Abstract
This chapter begins by showing that the subject of all secular capitalist modernity has always already come after itself—that is, it has always been the posthuman subject–object. This results from the concomitant development of the capitalist mode of production and the secularization of thought. It then turns to biopower/politics to redefine it according to the posthuman character of modern subjectivity. The conceptualization of the posthuman as subject–object and its corollary reconceptualization of biopower eventually led the author to examine the biopolitical reappropriation of certain Judeo-Christian—which is also to say strictly speaking premodern—concepts, specifically: eternity, immortality, Jubilee, and sacrifice. The chapter concludes by briefly hinting at the consequences of this reappropriation of religious categories for understanding the specifically biopolitical form of racism.
This chapter was originally published as ‘The Subject-Object of Commodity Fetishism, Biopolitics, Immortality, Sacrifice, and Bioracism’ in a special issue of Cultural Critique, vol. 96 (Spring 2017): 37–70. We thank the editors for giving us permission to reprint the essay.
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Notes
- 1.
My position here deviates to some extent from Étienne Balibar’s reading of Marx’s relation among the components of the labor process in industrial or machinized production. The ‘labour process’ in general consists of (1) the ‘personal activity’ of ‘labour’; (2) the ‘object of labour’; and (3) the ‘means of labour’ (Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar , Reading Capital (London: Verso, 2009: 270–271). The difference between the eras of handicraft (and manufacturing) and industrial production consists in a transformation of the form in which the three elements of labor combine. Handicrafts rely on a ‘“technique”’ as ‘the indissoluble ensemble of a means of labour or tool, and a worker, moulded to its use by apprenticeship and habit,’ just as the tool must itself ‘be adapted to the human organism’ (Althusser and Balibar, p. 267). With the introduction of the industrial ‘machine-tool’ this ‘relationship is inverted’ so that the human ‘organism must adapt itself to the instrument’ (Althusser and Balibar, p. 268). From this Balibar infers that the ‘machine-tool makes the organization of production completely independent of the characteristics of human labour-power: at the same stroke, the means of the labour and the labourer are completely separated and acquire different forms of development’ (Ibid.). But if the laborer’s organism must adapt itself to the instrument, then what takes place here is not a separation between labor and means of labor but rather the subjugation of the former by the latter. Thus, the elements constituting machinic production are indeed restructured around ‘the unity of the means…and the object of labour,’ under which the labor activity (and the laborer) is entirely subordinated—rather than being simply separated (Ibid.). It is because this total subordination of the labor to the means of labor eliminates the individual character of the laborer’s ‘technique’ that a unit of production no longer consists of a particular group of specialized laborers but is rather a ‘material skeleton independent of the labourers themselves’ (Capital, Vol. 1)—a ‘set of fixed machines ready to receive any workers’ (Ibid.).
- 2.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), p. 62.
- 3.
Karl Marx , Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 164–165.
- 4.
Ibid., pp. 165–166.
- 5.
- 6.
Marx (1990), pp. 164–165.
- 7.
Balibar (2007), pp. 58–59.
- 8.
Ibid., pp. 56, 64–65.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 67.
- 10.
Alexandre Kojève , Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assemb. Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 25.
- 11.
By referring to ‘stages’ I do not imply a teleological conception of history of the Hegelian type, but rather I mean to acknowledge the fact that, following Spinoza, the essence and attributes of substance strive for their maximum actualization within historical time, and it is these different degrees of actualization that my term ‘stages’ indicates. If there is any telos in history , this is the maximum actualization of the potential (essence) of substance, and whatever of this potentia l is not yet actualized at any given historical moment, nevertheless, exists, albeit only virtually , as part of the essence of substance. This is why one can know the essence of substance in its entirety only retroactively, after its full actualization—which is why the self-consciousness of humanity qua posthumanity could not emerge but after a considerable actualization of commodity fetishism .
- 12.
Balibar (2007), p. 76.
- 13.
Ibid., pp. 77–78.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 78. This is why, as Balibar remarks, Marx’s ‘theory of fetishism’ is ‘one of the greatest theoretical constructions of modern philosophy,’ as it shows ‘that there is no theory of objectivity without a theory of subjectivity. By rethinking the constitution of social objectivity, Marx at the same time virtually revolutionized the concept of the “subject”’ ( Balibar, pp. 56, 64–65) as precisely the subject-object. Through the concept of commodity fetishism Marx overcame both the dualism between subject and object and that between transcendence and immanence .
- 15.
Ibid., pp. 76–77.
- 16.
Michel Foucault , ‘The Subject and Power,’ in Brian Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York/Boston: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and David R. Godine, 1999), p. 420.
- 17.
Baruch/Benedict de Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, ‘part I, prop. 18 and part. 2, prop. 43, schol.’ Ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 479.
- 18.
Given that, according to Spinoza, there is only one substance, the reader might wonder how one can treat one specific historical object or era, secular capitalist modernity , as if it were tantamount to substance, since there have been various other historical eras. In other parts of my work I explain how each historical era is a specific modification of one and the same substance, which then must actualize itself in its own stages. See also Kordela Capital: At Least It Kills Time (Spinoza, Marx, Lacan, and Temporality) and Rethinking Marxism 18(4), pp. 539–563 (Kordela, 2006, 2013).
