In Mute Compulsion (2023), Soren Mau questions how capital has managed to ‘sustain its grip on social life’, how, despite its catastrophic volatility, it has been able to persist from the 15th century through to the present. Critics on the left have generally theorized capitalism’s continuity through a combination of violence and ideology – andContinue reading “Rough Notes on Outlaw Appropriation and Anchorage (2021)”
Category Archives: Interludes
Update Autumn 2023
I haven’t made as much progress on the outlaw appropriation/money as novelist project as I would have liked over the past summer. In part this is because I remain undecided as to what genre of writing the project belongs to, whether it is a blog post, literary essay, or an academic article; but also whetherContinue reading “Update Autumn 2023”
Cracking Capitalism: Myth and Labour in Inventing Anna
My somewhat belated reflections on Inventing Anna (2022) were published last week on Tom Pazderka’s substack A Secret Plot. The article in part seeks to question what it is about contemporary con artists and hustlers that makes them historically distinct (assuming they are indeed historically distinct) from the mythic snake oil salesman that haunts theContinue reading “Cracking Capitalism: Myth and Labour in Inventing Anna”
Enzo Traverso’s Revolution: An Intellectual History
One of the questions raised by Frédéric Lordon’s Imperium relates to what a political body can do, what actions it is capable of, what projects it imagines are possible. Turning to Spinoza, Lordon argues that ‘what a body can do depends on the configuration of its ingenium’. As deployed by Lordon, ingenium seemingly denotes aContinue reading “Enzo Traverso’s Revolution: An Intellectual History”
Organising the Present – Part Two
Reflections on Political Formalism in Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk and Ricardo Piglia’s The Way Out In the Name of Conrad For Kim Minwoo, the way out of the infinite reconstitution of evermore intensive capitalist social relations is death: one he embarks on with others, who end their worlds together, a faint if unsettling vision ofContinue reading “Organising the Present – Part Two”
Epics of Magical Appropriation
Refusing and Remythologising Labour in Outlaw Literature The following was presented at the 19th Annual Historical Materialism Conference in London (10 – 13 November, 2022). Reflecting on his youthful involvement with a delinquent gang calling itself ‘The Club of Midnight Gentlemen’, the narrator of Roberto Arlt’s novel The Mad Toy (1926) fondly recalls that moneyContinue reading “Epics of Magical Appropriation”
Organising the Present – Part One
Reflections on Political Formalism in Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk and Ricardo Piglia’s The Way Out In recent years, the prevailing theoretical trends within literary studies have consistently undersold the value and world-making capacities of humanities scholarship. Rather than study the forms through which literature builds and models social relations, critics have been enthralled to aContinue reading “Organising the Present – Part One”
Completing the Unresolved Plot of History
Theory, Politics, and Literature in Ricardo Piglia’s The Way Out My article Completing the Unresolved Plot of History: Theory, Politics, and Literature in Ricardo Piglia’s The Way Out has been published on Tom Pazderka’s Substack, A Secret Plot. The piece considers the combination of mythology, capital, and furious readers in Piglia’s eerily anachronistic and offbeatContinue reading “Completing the Unresolved Plot of History”
Thomas Travers 