in turning to explore the wider historical, cultural and sociological contexts which inform the production of neoliberal authority. The papers in this collection were first presented at (...) the symposium ‘Forms of authority beyond the neoliberal state’, held at the Griffith Law School in December 2017. They consider the role of the corporation, the site of the university, the politics of debt, the genre of prestige television, and the archic sources of state violence, in order to imagine forms of authority which lie beyond neoliberalism as an ideology and a set of practices, and the ensemble of institutions which constitute the neoliberal state. The contributions draw on social theory, philosophy, cultural studies, legal geography and political theology in exploring new possibilities for cultivating judgement through and beyond the sovereign, political and aesthetic terrains of neoliberal governance. (shrink)

Adding to contemporary debates about the relationship between financialization and neoliberalism, this article investigates their entanglement at the level of subjectivity. Primarily, the article argues that financialization and neoliberalism are converging to produce a new form of subjectivity, post-profit homo œconomicus, an always indebted but credit-seeking enterprise. The value of this approach, the article demonstrates, is that it provides theoretical tools capable of grasping the differential production of subjectivity across the uneven and unequal striations of contemporary neoliberal society, from precarious (...) workers of the gig economy to financial sector elites. The article examines two figures who have become central to public and academic debates about neoliberalism and financialization – the low-waged, precarious worker and the indebted student – to consider how neoliberal subjectivity is produced and distributed unevenly. It concludes that within these fragmentary socioeconomic positions are different instantiations of always indebted but credit-seeking human capital. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by material social relations. In the now extensive literature on biopolitics, our biopolitical era is characterized by the blending and mixing of what were previously thought of as separate realms: life is biologized, politics is biologized and biology is politicized, life and politics have been economized, (...) and making life is intertwined with making death. This article provides a general overview of two strains of these biopolitical entanglements. It begins by examining the largely French and Italian focus on how politics and life have become economized in contemporary neoliberalism. We then turn to the mainly Anglo-American focus on the biologization of life. It concludes by taking up the central problem that arises from the messiness of biopolitics: whither the political of the biopolitical economy of life? Is there such a thing as the political proper in our era? If not, then what type of politics must be deployed to address the issues of our biopolis? (shrink)

What can money do? Can it be put to work to address deepening forms of social and economic inequality associated with the financial crisis, ongoing recession and still unfolding politics of austerity? Can we have faith in money as an injustice-remedying substance in a crisis-ridden and (still thoroughly) financialised reality? While the latter scenario is implied in recent feminist calls to redistribute resources to redress widening socio-economic inequalities under austerity, in this article I suggest that such a redistributive logic fails (...) to account for the shifting capacities of resources, including the capacities of money. To track these shifting capacities, I revisit the demands of the 1970s women's liberation movement and especially the assumptions at play in these demands that money both measure and distribute justice. While these assumptions were arguably politically efficacious in that moment, in the contemporary present, pervasive financialisation has involved a material transformation to the capacities of money, a transformation that, I will suggest, leaves its justice-distributing potential in doubt. This article therefore not only calls for careful exploration of the capacities of resources in analyses of crisis, recession and austerity, but also for feminist theory to rethink redistributive justice in the light of such transformations. Central to these considerations is money in the wages form. (shrink)

The concept of legitimacy is examined through a reading of Habermas’s work on communicative action, and through a reading of the opening chapters of Between Facts and Norms. The claim that legal juries function in a manner similar to a ‘parliament’ is rejected in favour of a claim that they exercise a decentred ‘particle’ of popular sovereignty. An analysis of the jury’s lifeworld origins is undertaken and, the essay then considers the democratic function of the operation of ‘jury equity’ whereby (...) juries may produce ‘perverse’ decisions, or as described in the USA – jury ‘nullification’ whereby juries bring in verdicts that go against overwhelming evidence. (shrink)

The Depression Era collective started as several photographers and video artists joined forces in March of 2011 to create an archive of photographic images about the Greek economic crisis, amidst the social and political upheaval provoked by ongoing austerity impositions of the EU on the Greek economy. In this essay, I examine selected images from Depression Era, including images from Marinos Tsagkarakis’s series Non-Places of Transition, Yannis Hadjiaslanis’s series After Dark, Pavlos Fisakis’s series Nea Elvetia, and Georges Salameh’s series Spleen. (...) Bringing together Marxist philosophical approaches to aesthetics, via Walter Benjamin and Jean Luc-Nancy, I argue that these photographers’ work is a performative undoing of capitalist understandings of linear time that capture and foster desires for alternative radical temporalities, for non-capitalist senses of time. I discuss how these works disrupt linear notions of time as progress, and as measure of productivity and economic growth, which are intrinsic to modernity, and the creation of financial debt. Against capitalist linear temporality, these Depression Era photographs enable a performative encounter, a realm of visual experimentation in which the spectator is invited to feel time differently, to imagine different alternative temporalities that emerge from the collapse of capitalism. (shrink)