- 19.
Marx (1990), p. 165.
- 20.
Balibar (2007), p. 66.
- 21.
Marx (1990), p. 255.
- 22.
Balibar (2007), p. 67.
- 23.
Furthermore, as I argue elsewhere, power has always been biopower , since the formation of the most archaic societies and is not only a form of power specific to the capitalist mode of production. Nevertheless, there are substantial historical modifications of biopower that clearly distinguish its forms in each era, depending on both the era’s mode of production and its epistemological configuration of the relation between immanence and transcendence. See Kordela, Biopolitics: From Tribes to Commodity Fetishism, Differences 24:1.
- 24.
Foucault , The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990): pp. 136–140.
- 25.
Giorgio Agamben , Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford Univeristy Press, 1998), pp. 127–129.
- 26.
Agamben (1998), p. 114.
- 27.
Ibid., pp. 124, 119, 73.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 176.
- 29.
Marx , Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books and New Left Review, 1993), p. 267.
- 30.
Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 82.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Foucault (1990), p. 136; Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 259.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 127.
- 35.
Spinoza (1985), ‘pt. 4, preface,’ p. 544.
- 36.
Spinoza , Ethics (1985), ‘part II, prop. 44, cor. 2, dem.,’ p. 481.
- 37.
Gilles Deleuze , Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 62.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
Spinoza (1985), ‘part V, prop. 29,’ pp. 609–610.
- 41.
See Jacques Lacan, Book XVII. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
- 42.
Marx (1990), p. 138.
- 43.
Ferdinand de Saussure , Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally et al., trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1966), p. 115.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 69.
- 45.
Foucault , The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 42.
- 46.
Marx (1993), pp. 663, 659.
- 47.
Marx (1990), p. 257.
- 48.
Éric Alliez, Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time, Foreword by Gilles Deleuze, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996),: p. 7.
- 49.
Aristotle , The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair, revised by Trevor J. Saunders (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 81; 1256b40.
- 50.
Ibid., pp. 82–83, 84; 1256b40, 1257b10.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 84; 1257b25.
- 52.
Marx (1990), p. 253.
- 53.
Aristotle (1992), p. 84; 1257b25.
- 54.
Marx (1990), pp. 253, 251.
- 55.
Aristotle (1992), pp. 84–85; 1257b25–40.
- 56.
Ibid.
- 57.
Deleuze , Postscript on Control Societies. In Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 191.
- 58.
Richard Dienst , The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good (London: Verso, 2011), p. 179.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 166.
- 60.
Ibid., citing Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989), 1/3 1,240.
- 61.
Dienst (2011), p. 129.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Ibid., p. 124.
- 64.
Ibid.
- 65.
Deleuze , How Do We Recognize Structuralism? Trans. Melissa McMahon and Charles J. Stivale. In Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), pp. 170–192.
- 66.
The ‘individual’ makes its last appearance (i.e., still functions as an operative category) in modernism, that is, until the end of the disciplinary society. This is Deleuze’s point when, in the same text that greatly inspired Dienst, he writes: ‘Disciplinary societies have two poles: signatures standing for individuals, and numbers or places in a register standing for their position in a mass.…[The] power [of disciplines] both amasses and individuates, that is, it fashions those over whom it’s exerted into a body of people and molds the individuality of each member of that body.…In control societies, on the other hand, the key thing is no longer a signature or number but a code….The digital language of control is made up of codes indicating whether access to some information should be allowed or denied. We’re no longer dealing with a duality of mass and individual. Individuals become “dividuals,” and masses become samples, data, markets, or “banks”’ (Deleuze 1995, pp. 179–180).
- 67.
Dienst (2011), p. 124.
- 68.
Georges Bataille , Theory of Religion. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989): pp. 32–33.
- 69.
Ibid., p. 33; emphasis mine.
- 70.
Ibid., p. 34.
- 71.
Ibid., pp. 33, 17–19.
- 72.
Ibid., p. 35.
- 73.
Ibid., p. 37.
- 74.
Ibid., p. 38.
- 75.
Ibid.
- 76.
Ibid., p. 43.
- 77.
Ibid., p. 44.
- 78.
Ibid., pp. 34–35.
- 79.
Ibid., p. 35.
- 80.
Marx (1990), pp. 165, 167.
- 81.
Dienst (2011), p. 124.
- 82.
Lacan (1981), p. 59.
- 83.
Dienst (2011), pp. 124–125.
- 84.
Ibid., pp. 128–129; referring to Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, eds. Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leon (Köln: Taschen, 2001), p. 51.
- 85.
Foucault (2003), p. 254.
- 86.
Ibid., pp. 59–60, 255–257.
- 87.
Ibid., p. 61.
- 88.
Ibid.
- 89.
Dienst (2011), p. 125.
- 90.
Lacan (2007), pp. 80–81.
- 91.
Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion. In Selected Writings, Vol.1, 1913–1926, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard Press, 1996, p. 288; second set of brackets inserted by me).
- 92.
Ibid.
- 93.
Ibid.
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Kordela, A.K. (2018). The Human Not in the Human. In: Basu Thakur, G., Dickstein, J. (eds) Lacan and the Nonhuman. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63817-1_4
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