INTRODUCTION: THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONJUNCTURE
1. Here I refer to the purveyors of both “object-oriented ontology” (in philosophy) and “accelerationism” (in politics), whose anti-critical gestures I have assessed in several reviews. For a critique of the incoherence resulting from a detachment of speculation from critique in the work of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, see Nathan Brown, “The Nadir of OOO,” Parrhesia 17 (2013): 62–71. On the opposition of speculation to critique in Tristan Garcia’s Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, see Nathan Brown, “Speculation at the Crossroads,” Radical Philosophy 188 (November–December 2014): 47–50. On the accelerationist detachment of a retro-futurist utopian socialism from the Marxist critique of political economy, see Nathan Brown, “Avoiding Communism: A Critique of Inventing the Future,”Parrhesia 25 (2016): 155–171.
2. See Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), esp. 137–142. Heidegger’s question (answered in the affirmative) is: “Should time as pure sensibility stand in an original unity with the ‘I think’ of pure apperception? Should the pure I, which according to the generally prevailing interpretation Kant placed outside of all temporality and all time, be taken as ‘temporal’?” (121).
3. Here I want to acknowledge the importance of Catherine Malabou’s book Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality for grappling with the ungrounding of the transcendental. While my encounter with Before Tomorrow has come too late for a detailed engagement with Malabou’s reading of Kant, I consider her project akin to my own, though pursued on different grounds. Malabou’s approach is to displace the opposition between the a priori and the a posteriori through the concept of epigenesis to which Kant refers in Paragraph 27 of the Critique of Pure Reason and which Malabou elucidates and reframes through the resources of contemporary neuroscience and biology. My own approach is methodological: to reopen the problem of the relationship between rationalism and empiricism that would attend the ungrounding of transcendental critique—an approach I see first taken up, implicitly, by Hegel’s speculative critique of Kant in the Science of Logic (see Chapter 3). I look forward to offering an account—for now beyond the scope of this book—of the relation between my own rationalist empiricist approach and the epigenetic relay between reason and experience implicitly at issue in Malabou’s work. See Malabou, Before Tomorrow, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).
4. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 27.
5. Ibid., 60–62. For a translation of the very different version of this argument in Meillassoux’s dissertation “L’inexistence divine,” see Quentin Meillassoux, “The Factial,” trans. Nathan Brown, Parrhesia 25 (2016): 20–40.
6. Louis Althusser, “The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research,” in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 4.
7. Ibid.
8. Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, trans. G. C. Waterston (New York: Orion Press, 1968), 6. I have occasionally altered the translation for accuracy.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. See Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002).
12. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 5.
13. Ibid., 6.
14. Ibid., 7.
15. The theory of writing developed by Jacques Derrida, the techno-genetic deconstruction of the Husserlian epoché further developed by Bernard Stiegler, and the anti-humanist theory of discourse networks elaborated by Friedrich Kittler are all relevant to this brief account of the displacement of the centrality of the transcendental subject by mathematical inscriptions, technical apparatuses, and communication systems. I pursue this line of theoretical inquiry further in Chapter 6. See Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (1962), trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), and Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994), trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
16. Louis Althusser, “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists,” trans. Warren Montag, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (London: Verso, 1990), 70–165.
17. Louis Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 183–184.
18. Ibid., 184.
19. Ibid., 184–185.
20. Gaston Bachelard develops a theory of “the problematic” along these lines in Le rationalisme appliqué (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949). See Gaston Bachelard, “Corrationalism and the Problematic,” trans. Mary Tiles, Radical Philosophy 173 (May–June 2012): 27–32.
21. Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic,” 184–185 (note).
22. Ibid., 186.
23. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 101.
24. See Ken Adler, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World (New York: Free Press, 2002).
25. See Bureau Internationale des Poids et Mesures, “Draft Resolution A—26th Meeting of the CGPM (13–16 November 2018),” https://www.bipm.org/utils/en/pdf/CGPM/Draft-Resolution-A-EN.pdf (accessed July 16, 2018).
26. See Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 135–177.
27. Ibid., 163.
28. Ibid., 142.
29. Ibid.,143.
30. Ibid., 147–148.
31. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 3.
32. Ibid., 11–12.
33. Ibid., 11.
34. The application of the unit year to the dating of the earth may seem somewhat unsatisfactory, since it is a unit dependent upon the orbit of the very planet whose accretion is under consideration. If one likes, the quantities could be expressed using seconds as the metrical unit, since the definition of the second has been detached from the mean solar day and correlated, since 1967, to the periodicity of radiation in a caesium atom. See NIST, “Historical Context of the SI: Unit of Time (second)” in NIST Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty, https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/second.html (accessed July 17, 2018).
35. According to Hubert Krevine, “it is generally held that the whole process that forms a planet like Earth lasted more than a hundred million years.” See The Earth: From Myths to Knowledge (2011), trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015), 41.
36. The authoritative reference on the uncertainty of measurement is the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM), Joint Committee for Guides in Metrology, Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, 2008. The first paragraph of the GUM states: “When reporting the result of a measurement of a physical quantity, it is obligatory that some quantitative indication of the quality of the result be given so that those who use it can assess its reliability. Without such an indication, measurement results cannot be compared, either among themselves or with reference values given in a specification or standard. It is therefore necessary that there be a readily implemented, easily understood, and generally accepted procedure for character izing the quality of a result of a measurement, that is, for evaluating and expressing its uncertainty” (viii).
37. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 12.
