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Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature
Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology
Although both share a focus on human life as it is inscribed by power, Foucauldian biopolitics and Lacanian psychoanalysis have remained isolated from and even opposed to one another. In Being, Time, Bios, A. Kiarina Kordela aims to overcome this divide, formulating a historical ontology that draws from Spinoza, Marx, Heidegger, and Sartre to theorize the changed character of "being" and "time" under secular capitalism. With insights from film theory, postcolonial studies, and race theory, Kordela's wide-ranging analysis suggests a radically new understanding of contemporary capitalism--one in which uncertainty, sacrifice, immortality, and the gaze are central.
- GenresTheory
236 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2013
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November 30, 2018
In her 2007 book Surplus, Kordela brought together a number of key thinkers - not only Spinoza and Lacan, but also Marx, Saussure, and Kant - to engage in a fascinating and radical rethinking of the consequences of Spinoza's monism. At the core of this was an apparent contradiction: if monism is to be taken seriously, then all notions of telos are done away with, argues Spinoza, and yet human beings continue to need to *imagine* a fictional goal in order to live. This imagined order or goal is the surplus in Kordela's title, a concept of value that brings together economics, language, and any other system that is grounded in a differential system of evaluation.
This background is crucial for reading Being, Time, Bios, for Kordela's main purpose in this book is to look at how one gets from Sartrean phenomenology to her form of Lacanian/Marxist Spinozism. As I understand it, Kordela effectively does away with the notion of nothingness, and instead organizes existence into two modes: finite and infinite. What appears within the field of representation is finite, whereas what does not appear (but is alluded to within the field of finitude) is infinite. In a theistic perspective such as Spinoza's, God is able to oversee both finite and infinite; in today's secular perspective, however, we are limited to the finite while inferring the infinite from its effects (this accords with the Lacanian notion of the real).
Kordela relates this idea to theories of value, such as Saussure (linguistic) and Marx (economic). What is finite can be shown (e.g. a commodity) but the capitalist system then creates a logic of surplus-value that destabilizes representation to the point where an utterance always has a meaning that always points to an infinite surplus-value located beyond itself. Think of clothing, for instance: clothing is always a signifier at some level, but in the capitalist system this value takes on a life of its own, which is why Marx conceives of commodities that are able to communicate between themselves, outside of the subjectivity of the people wearing them.
Kordela also makes some fascinating claims about history and time. She notes is a concurrent move in modernity away from mythological narratives - in which the end ideologically assumes the beginning - toward a synchronic logos, a logic of the system. That doesn't stop the process of modern mythmaking, however - we need only to look at the facile explanations about the origins of capitalism or science to see the diachronic model still at work.
The most interesting part of this analysis for me was Kordela's brilliant analysis of two of Lacan's discourses: the Master and the University discourses (from Seminar XVII). Kordela shows how the Master discourse is rooted in the slave's naive presumption that the master possesses some inherent, surplus quality that openly justifies his superiority, a model of authority that is particularly prevalent in religious models. The repressed secret of the Master's discourse is that he actually doesn't know what he wants, even though he knows where to get it. The University discourse, by contrast, *suppresses* this notion of superiority and instead tries to pretend that knowledge is "objective," thus outwardly abolishing the master/slave distinction and claiming instead that all participants have equal access to knowledge. Of course, this move does not actually do away with inequality: instead, the repressed inequality becomes the unconscious of the university/scientific discourse.
The second half of the book aims to use the revised meta-ontology developed in the first half to reread the topic of biopolitics. As Kordela rightly argues, this area is ripe for a monist approach, since it relies heavily on the Cartesian split between body and mind. At the heart of this critique is a critique of utilitarianism, which is the main philosophical motive for the establishment of a biopolitics. At the core of its contradiction is the fact that utility is unable to provide a rational ground for itself: things should be useful, because, well, they just should be. Utilitarianism is simply assumed to be what human beings want "naturally." Kordela argues that biopolitics is ultimately a kind of reverse Cartesianism, whereby instead of a spirit that can switch between arbitrary bodies, bodies are instead foregrounded as the anchor of the mind/personality.
