Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello: The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999–) [EN, RU]

“A century after the publication of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.

Why is the critique of capitalism so ineffective today? In this major work, the sociologists Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski suggest that we should be addressing the crisis of anticapitalist critique by exploring its very roots.

Via an unprecedented analysis of management texts which influenced the thinking of employers and contributed to reorganization of companies over the last decades, the authors trace the contours of a new spirit of capitalism. From the middle of the 1970s onwards, capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist work structure and developed a new network-based form of organization which was founded on employee initiative and relative work autonomy, but at the cost of material and psychological security.

This new spirit of capitalism triumphed thanks to a remarkable recuperation of the “artistic critique”— that which, after May 1968, attacked the alienation of everyday life by capitalism and bureaucracy. At the same time, the “social critique” was disarmed by the appearance of neocapitalism and remained fixated on the old schemas of hierarchical production.

This book, remarkable for its scope and ambition, seeks to lay the basis for a revival of these two complementary critiques.”

First published in French in 1999.

English edition
Publisher Verso, 2005
Translated by Gregory Elliott
ISBN 1859845541, 9781859845547
601 pages

Publisher

The New Spirit of Capitalism (English, trans. Gregory Elliott, 2005, updated on 2012-11-4)
Novyy dukh kapitalizma (Russian, trans. S. Fokin, 2011, added on 2017-6-18)

Lorenzo Chiesa, Alberto Toscano (eds.): The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (2009)

This volume brings together essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, the entanglement of philosophical speculation and political proposition within recent Italian thought. Nihilism and biopolitics, two concepts that have played a very prominent role in theoretical discussions in Italy, serve as the thematic foci around which the collection orbits, as it seeks to define the historical and geographical particularity of these notions as well their continuing impact on an international debate. The volume also covers the debate around ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), the feminist thinking of sexual difference, the re-emergence of political anthropology and the question of communism. The contributors provide contrasting narratives of the development of post-war Italian thought and trace paths out of the theoretical and political impasses of the present—against what Negri, in the text from which the volume takes its name, calls ‘the Italian desert’.

Contents
Antonio Negri, ‘The Italian Difference’
Pier Aldo Rovatti, ‘Foucault Docet’
Gianni Vattimo, ‘Nihilism as Emancipation’
Roberto Esposito, ‘Community and Nihilism’
Matteo Mandarini, ‘Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s’
Luisa Muraro, ‘The Symbolic Independence from Power’
Mario Tronti, ‘Towards a Critique of Political Democracy’
Alberto Toscano, ‘Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri and the Subject of Antagonism’
Paolo Virno, ‘Natural-Historical Diagrams: The ‘New Global’ Movement and the Biological Invariant’
Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘Giorgio Agamben’s Franciscan Ontology’

Publisher: re.press, Melbourne, July 2009
ISBN 0980544076, 9780980544077
Transmission series
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.5 license
180 pages

publisher
google books

PDF

John Roberts: Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory (2006)

“After modernism and postmodernism, it is argued, the everyday supposedly is where a democracy of taste is brought into being – the place where art goes to recover its customary and collective pleasures, and where the shared pleasures of popular culture are indulged, from celebrity magazines to shopping malls. John Roberts argues that this understanding of the everyday downgrades its revolutionary meaning and philosophical implications. Bringing radical political theory back to the centre of the discussion, he shows how notions of cultural democratization have been oversimplified. Asserting that the everyday should not be narrowly identified with the popular, Roberts critiques the way in which the concept is now overly associated with consumption and ‘ordinariness’. Engaging with the work of key thinkers including, Lukacs, Arvatov, Benjamin, Lefebvre, Gramsci, Barthes, Vaneigem, and de Certeau, Roberts shows how the concept of the everyday continues to be central to debates on ideology, revolution and praxis. He offers a lucid account of different approaches that developed over the course of the twentieth century, making this an ideal book for anyone looking for a politicised approach to cultural theory.”

Publisher Pluto Press, 2006
ISBN 0745324118, 9780745324111
147 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2014-7-26)