38. Ibid., 17.
39. Hubert Krevine, The Earth, 43.
40. See Eran Tal, “The Epistemology of Measurement: A Model-Based Account,” PhD dissertation, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, 2012.
41. Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, 139.
42. Ibid., 148.
43. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 22.
44. Ibid., 76.
45. Meillassoux, “The Factial,” 23.
46. Meillassoux calls this “unsubordinated contingency”—a contingency that is not subordinated to any law implies the contingency of the laws themselves.
47. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5:183–184.
48. Ibid., 5:184.
49. Ibid., 5:184–185.
50. “In order to be convinced of the correctness of this deduction of the concept that is before us and of the necessity of assuming it as a transcendental principle of cognition, one need only consider the magnitude of the task of making an interconnected experience out of given perceptions of a nature that in the worst case contains an infinite multiplicity of empirical laws, a task that lies in our understanding a priori.” Ibid., 5:184.
51. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 15.
52. Ibid., 214–215.
1. ABSENT BLUE WAX: ON THE MINGLING OF METHODOLOGICAL EXCEPTIONS
1. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 3.
2. Ibid., 3–4.
3. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2:20.
4. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 6.
5. Descartes, Meditations, 21.
6. Ibid., 20.
7. Hume, Treatise, 6.
8. Ibid.
9. Articles that review various responses to Hume’s missing shade of blue include Robert Cummins, “The Missing Shade of Blue,” Philosophical Review 87 (October 1978): 548–565; Robert J. Fogelin, “Hume and the Missing Shade of Blue,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45.2 (1984): 263–271; John O. Nelson, “Hume’s Missing Shade of Blue Re-Viewed,” Hume Studies 15.2 (1989): 353–364; and William H. Williams, “Is Hume’s Shade of Blue a Red Herring?” Synthese 92 (1992): 83–99.
10. Hume, Treatise, 5.
11. Ibid., 6.
12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 144, B15.
13. Martial Gueroult, Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons, trans. Roger Ariew (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 1:75.
14. Ibid., 1:76.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Descartes, Meditations, 20.
18. Ibid., 20–21.
19. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134, 5:250.
20. Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xii.
21. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), xix.
22. Ibid., 109.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 108.
25. Descartes, Meditations, 22.
26. Michel Henry, “Videre Videor,” in The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 33.
27. Descartes, Meditations, 19.
28. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 34.
29. Ibid., 33.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 34.
33. “This means that the problem is and must be posed and resolved at the level of phenomena, excluding the hypocritical constructions of science and dogmatic philosophy. Therefore, only by taking the modes of sensation and imagination as they are posed and advanced by the power of their own phenomenality can they be exhibited as pertaining to thought, and in turn this ‘thought’ signifies nothing but that very phenomenality” (ibid., 35). “As thought’s ultimate possibility, affectivity reigns over and secretly determines all its modes” (ibid., 29).
34. Ibid., 33.
35. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 176.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boudas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
39. Descartes quoted in Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 169.
40. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 115.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 123.
43. Ibid., 115.
2. ALTHUSSER’S DREAM: THE MATERIALIST DIALECTIC OF RATIONALIST EMPIRICISM
1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 115.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 116.
4. Ibid.
5. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977, 15.
6. Ibid., 36.
7. Ibid., 46.
8. Quentin Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” Collapse 2 (2007): 73.
9. Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 189. See also Johnston, A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 158.
10. Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” 73.
11. Peter Hallward, “Anything Is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude” in The Speculative Turn, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 139. For a critique of Hallward’s response to Meillassoux’s work, see Nathan Brown, “The Speculative and the Specific: On Hallward and Meillassoux” in ibid., 142–163.
12. Louis Althusser, “The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research” in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 1–18.
13. Ibid., 3–4.
14. Ibid., 4.
15. Ibid.
16. Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 87–128.
17. Louis Althusser, “Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation: Ideology and Ideological Struggle,” trans. James H. Kavanagh, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Sciences, ed. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 1990), 9.
18. Karl Marx quoted in Louis Althusser, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015), 232.
19. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 112.
20. Ibid., 16.
21. Althusser, “Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation,” 9.
22. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 52.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 61.
25. Ibid., 115.
26. Ibid., 117.
27. Ibid., 116.
28. Ibid., 123.
29. Ibid., 115.
30. Ibid., 111.
31. Ibid., 36.
32. Louis Althusser, “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists,” trans. Warren Montag, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, 132–133.
33. Ibid.,133.
34. Ibid.,134.
35. Ibid., 128.
36. Louis Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy,” trans. Ben Brewster, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, 191.
37. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (New York: International Publishers, 1927), 61.
38. Ibid., 67.
39. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 13.
40. Ibid., 17.
41. Ibid., 122.
42. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 31.
43. Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, trans. G. C. Waterson (New York: Orion, 1968), 106.
44. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 27.
45. Ibid., 27.
46. Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy,” 197.
47. See Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 247–248. See also Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2002), 250–251. As Brassier points out, Meillassoux’s own interpretation of Popper’s position on this matter is contentious. See After Finitude, 133–134 n. 2.
48. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 82.
49. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 83.
50. Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy,” 185.
3. HEGEL’S COGITO: ON THE GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY OF CRITICAL METAPHYSICS
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 42.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 4–5. Pippin’s book sets out by specifying the first component of Hegel’s idealism as “the claim that a prior knowledge of the world, the ordinary spatio-temporal world, is possible—knowledge about that world, but achieved independently of empirical experience” (5). But this is the starting point that Hegel explicitly rejects.
