Re: Foucault and capital

Anyone interested in the Foucault-Marx connections should check out the
following new book by Jason Read (for HTML version with cover art and
details on how to order go to
http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=60812):

The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present

Jason Read


$57.50 Hardcover - 214 pages
Release Date: 9/11/2003
ISBN: 0-7914-5843-1

$18.95 Paperback - 214 pages
Release Date: 9/11/2003
ISBN: 0-7914-5844-X

Summary

Re-reads Marx in light of the contemporary critical interrogation of
subjectivity.

What is the relation between the economy, or the mode of production, and
culture, beliefs, and desires? How is it possible to think of these
relations without reducing one to the other, or effacing one for the sake of
the other? To answer these questions, The Micro-Politics of Capital re-reads
Marx in light of the contemporary critical interrogations of subjectivity in
the works of Althusser, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and Negri. Jason Read
suggests that what characterizes contemporary capitalism is the intimate
intersection of the production of commodities with the production of desire,
beliefs, and knowledge.

"Jason Read's book contains the most original and incisive readings of
Marx's texts that I have read in years, along with equally penetrating
analyses of Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. He demonstrates
beautifully along the way that French poststructuralism is not opposed to
Marxism, but that the two are in fact intimately related in their theories
of the production of subjectivity. The book helps reorient our
understandings of both Marxism and poststructuralism." - Michael Hardt,
coauthor of Empire

"This book represents a thoughtful reconsideration of Marx's notion of the
mode of production and does so in a way that is likely to appeal to a new
and younger readership by showing that mode of production is not simply an
economic concept but one that can explain the forms of subjectivity peculiar
to different kinds of social organization. The theoretical framework of the
book is refreshingly broad; the author draws from a number of theoretical
and philosophical schools and cannot easily be categorized as 'Deleuzean' or
'Althusserian.' This represents the perspective of a generation no longer
constrained by the notion of opposing theoretical camps so prevalent in the
1980s and '90s." - Warren Montag, author of Louis Althusser

Jason Read is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Southern Maine.


Table Of Contents

Introduction: There Is No Time Like the Present

1. The Use and Disadvantage of Prehistory for Life: Marx's "Pre-Capitalist
Economic Formations" and the Constitution of the Subject of Labor

Primitive Accumulation
Immanent Causality
The Prehistory of Capitalism
Production
Antagonistic Logic (Part One)

2. What Is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Karl Marx: The
Politics and Ontology of Living Labor

Abstract Labor
Living Labor
Disciplinary Power
Antagonistic Logic (Part Two)
The Production of Subjectivity

3. The Real Subsumption of Subjectivity by Capital
Real Subsumption
The Fragment on Machines
Immaterial Labor
Subjectivity: From Reproduction to Production
The Common

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index


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