I don't know if I can do justice to the scope and innovation of Kordela's thought in this quick and oversimplified review of this book's contents. There is so much that I have left out, from necessity, from what is an extremely complex and brilliantly argued critique. If anything, Being, Time, Bios is even more ambitious than the early Surplus, and while this means it is more difficult to read and follow its arguments, it is nonetheless absolutely worth taking the time to unravel its main points.
This background is crucial for reading Being, Time, Bios, for Kordela's main purpose in this book is to look at how one gets from Sartrean phenomenology to her form of Lacanian/Marxist Spinozism. As I understand it, Kordela effectively does away with the notion of nothingness, and instead organizes existence into two modes: finite and infinite. What appears within the field of representation is finite, whereas what does not appear (but is alluded to within the field of finitude) is infinite. In a theistic perspective such as Spinoza's, God is able to oversee both finite and infinite; in today's secular perspective, however, we are limited to the finite while inferring the infinite from its effects (this accords with the Lacanian notion of the real).
Kordela relates this idea to theories of value, such as Saussure (linguistic) and Marx (economic). What is finite can be shown (e.g. a commodity) but the capitalist system then creates a logic of surplus-value that destabilizes representation to the point where an utterance always has a meaning that always points to an infinite surplus-value located beyond itself. Think of clothing, for instance: clothing is always a signifier at some level, but in the capitalist system this value takes on a life of its own, which is why Marx conceives of commodities that are able to communicate between themselves, outside of the subjectivity of the people wearing them.
Kordela also makes some fascinating claims about history and time. She notes is a concurrent move in modernity away from mythological narratives - in which the end ideologically assumes the beginning - toward a synchronic logos, a logic of the system. That doesn't stop the process of modern mythmaking, however - we need only to look at the facile explanations about the origins of capitalism or science to see the diachronic model still at work.
The most interesting part of this analysis for me was Kordela's brilliant analysis of two of Lacan's discourses: the Master and the University discourses (from Seminar XVII). Kordela shows how the Master discourse is rooted in the slave's naive presumption that the master possesses some inherent, surplus quality that openly justifies his superiority, a model of authority that is particularly prevalent in religious models. The repressed secret of the Master's discourse is that he actually doesn't know what he wants, even though he knows where to get it. The University discourse, by contrast, *suppresses* this notion of superiority and instead tries to pretend that knowledge is "objective," thus outwardly abolishing the master/slave distinction and claiming instead that all participants have equal access to knowledge. Of course, this move does not actually do away with inequality: instead, the repressed inequality becomes the unconscious of the university/scientific discourse.
The second half of the book aims to use the revised meta-ontology developed in the first half to reread the topic of biopolitics. As Kordela rightly argues, this area is ripe for a monist approach, since it relies heavily on the Cartesian split between body and mind. At the heart of this critique is a critique of utilitarianism, which is the main philosophical motive for the establishment of a biopolitics. At the core of its contradiction is the fact that utility is unable to provide a rational ground for itself: things should be useful, because, well, they just should be. Utilitarianism is simply assumed to be what human beings want "naturally." Kordela argues that biopolitics is ultimately a kind of reverse Cartesianism, whereby instead of a spirit that can switch between arbitrary bodies, bodies are instead foregrounded as the anchor of the mind/personality.
I don't know if I can do justice to the scope and innovation of Kordela's thought in this quick and oversimplified review of this book's contents. There is so much that I have left out, from necessity, from what is an extremely complex and brilliantly argued critique. If anything, Being, Time, Bios is even more ambitious than the early Surplus, and while this means it is more difficult to read and follow its arguments, it is nonetheless absolutely worth taking the time to unravel its main points.
Displaying 1 of 1 review