Refusal and désistance of the political

February 4, 2007

Below is a fragment from Lacoue-Labathe’s contribution to a 1980 seminar on Les fins de l’homme, which sought, as he put it, to “question of the links which indisociably unites the political with the philosophical.” The excerpt is from Retreating the Political. It clearly takes place as a response to what, in the 1980s at least, took the form of a dispute between Marxism and deconstruction.

But, since the effort of enshrining these philosophical/political camps is only functional to either/both the academy and sects - which is to say, to a certain priesthood, in both cases - the fragment might otherwise be read as the moment when the intersections (but also tensions) between - as I put it some time back - the philosophers of the désistance and the theoreticians of the refusal were explicitly put. Lacoue-Labarthe:


Exodus

January 14, 2007

Paolo Virno’s “About Exodus” (trans. Alessia Ricciardi, Grey Room, n.21, 2005):

Among the different ways in which Marx described the crisis of capital accumulation (overproduction, the law of diminishing returns, etc.), there is one that goes largely unrecognized: the workers’ desertion of the factory.







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