Marx's rethinking of the combination between absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value during the 1860s is very important in order to reconsider the co-presence of different forms of historical temporality and exploitation. Postmodernism presents a picture of a plurality of historical times in which the old lies beside the modern and the sweatshop beside the high-tech factory. Because it fails to provide an explanation of the relation between these forms, postmodernism produces a false image of an 'ahistorical' present. In this article (...) I want to show how the combination of differentials of surplus-value works and why a representation of a plurality of historical temporalities synchronised by the temporality of socially-necessary labour is the most adequate image to comprehend it. The theoretical task is to show how the mature categorial structure of Capital not only does not need an historicist philosophy of history, but is in fact incompatible with it. (shrink)

Through a prolonged engagement with two indispensable works on the critique of energy — Fossil Capital and Capitalism in the Web of Life — Alberto Toscano develops a theory of universal exhaustion, positing a dialectics and tragedy of depletion and exhaustion that points to the limits to both nature and capital.

David Thomas takes a close look at the United Kingdom during the 1970s to examine the emergence of “electroculture.” Mapping class struggle, dispossession, and state violence onto a history of oil, Thomas makes the case that labor politics and energy politics are deeply intertwined.

Amy Riddle focuses on two novels, Oil on Water and Cities of Salt, to explore the “cultural logic of late fossil capital,” exploring the relation between oil as a commodity form and oil as part of nature, on one hand, and on the other, the distinction between realism and naturalism as argued by Georg Lukács in “Narrate or Describe?”.

Through the dialectic of parasite and host, Oxana Timofeeva underscores the link between capital and energy, pressing this dialectic into a brief comparison of labor and oil to reiterate the importance of Marxist dialectics to the study and critique of energy.

Taking up work from the 2015 Venice Biennale and Fredric Jameson’s Representing Capital, Amanda Boetzkes explores the intersection of the use of energies in both political struggle and the work of machines, arguing for reading the importance of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “archaeomodern tool,” in which political energies can be gauged in their representation as petrified objects.

Andreas Malm tracks a long history of capitalist expansion and crisis to make the case that its “contradictions and convulsions” are the moments that energy consumption and production do the most to “reproduce the fossil economy on ever greater scales.” Examining economic slowdowns or moments of depression might provide insights into the expansion of fossil fuel energy dependence.

Turning to the ways immaterial forms of “accumulation and material forms of labor intersect” under postcolonial capitalism, Katherine Lawless maps the relation between cultural media and the flow of energy and asks: “What happens if we map the emergence of global memory cultures alongside the transition to nuclear energy?”.

If the radical moment of the inauguration of modern philosophy is the rise of the Cartesian cogito, where are we today with regard to cogito? Are we really entering a post-Cartesian era, or is it that only now our unique historical constellation enables us to discern all the consequences of the cogito? The paper deals extensively with these questions on topics introduced by Catherine Malabou's Les nouveaux blessés (The New Wounded). Malabou proposed a critical reformulation of psychoanalysis, her starting point (...) being external shocks, brutal unexpected encounters or intrusions, due their properly traumatic impact on the way they touch a pre-existing traumatic "psychic reality". Malabou's basic reproach to Freud is that, when confronted with such cases, he succumbs to the temptation of meaning: he is not ready to accept the direct destructive efficiency of external shocks – they destroy the psyche of the victim (or, at least, wound it in an unredeemable way) without resonating in any inner traumatic truth. These cases of post-traumatic subjects show that if we take the "stories they are telling itself about itself," the narrative symbolic texture, away, something (or, rather nothing, a form of nothing) remains, which is nothing but the pure subject of the death drive. This is an idea of cogito at its purest, its "degree zero," and this is also the reason why today we so adamantly resist the spectre of cogito. (shrink)