5. Hegel, Science of Logic, 41.
6. Ibid., 42.
7. Ibid., 59.
8. See Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); and Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Hyppolite’s and Brandom’s accounts of Hegel are obviously very different and thus exemplify discrepant registers of the manner in which discursivity may be foregrounded in Hegel. For Hyppolite, “the open system of language and speech is thought in itself (Gedächtnis = Denken), the thought that turns itself into a thing, a sensible being, a sound, while the thing itself is negated, interiorized into thought. Language’s memory, with all its complex articulation, is the identity of being and thought” (29). For Brandom, it is the intersubjective dimension of rational normativity that requires discursive commitment. Brandom suggests that his account of intersubjective responsibility “makes sense if we think about the paradigm of discursive (conceptually contentful) norms as linguistic norms” (79). Thus Hyppolite emphasizes the ontological import of rational discursivity in Hegel, while for Brandom its import is pragmatic.
9. Hegel, Science of Logic, 41, 42.
10. Ibid., 54.
11. Ibid., 514.
12. Ibid., 515.
13. Ibid., 517.
14. Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, 37.
15. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy, 77.
16. Ibid., 1.
17. Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9.
18. Robert Pippin, “Back to Hegel?” Mediations 26.2 (Summer 2012), www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/back-to-hegel.
19. Hegel, Science of Logic, 41.
20. Ibid.
21. See Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006), 137–143, 436–438.
22. Hegel, Science of Logic, 669.
23. Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 246. I have amended the term “notional,” in Pippin’s text, to “conceptual” in order to retain consistency with my use of di Giovanni’s translation of the Logic.
24. Ibid., 246.
25. Hegel, Science of Logic, 42.
26. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 139.
27. Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic, 431.
28. Hegel, Science of Logic, 42.
29. Ibid., 514.
30. Ibid., 515.
31. Ibid., 517.
32. Stephen Houlgate, “Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic,” The Owl of Minerva 27.1 (Fall 1995): 37–49; Raoni Padui, “The Necessity of Contingency and the Powerlessness of Nature: Hegel’s Two Senses of Contingency,” Idealist Studies 40.3 (2010): 243–255. On necessity and contingency in Hegel’s Logic, see also Dieter Henrich, “Hegel’s Theorie über den Zufall,” Kant-Studien 50 (1958–59): 131148; George di Giovanni, “The Category of Contingency in the Hegelian Logic,” in Art and Logic in Hegel’s Philosophy, ed. Warren E. Steinkraus and Kenneth L. Schmitz (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980), 179–200; and John Burbidge, “The Necessity of Contingency: An Analysis of Hegel’s Chapter on Actuality’ in the Science of Logic,” Art and Logic in Hegel’s Philosophy, 201–217.
33. Hegel, Science of Logic, 480.
34. Ibid., 481.
35. Ibid., 482.
36. Ibid., 483.
37. Ibid., 484.
38. Ibid., 485.
39. Ibid., 486.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 488.
44. Ibid., 414.
45. Ibid., 415.
4. HEGEL’S APPRENTICE: FROM SPECULATIVE IDEALISM TO SPECULATIVE MATERIALISM
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 753.
2. Ibid., 752.
3. Ibid., 29.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 753.
6. Ibid., 752.
7. Ibid., 751.
8. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 461–462. Translation altered: I have followed the translation of “tilgt” as “annul,” as in Pinkard’s draft dual-language translation and in A. V. Miller’s earlier version. The complete clause in German is, “deswegen erscheint der Geist notwendig in der Zeit, und er erscheint so lange in der Zeit, als er nicht seinen reinen Begriff erfasst, das heisst, nicht die Zeit tilgt.” See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/pinkard-translation-of-phenomenology.pdf (accessed July 24, 2018).
9. Hegel, Science of Logic, 740.
10. Ibid., 413.
11. Ibid., 415.
12. Ibid., 413.
13. Hegel stipulates: “The fact proceeds from its own ground. It is not grounded or posited by it in such a manner that the ground would still stay underneath, as a substrate; on the contrary, the positing is the outward movement of ground to itself and the simple disappearing of it.” Ibid., 417.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 41.
16. Ibid., 514.
17. Ibid., 515.
18. Ibid., 514–515.
19. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 460.
20. Ibid., 461.
21. Hegel, Science of Logic, 672.
22. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 61.
23. Quentin Meillassoux, “L’inexistence divine,” PhD dissertation, Université de Paris I, Department of Philosophy (1996), 43. For a translation of this section of Meillassoux’s dissertation, see Quentin Meillassoux, “The Factial,” trans. Nathan Brown, Parrhesia 25 (2016): 20–40. I will cite the pagination of the French text for consistency with quotations from untranslated sections of the dissertation.
24. Meillassoux, “L’inexistence divine,” 47.
25. Ibid.
26. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 314.
27. Meillassoux, “L’inexistence divine,” 44.
28. Ibid., 57–58.
29. Ibid., 59.
30. Ibid., 35.
31. Ibid.
32. Hegel, Science of Logic, 413.
33. Ibid., 414.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 487.
36. Ibid.
37. Meillassoux, “L’inexistence divine,” 185.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 245–246.
40. Ibid., 87.
41. Ibid., 86–90.
42. Ibid., 245.
43. Ibid., 244.
44. Ibid., 246.
45. Ibid.
46. See ibid., 140.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 101.
49. Ibid., 76.
50. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Alan W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A495; B523. My emphasis.
