Capital at the Brink: Overcoming the Destructive Legacies of Neoliberalism

280 Pages·2014·1.753 MB·English

by  Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Uppinder Mehan (eds.)

Capital at the Brink reveals the pervasiveness, destructiveness, and dominance C
of neoliberalism within American society and culture. The contributors to a
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this collection also offer points of resistance to an ideology wherein, to bor- i Capital at the Brink
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row Henry Giroux’s comment, “everything either is for sale or is plundered for
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profit.” The first step in fighting neoliberalism is to make it visible. By discuss-
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Overcoming the Destructive Legacies
ing various inroads that it has made into political, popular, and literary culture, t
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Capital at the Brink is taking this first step and joining a global resistance that e of Neoliberalism

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works against neoliberalism by revealing the variety of ways in which it domi-
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nates and destroys various dimensions of our social and cultural life. i
n Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan
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Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences and Professor of
English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is editor and
publisher of American Book Review, and the founder and editor of symplokē.
His recent books include Neoliberalism, Education, Terrorism: Contemporary
Dialogues (2013, with H. Giroux, S. McClennen, and K. Saltman), Corporate
Humanities: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy (2013), and Turning the
Page: Book Culture in the Digital Age (2014).
Uppinder Mehan is Dean of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of
English at Fort Valley State University. He is editor, with Nalo Hopkinson, of
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, and his essays
have appeared in Comparative Literature, Paragraph, and Foundation: The
International Review of Science Fiction.
Cover Image: Original photograph © 2014 cc-by-sa Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, cropping and
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coloration by OHP. Original available at http://commons.wikimedia.org i L
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Series: Critical Climate Change

Capital at the Brink
Critical Climate Change
Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook
The era of climate change involves the mutation of sys-
tems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and
has stood, until recently, outside representation or address.
Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change
concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and
energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological
and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibil-
ity of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual
production and archives; but the current sense of deple-
tion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes
of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new
formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and re-
alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical
languages and conceptual templates, political premises and
definitions of ‘life.’ There is a particular need to publish in
timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the
boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the in-
terface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomor-
phic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change
is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemo-
political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of
terrestrial mutation.
Capital at the Brink
Overcoming the Destructive Legacies of Neoliberalism
edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan
OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS
An imprint of Michigan Publishing
University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor
2014
First edition published by Open Humanities Press
Freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.12832551.0001.001
Copyright © 2014 Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan, chapters by respective Authors
This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license.
Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy
their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under
the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair
use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.
Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restric-
tions. Please see the Permissions section at the back of this book for more information.
ISBN 978-1-60785-306-0
Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose
mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books
published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at Michigan Publishing are produced through
a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which
provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to pub-
lish leading research in book form.
OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS
www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org
Contents
Acknowledgements 9
Introduction: The Wrath of Capital 11
Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan
I Race, Violence, and Politics
1. Neoliberalism and Violent Appearances 30
Paul A. Passavant
2. The Turn to Punishment: Racism, Domination,
and the Neoliberal Era 72
Noah De Lissovoy
3. Neoliberalism, Environmentality, and the Specter of
Sajinda Khan 96
Robert P. Marzec
4. Rhetorical Assemblages: Scales of Neoliberal Ideology 120
Jennifer Wingard
5. Neoliberalism, Autoimmunity and Democracy:
Derrida and the Neoliberal Ethos 140
Zahi Zalloua
II Literature, Culture, and the Self
6. Complexity as Capture: Neoliberalism
and the Loop of Drive 158
Jodi Dean
7. Neoliberalism, Risk, and Uncertainty in the Video Game 186
Andrew Baerg
8. Neoliberalism in Publishing: A Prolegomenon 215
Jeffrey R. Di Leo
9. The Post-Political Turn: Theory in the Neoliberal Academy 241
Christopher Breu
10. Neoliberalism, Post-Scarcity, and the Entrepreneurial Self 259
Uppinder Mehan
Notes on Contributors 275
“Under neoliberalism everything either is
for sale or is plundered for profit.”
Henry Giroux,
The Terror of Neoliberalism