Language Follows Labour

This chapter invites the reader to rediscover Nikolai Marr’s scientific work, which is situated at the intersection of archaeology, linguistics, and anthropological language theory. Marr’s linguistic models, which Sergei Eisenstein compared to a reading of Joyce’s Ulysses, underwent however multiple waves of critique. His heterodox materialism, originating in an archaeological vision of history and leading to a speculative ‘palaeontology of speech’, reveals a complex vision of time, one traversed by ‘survivals’ and anachronisms.

Emergence that Matters and Emergent Irrelevance

With reference to the mobilization of physics in new feminist materialisms, this chapter argues that the fundamental ontology of matter suggested by physics is of no political relevance. Instead, its position is that devising effective strategies to deactivate the normative power of fundamental ontologies remains politically relevant despite long-standing critiques of essentialism. The chapter proposes that physics can be helpful both for understanding its own irrelevance and for inspiring strategies of deactivation.

Temporality and History in Spinoza

Spinoza’s philosophy is often characterized as a philosophy sub specie aeternitatis where time and temporality are notions without an expressive role. Consequently, understanding human history by means of the Ethics — using geometric demonstrations supported by metaphysical terms — and without the aid of the notion of time, can be considered as leading to an unsolvable problem. In this chapter, I draw upon Spinoza’s refusal of finalism to propose a renewed investigation about Spinozism and the issue of temporality, asking the question: could the absence of time in Spinoza’s work and his writings on efficient and immanent causality allow us to rethink a theory of history?

Anarchafeminism & the Ontology of the Transindividual

While literature on intersectionality proliferates, mention of anarchafeminism, which is a feminist tradition that focuses on the intersectional nature of female oppression, is scarce to say the least. This feminist strand of anarchism has largely been neglected both within feminism and the left. I argue that anarchafeminism is a particularly timely form of feminism because it is able to articulate a feminism free of essentialism. Furthermore, I argue that an ontology of the transindividual is the best possible philosophical ally for this project.

Materialism and Capitalism Today

This chapter identifies a materiality of social bonds that is not reducible to the logic of exchange value between alienated subjects. It analyses different forms of relationship of the human body to the milieu, following Marcel Mauss’s techniques of the body and André Leroi-Gourhan’s definitions of evolution. The producing body, it is argued, does more than only embody norms in a process of subjectivation. The externalization of the body in gestures cannot be reduced, therefore, to the evolutionary level that produces ethnic and social norms.

Materialism, Politics, and the History of Philosophy

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the political uses of the categorization of eighteenth-century French materialism as mechanistic and reductionist. Regardless of the current or outdated character of these materialisms, their rejection and the narratives that endorsed such judgments appear as partly ideological. Using several examples, this chapter will examine how this reductionist image of eighteenth-century French materialism was formed in the nineteenth century. It aims to show that the quarrels about materialism focused at that time on the question of a society’s dominant beliefs.

On Populist Illusion

Amplifying the distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, Ernesto Laclau crowns his examination of the blind spots of the Marxist tradition with an encomium of populism. His project to re-centre ‘the political’ does not postulate a beginning marked by a great event. Instead, Laclau celebrates ontological foundation as the abyss of all politicity. This chapter critically assesses how Laclau invests the body of the populist leader with an extra-quotidian character. I will also show how the assumption that the body of the leader animates political beginnings and primordially channels them restrains Laclau’s previous ‘deepening of the materialist project’.

A Materialist Education

Spinoza never wrote the ‘science of education’ he refers to in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. But I will argue that an ethical education can be deduced from his philosophy, which proposes a materialist education in the sense that it aims at a transformation of the affective sensibility of the body. Such an education should be understood as a re-education or counter-education, instead of what we ordinarily understand as education, which is a moral education.

Non Defuit Materia

The relationship between politics and metaphysics in Spinoza’s philosophy has been highlighted by Antonio Negri in The Savage Anomaly. But the determinism of God’s power, implying the identity between freedom and necessity, has not been analysed in its political effects. This chapter will show by whom the imaginary reality of free will can be politically employed; that due to the identity between reality and perfection, a ‘real’ tyranny can be considered a ‘perfect’ regime; how a free multitude, living in a democratic regime, differentiates itself from an enslaved one, and how its freedom can be necessary.