51. Heidegger, Being and Time, 314.
52. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
53. Heidegger, Being and Time, 415.
54. Meillassoux, “L’inexistence divine,” 232.
55. Ibid., 158.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 160.
58. See Martin Heidegger, “Anaximander’s Saying,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 242–281.
59. Meillassoux, “L’inexistence divine,” 144–145.
60. Ibid., 145.
61. Ibid., 146.
62. Ibid.
63. See Meditation 18, “Being’s Prohibition of the Event,” in Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 184–190.
5. HEGEL’S KILOGRAM: TAKING THE MEASURE OF METRICAL UNITS
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 285.
2. Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, trans. G. C. Waterston (New York: Orion Press, 1968), 5.
3. For a concise account, see R. A. Nelson, “Foundations of the International System of Units,” The Physics Teacher 199 (December 1981): 596–613. For a narrative account, see Ken Adler’s classic The Measure of All Things (New York: Free Press, 2002). See also H. A. Klein, The Science of Measurement: A Historical Survey (New York: Dover, 2011), 105–119.
4. Adler, The Measure of All Things, 1.
5. Hegel, Science of Logic, 288.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 279.
8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 292.
9. Joint Committee for Guides in Metrology (JCGM), International Vocabulary of Metrology: Basic and General Concepts and Associated Terms, 3rd ed. (2008), 2.
10. Ibid., 16.
11. Hegel, Science of Logic, 282.
12. Ibid., 285.
13. 17th General Conference on Weights and Measures (1983). On the definition of metrical units in terms of physical constants, see Bureau Internationale de Poids et Mesures, “The ‘Explicit-Constant’ Definition,” http://www.bipm.org/en/measurement-units/rev-si/explicit-constant.html (accessed August 5, 2017).
14. See W. Nawrocki, “The Quantum SI: Towards the New System of Units,” Metrology and Measurement Systems XVII (2010): 139–150, and Peter Mohr, “Defining Units in the Quantum Based SI,”Metrologia 45 (2008): 129–133. For a layman’s introduction to physical constants, see the NIST’s “Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty,” Introduction to Constants for Nonexperts, https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/introduction.html (accessed August 5, 2017).
15. On the definition and accuracy of the standard second, see E. Tal, “The Epistemology of Measurement: A Model-Based Account,” PhD dissertation, University of Toronto (2012), 26–48, 93–138. For an excellent account of the philosophy of measurement more generally, see Eran Tal, “Old and New Problems in Philosophy of Measurement,”Philosophy Compass VIII (2013): 1159–1173.
16. The Planck constant h is linked to mass by two fundamental equations: E = hv and E = mc2. In the first equation, the energy of a photon (E) is proportional to its frequency (v) by a constant factor (h). The second equation means that energy (E) is proportional to mass (m) by a constant factor (c2). Since h is related to E by the first equation and E is related to m through the second equation, one can establish a relation between h and m, relating the Planck constant to mass. See NIST, “Redefining the Kilogram, Planck’s Constant,” https://www.nist.gov/physical-measurement-laboratory/plancks-constant (accessed August 5, 2017). The numerical value of h can be expressed in the unit J.s (Joules/second), which is equivalent to kg.m2.s–1. Thus, h can be linked to the unit of mass (kg) through the definitions of the meter (m) and the second (s). On the more complicated system of equations through which this relationship is established in experimental practice through the use of a kibble balance, see D. Haddad et al., “Bridging Classical and Quantum Mechanics,” Metrologia 53 (2016): A83–A85.
17. P. Richard, H. Fang, and R. Davis, “Foundation for the Redefinition of the Kilogram,”Metrologia 53 (2016): A6–A11. The recommendation of twenty parts per billion as the level of uncertainty requisite for redefinition was arrived at in 2010 by the BIPM’s Consultative Committee for Mass and Related Quantities (CCM). See its “Report of the 12th Meeting (March 26, 2010),” http://www.bipm.org/en/bipm/mass/avogadro/ (accessed August 5, 2017).
18. NIST, “Older Values of the Constants,” https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/archive2010.html (accessed August 5, 2017).
19. A. G. Steele et al., “Reconciling Planck Constant Determinations via Watt Balance and Enriched-Silicon Measurements at NRC Canada,”Metrologia 49 (2012): L8-L10.
20. NIST, “Fundamental Physical Constants,” https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?h (accessed August 5, 2017).
21. Bryan Kibble invented the Watt balance in 1975. See B. P Kibble, “A Measurement of the Gyromagnetic Ratio of the Proton by the Strong Field Method,” in Atomic Masses and Fundamental Constants, ed. J. H. Sanders and A. H. Wapstra (New York: Plenum, 1976), 5:545–551. The Watt balance was renamed following Kibble’s death in 2016.
22. For details, see Richard Steiner’s excellent article on the history of approaches to measuring the Planck constant, “History and Progress on Accurate Measurements of the Planck Constant,” Reports on Progress in Physics LXXVI (2013): 15–17. See also J. R. Pratt, “How to Weigh Everything from Atoms to Apples Using the Revised SI,” Measure IX (2014): 26–38.
23. NIST, “NIST’s Newest Watt Balance Brings World One Step Closer to New Kilogram” (2016), https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/06/nists-newest-watt-balance-brings-world-one-step-closer-new-kilogram (accessed August 5, 2017).
