Laurie Penny: Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · body, cannibalism, capitalism, feminism, sexuality, women
“A feminist dissection of women’s bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism, whereby women are both consumers and consumed.
Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women’s bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women’s political selfhood. Touching on sexuality, prostitution, hunger, consumption, eating disorders, housework, transsexualism and the global trade in the signs and signifiers of femininity, Meat Market is a thin, bloody sliver of feminist dialectic, dissecting women’s bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism.”
Publisher ZerO Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, 2011
ISBN 1846945216, 9781846945212
79 pages
interview with the author, cont. (Maeve McKeown, New Left Project)
review (Abby O’Reilly, The Independent)
review (Zoe May Sullivan, The Oxonian Review)
author’s columns: The Guardian, New Statesman, The New Inquiry
Benjamin Noys: The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · accelerationism, affirmationism, capitalism, critique, desire, difference, event, multitude, philosophy, politics, resistance, theory
The Persistence of the Negative offers an original and compelling critique of contemporary Continental theory through a rehabilitation of the negative. Against the usual image of rival thinkers and schools, Benjamin Noys identifies and attacks a shared consensus on the primacy of affirmation and the expelling of the negative that runs through the leading figures of contemporary theory: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou.
While positioning the emergence of affirmative theory as a political response to the corrosive effects of contemporary capitalism, Noys argues that, all too often, affirmation is left re-affirming the conditions of the present rather than providing the means to disrupt and resist them.
Refusing to endorse an anti-theory position that would read theory as the symptom of political defeat, The Persistence of the Negative traverses these leading thinkers in a series of lucid readings to reveal the disavowed effects of negativity operating within their work.
Overturning the limits of recent debates on the politics of theory, The Persistence of the Negative vigorously defends the return of theory to its political calling.
Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2010
ISBN 0748638636, 9780748638635
196 pages
review (Baylee Brits, Parrhesia)
review (Raphael Schlembach, Shift Magazine)
Jean-François Lyotard: Libidinal Economy (1974/1993)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, desire, economics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, semiotics, sex
Libidinal Economy, a major work of modern Continental philosophy in its own right, is regarded as the most important response to Deleuze and Guattari’s groundbreaking work. Having broken from Marxism, Lyotard presents an almost nihilistic attack on the philosophies of desire in a polemical and compelling work.
This philosophical development of the Freudian concept of ‘libidinal economy’ is in part a response to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, it can also be seen as culminating a line of modern thought ranging from de Sade, Nietzsche and Bataille, to Deleuze, Klossowski, Irigaray and Cixous.
First published as Economie Libidinale, Les Editions De Minuit, Paris, 1974
Translated and with Introduction by Ian Hamilton Grant
Publisher Indiana University Press, 1993
ISBN 0253207282, 9780253207289
275 pages