Unworkable: Delusions of an Imploding Civilization

208 Pages·2022·1.448 MB·English

by  Fabio Vighi

Unworkable
SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature
——————
Charles Shepherdson, editor
Unworkable
DELUSIONS OF AN IMPLODING CIVILIZATION
FABIO VIGHI
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Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2022 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Vighi, Fabio, author.
Title: Unworkable : delusions of an imploding civilization / Fabio Vighi.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2022] | Series:
SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438487250 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438487274
(ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Prologue. Loss of Gravity in the Capitalist Galaxy ix
Chapter 1. Labor, Value, and Other Capitalist Delusions 1
Dialectical Totalities 1
Brief Encounters 5
Setzung der Voraussetzungen 9
Hegel after Marx 13
The Fantasy of Surplus-Value 17
Hegel in and out of Political Economy 20
Chapter 2. Implosion of the Work Society 25
Modernity’s Self-deployment 25
Self-caused and Self-realized Reason 29
Real Work and Labor-time 33
Calling the Bluff 36
André Gorz’s Critique of Work 39
Disaster Economics 42
The Difficulty of Letting Go 46
Chapter 3. The Missing Cause 51
Chronic Constipation 51
A Worldless Discourse 54
The New Master 58
Colonization of the Productive Mind 61
Clouds of Impotence 64
vi CONTENTS
Labor as Vanishing Presupposition 67
Marx’s Teleology 71
The Transcendental Schema of Capitalist Time 77
Beyond Exploitation 80
Chapter 4. Dialectical Short Circuits 85
The Catastrophe of Liberation 85
Blindness of the Automatic Subject 89
Hegel: Being as Self-mediated Groundlessness 93
The Speculative Breakthrough 99
The Labor Decoy 103
Big Data and the Fanaticism of Breathing 107
Chapter 5. The Financial Demon 111
Shackled by Nostalgia 111
Capitalist Bulimia 116
The Anatomy of Finance Is the Key to the Anatomy of the
Real Economy 121
Genie out of the Capitalist Bottle 123
Neoliberal Perversions 130
Populist Symptoms 136
Viral Simulations 139
Epilogue. Emergency Capitalism and the Exhaustion of a Form
of Life 145
Notes 151
Works Cited 177
Index 187
Acknowledgments
Chapters 3 and 5 contain sections revised from earlier articles: “The Hegelian
Moment: From the Withering Away of Labour to the Concrete Universality
of Work,” Continental Thought and Theory 2, no. 4 (2019): 83–107; “Genie
out of the Bottle: Lacan and the Loneliness of Global Capitalism,” Crisis
and Critique 6, no. 1 (2019): 390–415.
vii

Prologue
Loss of Gravity in the Capitalist Galaxy
This book discusses the ongoing implosion of the work society from three
distinct angles: the dialectic of capital and labor (Hegel and Marx), our
societies’ loss of symbolic efficiency (Lacan and Gorz), and the ideology of
simulation (Baudrillard). The overarching aim of my three-pronged approach
is to show that our implosive condition is rooted in the unstoppable dis-
solution of our shared labor narrative, as well as in a pervasive ideological
structure preventing us from confronting the cause of such dissolution. To
this end, Hegel and Lacan are engaged as thinkers of the ‘empty cause,’
which needs to be endorsed if we are to find a way out of the current
stalemate. Marx, on the other hand, is situated between radical critique and
appraisal of labor as modernity’s ontological horizon. Finally, Baudrillard is
introduced to illuminate the insidious ideological text of our time, where
the evaporation of the social bond is obscured by the imposition of viral
hyperreality.
While the book’s central themes return in each of its five chapters, I
start from the analysis of the capitalist dialectic and end with a critique of
contemporary ideology. Much of the book is an attempt to unravel capitalist
accumulation as an exhausted mode of production that is now approaching
its redde rationem. My opening gambit is to show how capitalist implosion
can be properly appreciated only by supplementing Marx’s critique of political
economy with Hegel’s speculative dialectics. The only way to think labor
dialectically is by endorsing its speculative identity with capital. In this
regard, the critical discussion of labor is cross-fertilized with the assessment
of technological automation’s role in undermining our world’s reproductive
capacity. Notwithstanding the devastating impact of automation since the
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