24. As Andreas et al. note, ‘Although a forthcoming new definition of the kilogram will be based on the Planck constant, h, the value of h can be calculated from that of NAwithout losing accuracy using the molar Planck constant, NAh. See “Counting the Atoms in a 28Si Crystal for a New Kilogram Definition,”Metrologia 48.2 (March 2011): S1-S13. For general information on the Avogadro Project, see BIPM, “International Avogadro Project,” http://www.bipm.org/en/bipm/mass/avogadro (accessed August 5, 2017). For technical information and experimental results up to 2011, see Metrologia 48.2 (April 2011), a special issue devoted to the International Avogadro Project. For more recent results, see I. Azuma et al., “Improved Measurement Results for the Avogadro Constant Using a 28Si-Enriched Crystal,” Metrologia 52.2 (March 2015): 360–375.
25. Devin Powell, “Roundest Objects in the World Created,” New Scientist (July 1, 2008), https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14229-roundest-objects-in-the-world-created (accessed August 5, 2017).
26. I. Azuma et al., “Improved Measurement Results.”
27. S. Schlamminger et al., “Determination of the Planck Constant Using a Watt Balance with a Superconducting Magnet System at the National Institute of Standards and Technology,”Metrologia 51 (2014): S15–S24.
28. S. Schlamminger et al., “A Summary of the Planck Constant Measurements Using a Watt Balance with a Superconducting Solenoid at NIST,”Metrologia 52 (2015): L5-L8. Over the whole course of its operation, the total uncertainty of the measurements taken with NIST amounted to 57 parts per billion.
29. D. Haddad et al., “Measurement of the Planck Constant at the National Institute of Standards and Technology from 2015–2017,” accepted manuscript, Metrologia (2017).
30. Ibid.
31. Technische Universität Ilmenau, “Researchers Developing a New Balance for the New Kilogram” (June 20, 2017), https://phys.org/news/2017–06-kilogram.html (accessed August 5, 2017).
6. THE TECHNICS OF PREHENSION: ON THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF NICOLAS BAIER
1. Nicolas Baier, “Vanitas,” trans. Kathe Roth inParéidolies/Pareidolias (Musée Regional de Rimouski, 2009), 29.
2. Ibid.
3. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 78.
4. Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 306. Quoted in Clément Rosset, Le réel: Traité de l’idiotie (Paris: Minuit, 1997), 43.
5. Ibid.; my translation.
6. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 137.
7. Ibid., 141.
8. Email communication with Nicolas Baier, November 3, 2010.
9. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 211.
10. Ibid., 210.
11. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 153.
12. Ibid., 142.
13. On “orthotheticity”—the retentional exactitude of inscriptions—and for an investigation of the situation of contemporary technics within the theoretical framework developed by Stiegler in Technics and Time, 1, see Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
14. Email communication with Nicolas Baier, November 3, 2010.
15. See Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
16. See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
17. See N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
18. Email communication with Nicolas Baier, November 3, 2010.
19. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 22.
20. Ibid., 148.
21. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2:21.
22. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 31.
23. Wilfred Sellers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956), ed. Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
24. Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind, trans. G. C. Waterston (New York: Orion, 1968), 95.
25. Ibid.
26. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1925), 49.
27. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 5.
28. See, however, Chapter IX of Adventures of Ideas, on “Science and Philosophy.” Here Whitehead offers an account of how “science and philosophy mutually criticize each other” through the reciprocal relation of concrete fact and conceptual abstraction. His model of this dialectic is the relation between Aristotelian empiricism (observation, classification) and Platonic rationalism (the primacy of mathematics). Bachelard’s epistemology is thus compatible with Whitehead’s account of the relation between science and philosophy, though Bachelard attends in more detail to the relation between rationalism and empiricism within science and devotes considerably more attention to this problem over the course of his epistemological writings.
29. Gaston Bachelard, The New Spirit of Science, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon, 1985).
7. WHERE’S NUMBER FOUR? THE PLACE OF STRUCTURE IN PLATO’S TIMAEUS
1. On the modern specificity of Spinoza’s concept of form, see Yahouda Ofrath, “Le concept de forme dans la philosophie de Spinoza,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 139.2 (April–June 2014): 147–173.
2. Ibid., 147.
3. Bas C. van Frassen, Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 265.
4. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1871), 17a. In addition to Jowett’s translation, I will refer to the translation by Donald J. Zeyl (New York: Hackett, 2000).
5. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 17b.
6. For a reading of the banishment of Socrates’s wife, Xanthippe, from the scene of the Phaedo, see Julie Beth Napolin, “On Banishing Socrates’ Wife: The Interiority of the Ear in Phaedo,” in Poiesis, eds. Nathan Brown and Petar Milat (Zagreb: MaMa Multimedia Institute, 2017), 156–175.
7. John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 9–10.
8. Ibid., 7.
9. Ibid., 8.
10. See, in particular, 51d.
11. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 28a.
12. Ibid., 29b–c.
13. Ibid., 29d.
14. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Zeyl, 35a–b.
15. Ibid., 32c.
16. Ibid., 36e.
17. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 31c.
