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Here’s the abstract for the oikopolitics piece:

In his 2009 Inaugural speech, US President Obama spoke of America’s future by not only invoking We the People’s faith in founding ideals and documents, but he did so – by this time, as his signature rhetoricity – by evoking storms. Every “so often,” he remarked, “the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.” He also spoke of an immeasurable “sapping of confidence” in America’s futurity, alongside “indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics,” such as foreclosures, rising unemployment, and a costly health care. The essay that follows was written just prior to that speech, but it nevertheless attempts to understand how the measurable acquaints itself with the immeasurable (desire and the future) through a meshing of gender, race, sex, labour and desire in the accounting of the household – and the oikos, in all its etymological tightening. The question, in one sense, is how the coincidence of crises financial and climatic might unfold and recompose an oikopolitics. The concept of an oikopolitics is offered here as something far more explanatory of the genealogical and familial than understandings of sovereignty through a biopolitical lens have admitted, and something far less subjectively universal than many accounts of affect and intimacy aspire to. It does not simply point to a blurring of the classical distinction between the public realm of politics and the private domain of the household in the trammeling of arousal to labouring, and a socio-political horizon whose possible forms of relation are those of the national state conceived as home. It is also explanatory of the ways politics assumes the task of securing an intimately normative disposition, the raising of a properly political subject on the grounds of the at once familial and national. It is, in another sense then, a post-autonomist contribution to discussions that, thankfully, remain turbulent.

The beloved and I saw Babel a while ago. I spent much of the film with tears running down my face, and I’m still not sure what to make of it. It felt like being caught up in a torrent, which I suppose was the point: the ways in which the War on Terror Reign of Terror (and border policing) so overdetermined each instance in the film that what might otherwise have amounted to an accident or argument spirals into catastrophe.

The much-awaited edition of Borderlands on Althusser is up and about.

A successful encounter, one that is not brief, but lasts, never guarantees that it will continue to last tomorrow rather than come undone. Just as it might have not taken place, it may no longer take place.

Althusser, on the encounter, aleatory materialism, class formation and (political-economic) laws.

In untold passages, Marx […] explains that the capitalist mode of production arose from the ‘encounter‘ between ‘the owners of money’ and the proletarian stripped of everything but his labour-power. ‘It so happens’ that this encounter took place, and ‘took hold’, which means that it did not come undone as soon as it came about, but lasted, and became an accomplished fact, the accomplished fact of this encounter, inducing stable relationships and a necessity the study of which yields ‘laws’,

Following on from recent posts, and to grasp something of the particularity of Virno’s concept of the ‘frontier’, and perhaps also the Spaghetti Western, re-reading Althusser’s “The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza”, from Montag and Stolze (eds), The New Spinoza. An extract:

I came to Machiavelli by means of a word, ceaselessly repeated, of Marx’s, saying that capitalism was born from the “encounter between the man with money and free laborers,” free, that is, stripped of everything, of their means of labor, of their abodes and their families, in the great appropriation of the English countrysides (this was his preferred example). Encounter: Again a ‘casus,’ a ‘case,’ a factual accident without origin, cause or end.

a·le·a·to·ry (ā’lē-A-tôr’ē, -tōr’ē) adj : Dependent on chance, luck, or an uncertain outcome.