Remaindered Life

by Neferti Xina M. Tadiar

In Remaindered Life Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new conceptual vocabulary and framework for rethinking the dynamics of a global capitalism maintained through permanent imperial war. Tracking how contemporary capitalist accumulation depends on producing life-times of disposability, Tadiar focuses on what she terms remaindered life—practices of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending. Through this heuristic, Tadiar reinterprets the global significance and genealogy of the surplus life-making practices of migrant domestic and service workers, refugees fleeing wars and environmental disasters, criminalized communities, urban slum dwellers, and dispossessed Indigenous people. She also examines artists and filmmakers in the Global South who render forms of various living in the midst of disposability. Retelling the story of globalization from the side of those who reach beyond dominant protocols of living, Tadiar demonstrates how attending to remaindered life can open up another horizon of possibility for a radical remaking of our present global mode of life.

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction

456 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 2022

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this book maybe a week or two ago, and I keep coming back to what Tadiar says. At first, the writing style was hard for me to follow, but once it clicked, I found myself really compelled by the arguments in the book. I want to say, the way that Tadiar write about drug users was so refreshing. As a harm reductionist-turned-sociologist, I always brace myself for dehumanizing rhetoric or rehashed tropes, but Tadiar deftly analyzes the necropolitical processes producing this subset of "expendable life." I found the analyses really compelling and it was one of those texts that you read, that informs the frame you use to analyze the world.

[Aldrake · Rating 5 out of 5]

challenging but worth basahin. ilang beses ko nang binabalik-balikan.

a great account of how the global capitalist war disenfranchises the communities of thirdworld postcolonial nations, thereby creating surplus populations, those whose lives are deemed as waste, disposabl/expendable and being marginalized by capital as a direct source of value for the social reproduction of capital by servicing those people directly engaged in productive work/extraction of value—those who are deemed as life worth living, valued/valorizable life, life as interest bearing capital.

such conditions are exemplified by migrant domestic servants whose lives function as life maintenance or machine for their employer's valuable life-production. the concept of "life-times", an expanded version of the classical marxist notion of socially necessary "labor time" is key in this analysis. under the post-fordist shift of capitalism's mode of accumulation, the distinction between the time of labor and time of living disappears, just like how the domestic servants are always at the unlimited disposal of their owner/employer.

[aerialxav · Rating 5 out of 5]

Preface, Part I and II and V. Deeply deeply moving.

MINDBLOWING. Sentences grappling totality.

[Yanan Rahim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant book—one of the very best of the best.

[Shreya U.K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. i want to read this many times more.

[Burc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was excited for this book just because I really enjoyed Tadiar's other work. Maybe I was too excited and somehow the book didn't live upto it?

I really appreciate the empirical scope of the book as well as the more sustained engagement with Rosa Luxemburg. Part I is just conceptual interventions, Part II focuses on the theme of "excess populat'ons" by focusing on the lives of slum dwellers and overseas workers from the Philippines. It tries to integrate this focus on surplus populations with a distinction between money as capital and money as exchange. This means that there are people who live their lives as money capital (people who get to see themselves as self-entrepreneurs, neoliberal subjects etc.) and people who are made surplus to the law of value.

Part III focuses on urbanization and the platform economy. Focuses on service work in Metro Manila and new infrastructure projects.

Part IV is about what counts as human and has insights into Philippenes history and the rise of Duterte.

Part V is about art work and film.

As the summary indicates the themes a little bit scattered and it's really the focus on philippenes in relation to us imperailism and the conceptual framework that is holding the book together.


Still was useful for thinking through the remaindered as a category that falls out of processes of social reproduction while also forming its associated milieu.

Bonus: this book kind of serves as a nice companion to Simone's urban surround.

[Dean Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

To read Remaindered Life in one sitting would be a disservice to oneself. Tadiar’s great achievement lies in verbalizing lives, be it disposable or remaindered, offering readers a reorientation—one that asks us to reckon with how value is assigned, and at what cost. The book definitely isn’t an easy read, before being rewarded enlightenment, one must trudge through numerous terminologies and theories, as well as be familiarized with its structure and language. However, once the reader becomes fluent in Tadiar’s lexicon, the book transforms into a must-read for anyone seeking to understand and contextualize this seemingly cyclical life of violence because of war, and also learn how people push back this brutality. After all, Tadiar reminds us:

“People fight back. They organize. Their fighting is lifesaving, life-making. Their organizing creates openings and connections so they are not engulfed.”