18. Ibid., 32b–c.
19. See Plato, Timaeus, trans. Zeyl, 48e–53a.
20. Ibid., 52b.
21. In his major essay on the Timaeus, “Khora,” Derrida declares his intention to foreground the concept of “structure” in the tropology of the dialogue. In a suggestive passage, he writes: “Tropology and anachronism are inevitable. And all we would like to show is that it is structure which makes them thus inevitable, makes of them something other than accidents, weakness, or provisional moments. It is this structural law which seems to me never to have been approached as such by the whole history of interpretations of the Timaeus. It would be a matter of a structure and not of some essence of the khora, since the question of essence no longer has any meaning with regard to it” (94). It may well be that Derrida’s larger theoretical itinerary does indeed show that it is structure that makes tropology and anachrony inevitable. However, in his essay on the Timaeus, he does not develop a concept of structure as it applies to Plato’s text with any rigor. Indeed, he more frequently deploys the term “form” where he might have considered “structure” with greater precision, and he usually seems more concerned with the former. In the closing paragraph, for example: “In what is formal about it, precisely, the analogy is declared: a concern for architectural, textual (histological) and even organic composition is presented a little further on” (126–127). Jacques Derrida, “Khora,” trans. Ian McLeod in On the Name (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
22. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Zeyl, 52d.
23. Ibid., 53c–56c.
24. See A. E. Taylor, A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928); Francis M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1937).
25. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 53c.
26. See The Online Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon, dir. Maria Pantelia, http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=1&context=lsj (accessed August 15, 2018).
27. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Zeyl, 53b. See also Plato, Timaeus, trans. Desmond Lee, rev. T. K. Johansen (New York: Penguin, 1965), 53b.
28. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 54d.
29. Ibid.
30. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 216, 54d.
31. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 53a.
32. Ibid., 53b.
33. Ibid., 32c.
34. Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit (1934), trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 167.
35. A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 17–18.
36. Edmund Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry,” translated by John P. Leavey in Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 164.
37. Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, 88.
38. Alain Badiou, “Mark and Lack” (1967), trans. Zachary Luke Fraser with Ray Brassier, in Concept and Form, Vol. 1: Selections from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, ed. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (London: Verso, 2012), 172.
39. Ibid., 174.
40. Ibid.
41. Gaston Bachelard, La philosophie du non (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973), 5; my translation.
8. BADIOU AFTER MEILLASSOUX: THE POLITICS OF THE PROBLEM OF INDUCTION
1. Meillassoux engages in particular with Nelson Goodman’s pragmatic deflation of Hume’s problem in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See Quentin Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” Collapse II (2007): 55–81.
2. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 39.
3. Ibid., 22.
4. Ibid., 39.
5. See Quentin Meillassoux, “Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory,” Collapse III (2012): 107.
6. Hume, Enquiry, 39.
7. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 392.
8. Ibid., 391. See also Alain Badiou, L’être et l’evenement (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988), 429.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 180.
13. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 47–48.
14. Ibid., 48.
15. Ibid., 47.
16. Ibid., 34.
17. Ibid., 40.
18. Ibid., 113, 40.
19. Ibid., 141.
20. Badiou, Being and Event, 399.
21. Ibid., 400.
22. Ibid., 406.
23. Ibid., 393.
24. Ibid., 393–394.
25. Ibid.,406.
26. Ibid.,395.
27. For a lucid account of the limits of the encampment and the general assembly as forms of organization, see Jasper Bernes, “Square and Circle: The Logic of Occupy,” The New Inquiry (September 17, 2012), https://thenewinquiry.com/square-and-circle-the-logic-of-occupy (accessed August 19, 2018).
28. See Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, “Aleatory Rationalism” in Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004), 253–278.
29. Badiou, Being and Event, 406.
30. Ibid., 395.
31. Hume, Enquiry, 29.
9. THE CRITERION OF IMMANENCE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF STRUCTURAL CAUSALITY: FROM ALTHUSSER TO THÉORIE COMMUNISTE
1. Louis Althusser, et al, Reading Capital (1965), trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015), 344.
2. Ibid.
3. For an exposition of Macherey’s questioning of Althusser on the relation between “whole” and “lack” vis-à-vis “structure,” see Warren Montag’s chapter “Between Spinozists,” from which I quote here. Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 73–100.
4. Macherey quoted in ibid., 74.
5. Althusser quoted in ibid.
6. Ibid., 90.
7. Montag, “Between Spinozists,” 84.
8. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 86.
9. Althusser, Reading Capital, 26.
10. Ibid., 328.
11. Spinoza, Ethics, 206, V.6.P.
12. See ibid., 207, V.10.Sch.
13. Ibid., 65, II.4.
14. Ibid., 87, II.38.
15. Althusser, Reading Capital, 293.
16. Ibid., 255.
17. Ibid.
18. Spinoza, Ethics, 220, V.37.P
19. On the conceptual and tensions attending Althusser’s adoption of Spinoza’s epistemology, see Knox Peden, “Recuperating Science: The Sources of Althusser’s Spinozism,” in Spinoza Contra Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 127–148, esp. 148.
20. Althusser, Reading Capital, 24.
21. Ibid., 71.
22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 48.
23. Whereas Spinoza’s references to “the whole” have their ground in the ontological unity of substance, the epistemological criterion of the whole functions in his thought as a criterion of immanence, forcing thought to conceive things through their infinite essence. In Althusser’s work, on the other hand, references to “the whole” are located at the level of the structural unity of an historical process, such that this process cannot be thought according to the criterion of ontological immanence (which would erase its specificity). Transcendence is introduced by treating structural knowledge of finite things as if it were the third kind of knowledge.
24. The most lucid articulation of theoretical debates and practical positions constituting the history of left communism is Paul Mattick’s Anti-Bolshevik Communism (London: Merlin Press, 1978).
