Economics and Sociology in the Transition from Industrial to Post-Industrial Capitalism

Author(s):  
George Liagouras
Author(s):  
Christian Gilliam

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of ‘pure’ immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of ‘the political’; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or ‘micropolitical’ life of desire. He argues that here, in this ‘life’, is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately justifies the conceptual necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of ‘pure’ immanence are either apolitical or politically incoherent.


Hypatia ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Holland

This paper reconsiders Marcuse's Eros and Civilization from the perspective of Gayle Rubin's classic article “The Traffic in Women.” The primary goals of this comparison are to investigate the social and psychological mechanisms that perpetuate the archaic sex/gender system Rubin describes under current conditions of post-industrial capitalism; to open possible new avenues of analysis and liberatory praxis based on these authors’ applications of Marxist insights to cultural interpretations of Freud's writings; and to make clearer the role sexual repression continues to play in all forms of oppression, even in a public world seemingly saturated with sex.


Author(s):  
Christian Gilliam

Taken together, the four thinkers of ‘pure’ immanence offer a new take on ethicality, political analysis and political practice; moving the centre of gravity of analysis and action away from the political traid, toward a subjectivity-without-a-subject, one where we no longer look for a transcendent Outside or rupture in/of immanence to ground resistance in spite of our condition (i.e. dialectical excess), but rather work through our condition and its entangled lines of immanence and ‘three’ folds of disjuncture, through an affirmative ethics of self-experimentation. When read within a contemporary setting and so within the context of post-industrial capitalism, it offers a unique critique of it, bested in its refreshing radicality only by its accompanying a-systematic (as opposed to anti-system, i.e. dialectical materialism) political praxis. A praxis that, very much in the vein of Gramsci’s ‘passive revolution’, urges us to work throughcapitalism, in order to truly overcome it strictures and all that relates to it. What some might view as a self-indulgent Renaissance bourgeois concern of playing with one’s sense of self outside of politics, is in fact actually the site where the political is most at stake. Politics begins here.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document