Potentia Of Poverty Marx Reads Spinoza

Potentia of Poverty opposes to the surplus-value of capital a surplus-concept of life – of the worker, of the non-worker, of the poor, of the rich: an excess of being with the power to undo capital by using its own mechanism. Antonio Negri writes in the preface that ‘The poor is the powerful, Pascucci tells us. She interprets Marx as a reader of Spinoza; however, maybe there is something more here than there is in Spinoza and Marx themselves. A further passage is necessary to grasp this “more”: namely, to tie the experience of poverty to an ontology of “cupiditas” [desire], that is, of “amor” [love]’.

Marx, Spinoza and Darwin presents a common thread in its argument: it shows how these authors—certainly with differences among themselves—consolidated a field of investigation that does not resort to transcendent or religious premises in approaching the phenomena they analyze. Thus, when Spinoza declared that the “will of God” is the “sanctuary of ignorance,” when Marx provocatively maintained that “criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism,” or when Darwin polemicized against a millennial creationist approach, all were taking a stand that invited us to view our world through a secular and immanent lens. In addition to this common thread, Martins discusses other issues present in the works of these thinkers, for instance the space that exists for human subjectivity from a Marxist perspective (which is not to be confused with philosophical “objectivism”): men and women are encouraged to act in the world. With this conceptual background, the concluding chapters of the book address the proliferation of some less examined Christian fundamentalisms in contemporary world, presenting an explanatory hypothesis for the phenomenon.

This book offers a close philosophical reading of King Lear and Timon of Athens which provides insights into the groundbreaking ontological discourse on poverty and money. Analysis of the discourse of poverty and the critique of money helps to read Shakespeare philosophically and opens new reflections on central questions of our own time.

A journal of political philosophy.

This classic collection of essays by E.P. Thompson, one of England’s most renowned socialist voices, remains a staple text in the history of Marxist theory. The bulk of the book is dedicated to Thompson’s famous polemic against Louis Althusser and what he considers the reductionism and authoritarianism of Althusserian structuralism. In lively and erudite prose, Thompson argues for a self-critical and unapologetically humanist Marxist tradition. Also included are three essays of considerable importance to the development of the New Left.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world’s most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots of their alienation from existing society and determination to change it extend back to the very heart of the Enlightenment, when Spinoza and other philosophers living in a rigid, hierarchical society colored by a deeply hostile theology first developed a modern revolutionary consciousness. Leading intellectual historian Jonathan Israel shows how the radical ideas in the early Marx’s writings were influenced by this legacy, which, he argues, must be understood as part of the Radical Enlightenment. He traces the rise of a Jewish revolutionary tendency demanding social equality and universal human rights throughout the Western world. Israel considers how these writers understood Jewish marginalization and ghettoization and the edifice of superstition, prejudice, and ignorance that sustained them. He investigates how the quest for Jewish emancipation led these thinkers to formulate sweeping theories of social and legal reform that paved the way for revolutionary actions that helped change the world from 1789 onward—but hardly as they intended.

Even as the rewards of work decline and its demands on us increase, many people double-down on their commitment to wage slavery-working harder, doing overtime, and learning to hustle. To paraphrase Spinoza, why do people fight to be exploited as if it were liberation? To find the answer, The Double Shift turns to the intersection of Marx and Spinoza and examines contemporary ideologies and the modern phenomena of work-motivational meetings at Apple Stores, the culture of Silicon Valley, as well as film and television, from Office Space to Better Call Saul-to argue for the transformation of our collective imagination and attachment to work.

This book brings together key essays from the career of social theorist John O’Neill, including his uncollected later writings, focusing on embodiment to explore the different ways in which the body trope informs visions of familial, economic, personal, and communal life. Beginning with an exploration of O’Neill’s work on the construction of the biobody and the ways in which corporeality is sutured into social systems through regimes of power and familial socialisation, the book then moves to concentrate on O’Neill’s career-long studies of the productive body and the ways in which the working body is caught in and resists disciplinary systems that seek to rationalise natural functions and control social relations. The third section considers O’Neill’s concern with the ancient, early modern, and psychoanalytic sources of the post-modern libidinal body, and a final section on the civic body focuses specifically on the ways in which principles of reciprocity and generosity exceed the capitalist, individualist body of (neo)liberal political theory. The volume also includes an interview with O’Neill addressing many of the key themes of his work, a biographical note with an autobiographical postscript, a select bibliography of O’Neill’s many publications, and an extensive introduction by the editors. A challenging and innovative collection, Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader will appeal to critical social theorists and sociologists with interests in the work of one of sociology’s great critical readers of classical and contemporary texts.