25. Althusser, Reading Capital, 291–292.
26. Ibid., 292.
27. Ibid., 255.
28. See Anton Pannekoek, “Party and Working Class” (1936), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/party-working-class.htm. Pannekoek’s major texts are World Revolution and Communist Tactics (1920), trans. D. A. Smart, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/tactics/index.htm (accessed August 25, 2018) and Worker’s Councils (1946), trans. J. A. Dawson (1950), Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1947/workers-councils.htm#h17 (accessed August 25, 2018).
29. Pannekoek thus supports the system of workers soviets against both parliamen-tarianism and trade unions, as well as the centralization of the Party form. See Parts IV, V, and VII of his 1920 text World Revolution and Communist Tactics.
30. Even when the left communist Paul Mattick, in “Humanism and Socialism” (1965), affirms that “the resumption of the struggle for socialism would also be the rebirth of humanist socialism” (168), he also sharply distinguishes what he means by the latter from the essentialism critiqued by Althusser: “Humanism can thus neither be related to, nor derived from, the essence of man. It refers to the social conditions and relation which determine the behavior of men” (162). See Anti-Bolshevik Communism, 157–168.
31. For an extended treatment of Rancière’s critique in Althusser’s Lesson, see Nathan Brown, “Red Years: Althusser’s Lesson and Rancière’s Error,” Radical Philosophy 170 (November-December 2011): 16–24.
32. Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista (London: Continuum, 2011), 92.
33. Ibid., 92.
34. While Rancière heralded the Lip struggle as a triumph of worker’s self-management and self-organization, the post-councilist group Négation wrote a text titled Lip and the Self-Organized Counter-Revolution (1974), trans. Petar Rachleff and Alan Wallach (Detroit: Black & Red, 1975). Available at https://libcom.org/library/lip-and-the-self-managed-counter-revolution-negation (accessed August 27, 2018). Noting that “in the absence of any real solidarity movement the workerist character of the struggle prevailed overs it proletarian origin as the conflict developed,” Négation argues that the Lip struggle demonstrates the counterrevolutionary character of affirming self-management within capitalist social relations. They conclude that the affair “reflects the end of the workers’ movement as a progressive historical force,” insofar as it exemplifies the objective limits of affirming working-class identity as a revolutionary position.
35. See Paul Mattick, “Spontaneity and Organization” (1949), in Anti-Bolshevik Communism, 117–137, and “The New Capitalism and the Old Class Struggle” (1976) available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1976/new-capitalism.htm (accessed August 27, 2018).
36. Mattick, “Spontaneity and Organization,” 120.
37. See Gilles Dauvé and François Martin, Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement (Oakland: PM Press, 2015).
38. Théorie Communiste, “The Present Moment,” Libcom, https://libcom.org/library/present-moment-theorie-communiste (accessed August 27, 2018).
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado About Nothing,” translated by Endnotes, Endnotes 1 (October 2008): 155.
47. Ibid., 155–156.
48. Though I cannot present the historical and analytical details of this periodiza-tion with the thoroughness they deserve, this aspect of TC’s work has been discussed and criticized in widely available texts. See “Aterword,” Endnotes 1 (October 2008): 208–216, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/1/en/endnotes-afterword; “The History of Subsumption,” Endnotes II (April 2010): 130–153, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/2/en/endnotes-the-history-of-subsumption; Screamin’ Alice, “On the Periodization of the Capitalist Class Relation,” Sic. 1 (November 2011), https://libcom.org/files/Sic-1-periodisation.pdf. I offer a closely related but modified periodization of the history of modernity through phrases of formal and real subsumption in my article “Post-modernity, Not Yet: Toward a New Periodization,” Radical Philosophy 2.01 (February 2018): 11–27.
49. Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado About Nothing,” 156.
50. Ibid., 157.
51. Ibid., 159.
52. Ibid.
53. If this second period of programmatism is structured by the reinforcement of proletarian identity as the reproduction of capital, in the United States we now see electoral politics pivot around opposing forms of nostalgia for this period: rejections of the post-1970s economic restructuring (“neoliberalism,” “financialization”) take the form of either the reaffirmation of Made in America working class identity (accompanied by tax breaks, tariffs, and xenophobic hostility), or the reaffirmation of social welfare as the sharing productivity gains (i.e., Fordism). While the first form of nostalgia is consolidated in Trump’s Make America Great Again ethos, the second is legible as the “progressive” wing of Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America. A related form of nostalgia is evident in “left accelerationism” as a theoretical tendency; the purported futurism of this tendency resembles an ahistorical synthesis of the proletkult, Soviet constructivism, and the Jetsons, routed through a contem porary utopian socialist fantasy of postcapitalist transition enabled by automation and universal basic income. See Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (London: Verso, 2015); for an extended critique, see Nathan Brown, “Avoiding Communism: A Critique of Inventing the Future,” Parrhesia 25 (2016): 155–171. Against neoliberal “globalism” (incarnate in the figure of Hillary Clinton), the reactionary right (Trump) stirs up nativist rage, while the reformist left (Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez) promotes pluralist redistribution. Meanwhile, utopian futurists promulgate an unholy alliance of Edward Bellamy and Elon Musk. What all of these have in common is a normative rejection of the counterrevolutionary economic restructuring since the 1970s without a serious recognition of its irreversible effects. Against neofascist nostalgia, the reformist left offers social democratic and programmatist nostalgia.
54. Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado About Nothing,” 159.
