Keywords
theology
fetishism
enstrangement effects
allegory
How to Cite
Abstract
The paper tries to once again bring into play the classical ideas of the Marxian critique of political economy and to demonstrate how these ideas can be reactivated by an injection of theology. Special attention will be dedicated to the theologically intensified notion of alienation, treated not only as a subject but also as a method of criticism. The aim of such an estranging method is to make visible the “transcendental plane” of the capitalist historical a priori. This will be done through the production of allegories, that is figurations of the infinite movement of the capitalist totality. Starting with a critique of the disenchanted Euhumerism of Hardt and Negri, who want to demythologise political economy as nothing but relations between people, I attempt to show the limits of their approach, by exposing the constitution of capital as the creation of an inverted reality. In this process, hypostasis of human labour (i.e. capital) gets the upper hand over human beings, not only in imagination, but also in reality, making a clear-cut distinction between real and imagined entities questionable. Through the analysis of the focal points of this process, I will attempt to demonstrate a complex interplay of subsequent disenchantments and miraculations, which establish capital as something more than human, while simultaneously naturalising its phantasmic becoming as the very core of the reality principle. Alienation as method tries to break the simultaneity of miraculation/disenchantment by dividing apparently unitary semblance – fetish – into distinct and potentially conflicted layers. Potential for this conflict is produced by two estrangement effects. Firstly, by juxtaposing a finite human subject with the infinite process of capital. Secondly, by thinking of conversion, which – becoming the highest point of alienation – could enable the human being to establish itself as an autonomous subject against the gods of this world and its own worldly self.
References
Agence France-Presse. 2014. “Orban trumpets harsh Hungarian ‘workfare’ scheme.” http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/140309/orban-trumpets-harsh-hungarian-workfare-scheme.
Althusser, Louis. 1962. “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht: Notes on a Materialist Theatre.” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1962/materialist-theatre.htm.
Althusser, Louis. 2014. “On Genesis.” Trans. Jason E. Smith. Décalages 1(2): 1–4.
Annanikova, Ludmiła. 2014. “Sześć punktów i wylatujesz: Packing po polsku.” Gazeta Wyborcza, 19th February.
Aronowitz, Stanley, and William Difazio. 2012. “The Jobless Future.” In Labour & Leisure, ed. Krzysztof Gutfrański. Gdańsk: Instytut Sztuki Wyspa.
Arthur, Chris J. 2004. The New Dialectic and Marx’s “Capital”. Leiden–Boston: BRILL.
Arthur, Chris J. 2009. “Possessive Spirit of Capital: Subsumption/Inversion/Contradiction.” In Re-Reading Marx: New Perspectives after the Critical Edition, eds. Ricardo Bellofiore, Roberto Fineschi. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Balibar, Étienne. 1970. The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism. In Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. Reading “Capital”. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books.
Balibar, Étienne. 2007. The Philosophy of Marx. Trans. Chris Turner. London–New York: Verso.
Bellofiore, Ricardo. 2009. “A Ghost Turning into Vampire.” In Re-Reading Marx: New Perspectives after the Critical Edition, eds. Ricardo Bellofiore, Roberto Fineschi, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Benjamin, Walter. 2003. The Origins of the German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London–New York: Verso.
Brzozowski, Stanisław. 1990. Idee: Wstęp do filozofii dojrzałości dziejowej. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie.
Brzozowski, Stanisław. 2007. Głosy wśród nocy: Studia and przesileniem romantycznym myśli europejskiej. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej.
Brizé, Stephan. 2015. The measure of a man (La loi du marché).
De Angelis, Massimo. 1999. “Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation: A Suggested Reinterpretation.” http://homepages.uel.ac.uk/M.DeAngelis/PRIMACCA.htm.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1996. “Schen und Schprechen: Erfahrungen, Aussagen – Erinnerung an ein Denkexperiment.” In Gilles Deleuze – Fluchtlinien der Philosophie, eds. Freidrich Balke, Joseph Vogl. München: Verlagsor.
Derrida, Jacques. 2006. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Introduction Bernd Magnus, Stephen Cullenberg. London–New York: Routledge Classics.
Derrida, Jacques, et al. 2008. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker. London–New York: Verso.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. 2015. The Brothers Karamazov. http://www.planetpdf.com/ebookarticle.asp?contentid=6161.
“Dragon’s Den. Edycja polska.” 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvwyXA0iCig.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1957. The Essence of Christianity. Trans. George Eliot. Introductory essay Karl Barth. Foreword H. Richard Niebuhr. New York: Harper & Row.
Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981–82. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–79. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gombrowicz, Witold. 1989. Diary. Vol. 2. Trans. Lillian Vallee. Chicago: Northwestern University Press.
Graeber, David. 2012. “Consumption.” In Materiality, eds. Krzysztof Gutfrański, Arne Hendriks, Ines Moreira, Aneta Szyłak, Leira Vergara. Gdańsk: Instytut Sztuki Wyspa.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Harvey, David. 2010. The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Henry, Michel. 1983. Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 2008. “Pleasure: A Political Issue.” In Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory. London–New York: Verso.
Jameson, Fredric. 2013. Representing Capital: A Commentary on Volume One. London–New York: Verso.
Juncker, Jean-Claude. 2015. “Interview.” Le Figaro, 29th January.
Kachanov, Roman, and Eduard Uspensky. 1969. Gena the Crocodile.
Kenney, Padraic. 1997. Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Konwicki, Tadeusz. 1999. Minor Apocalypse: A Novel. Trans. Richard Lourie. Afterword Robert L. McLaughlin. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press.
Lazzaratto, Maurizio. 2012. The Making of the Indebted Man: Essay on Neoliberal Condition. Trans. Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1997. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Seán Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lubac, Henri de. 1988. Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Men. Trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard, Elizabeth Englund. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics.
Marx, Karl. 1992. Early Writings. Trans. Rodney Livingstone, Gregor Benton. London: Penguin Classics.
Marx, Karl. 2015. Results of the Direct Production Process. Trans. Ben Fowkes. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/.
Mazzucato, Mariana. 2013. The Entrepreneurial State, Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. London: Anthem Press.
Miłosz, Czesław. 2001. “The Spirit of History.” In Miłosz, Czesław. New and Collected Poems 1931–2001. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press.
Olesik, Marta. 2014. Mieszczanin na górze Moria: Søren Kierkegaard, nowoczesny podmiot i oswajanie absolutu. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sic!.
Ontario Health Coalition. http://www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca.
Pitala, Wojciech. “Lewica nie może popierać górników.” http://www.krytykapolityczna.pl/artykuly/kraj/20150122/lewica-nie-moze-popierac-gornikow.
Postone, Moishe. 1996. Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rubin, Isaac Illich. 1972. “Marx’s Theory of Commodity Fetishism.” In Rubin, Isaac Illich. Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. https://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/.
Rubin, Isaac Illich. 1979. A History of Economic Thought. London: InkLinks.
Santorski, Jacek. 2015. “Praca z pasją (jednak) ma sens.” Sens w pracy 3: 5–9.
Schumpeter, Joseph. 1998. Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationaloekonomie. Cited in Backhaus, Hans Georg. 1995. “Between Philosophy and Science.” In Open Marxism. Vol 1.: Dialectics and History, eds. Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, Kosmas Psychopedis. London: Pluto Press.
Smith, Adam. 1976. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Vol. 1, Book IV. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stimilli, Elettra. 2011. Il debito del vivente: Ascesi e capitalismo. Macerata: Quodlibet.
Temkin, Aleksander. 2014. “Porfiry Pietrowicz, czyli urzędowe sumienie zapasowe.” Kronos 1: 223–229.
Thompson, Edward P. 1988. The Making of The English Working Class. London: Penguin Books.
Thompson, Edward P. 1993. “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.” In Thompson, Edward P. Customs in Common. London: Penguin Books.
Vivosmart. “Die Garmin vívo-Serie – Join the movement!”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRymY6Qz-os.
Vogl, Joseph. 2015. The Spectre of Capital. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2012. “Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 20: 66–79.
Wood, Meiksins Ellen. 2002. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London–New York: Verso.
License
“Theoretical Practice” seeks to put into practice the idea of open access to knowledge and broadening the domain of the commons. It serves the development of science, thinking and critical reflection. The journal is published in open-access mode under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license (detail available here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). Articles published in the journal may be freely distributed, stored, printed and utilized for academic and teaching purposes without restrictions.
They should not be, however, used for any commercial purposes or be reconstructed into derivative creations. Access to the journal may not be limited or offered for a fee by any third party.
Prospective authors are obliged to fill in, sign and send back the publishing contract compliant with the CC licencing. [PL.pdf, PL.doc, EN.pdf,EN.doc].
According to this contract, authors grant the journal a non-exclusive right to publish their work under the creative commons license (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0) without any financial obligation on both sides of the contract.
Before submission authors should make sure that derivative materials they use are not protected by copyright preventing their non-commercial publication. Authors are responsible for any respective copyright violations.