55. See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (London: Verso, 2006); Robert Brenner, “What’s Good for Goldman Sachs Is Good for America” (April 2009), http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/cstch/papers/BrennerCrisisTodayOctober2009.pdf (accessed September 1, 2018).
56. Aaron Benanav and John Clegg, “Misery and Debt,” Endnotes 2 (April 2010): 20–51.
57. Théorie Communiste, “The Glass Floor” (2009), Libcom, http://libcom.org/library/glass-floor-theorie-communiste (accessed Sept 1, 2018).
58. “Théorie de l’écart,” as yet untranslated into English, was initially published as Théorie Communiste no. 20 (September 2005). I will refer to the pagination of the pdf file available online through TC’s webpage, https://sites.google.com/site/theoriecommuniste/la-revue/tc-20 (accessed Sept 2, 2018). All translations are my own.
59. The term écart could also be translated as “gap” or “swerve.” I translate the term as “rift” in order to convey not only a space or absence, and not only a sudden shift in direction, but to connote an antagonist tearing or uneven fracture within the cycle of reproduction, produced by proletarian action.
60. Théorie Communiste, “Théorie de l’écart,” 8.
61. Ibid.
62. Théorie Communiste, “The Glass Floor.”
63. Théorie Communiste, “Théorie de l’écart,” 69.
64. Théorie Communiste, “Qui sommes nous,” https://sites.google.com/site/theoriecommuniste/la-revue (accessed September 2, 2018).
65. TC ‘s exchange with Dauvé and Nesic is collected in Endnotes 1 (Oct. 2008). See, in particular, “Normative History and the Communist Essence of the Proletariat,” 76–89.
66. Théorie Communiste, “The Present Moment.”
67. Ibid.
68. Théorie Communiste, “Théorie de l’écart,” 10.
69. Roland Simon, “Interview with Roland Simon,” Riff Raff 8 (Autumn 2008): https://www.riff-raff.se/en/8/interview_roland.php (accessed September 2, 2018).
10. THE ANALYTIC OF SEPARATION: HISTORY AND CONCEPT IN MARX
1. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 203.
2. Moise Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 25.
3. Ibid.
4. See Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (New York: Verso, 2011), 81–85 and 109–110; Michael Lebowitz, Following Marx: Method, Critique, and Crisis (Boston: Brill, 2009), 248–258; Howard Engelskirchen, “The Concept of Capital in the Grundrisse, “ in In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, ed. Riccardo Bellofiore, Guido Starosta, and Peter D. Thomas (Boston: Brill, 2013), 177–194, esp. 186–194; Endnotes, Ά History of Separation” in Endnotes 4 (October 2015): 70–192.
5. Jameson, Representing Capital, 81.
6. Ibid., 109.
7. Ibid., 130.
8. Ibid., 130–131.
9. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 104.
10. Marx, Capital, 482.
11. Ibid., 874–875.
12. See Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (Hamburg: Verlag von Otto Meissner, 1867), 1:700–701 and Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987), 1:645.
13. It may be the somewhat faulty logic of opposition in this passage that results in its excision by Engels: the second dissolution (of ownership by direct producers of the means of production) would seem also to be included in the first dissolution (of the circumstances in which direct producers were another’s property and owned the means of production).
14. Marx, Capital, 203.
15. Marx, Das Kapital (1987), 148.
16. Marx, Capital, 188.
17. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1993), 452.
18. Marx, Capital, 202–203.
19. For a more detailed and conjuncturally specific version of the argument that follows (though not a version focused on the concept of separation), see Nathan Brown, “The Proletariat,” Trans-Scripts 3 (2013): 61–75.
20. Karl Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 33.
21. Aaron Benanav and John Clegg, “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,” Endnotes 2 (April 2010): 20–51. Italics are added to the quotation from Marx in the Endnotes article.
22. Marx, Capital, 764.
23. Ibid., 798.
24. Ibid., 875.
25. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 63–64.
26. Ibid., 12.
27. Ibid., 13.
28. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 332.
29. Ibid., 42.
30. In recent years, Théorie Communiste has devoted its attention to integrating an analysis of gender into its analysis of class constitution and cycles of struggle. See Roland Simon, “Gender Distinction, Programmatism, and Communisation,” Théorie Communiste 23 (May 2010), http://libcom.org/library/gender-distinction-programmatism-communisation. For communist approaches to gender and race loosely aligned with communization theory see Endnotes, “The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection,” Endnotes 3 (September 2013): 56–90, and Chris Chen, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes Toward an Abolitionist Antiracism,” Endnotes 3 (September 2013): 202–223.
CONCLUSION: THE TRUE, THE GOOD, THE BEAUTIFUL
1. Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, trans. G. C. Waterston (New York: Orion Press, 1968), 6.
2. See Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steven Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010). See also Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, eds., The Idea of Communism (London: Verso, 2010).
3. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Polity, 2007), 97.
4. Théorie Communiste, “The Present Moment,” https://libcom.org/library/present-moment-theorie-communiste.
5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. Laurence Wishart (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 57.
6. Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis, in Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001).
7. For this manner of approaching Kant’s theory, I am indebted to conversations with Robert Lehman.
8. See Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), and Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Michael Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
9. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 107.
10. Ibid. Italics in original.
11. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 233.
12. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 103–129.
13. Ibid., 11–40.
14. Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
15. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 70–102.
16. See Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
17. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 243.
18. Ibid., 241.
19. See Michel Henry, Barbarism, trans. Scott Davidson (London: Continuum, 2012).