Subjectivity and Visions of the Common

Abstract

This article highlights the important contributions as well as unresolved questions presented in Yahya Madra and Ceren Özselçuk's and in Anna Curcio's work on subjectivity and the common. Madra and Özselçuk's psychoanalytic approach and Curcio's approach from within postoperaismo, despite their differences, allow us to address important issues regarding the relationship between contemporary capitalist production and subjectivity.

Keywords:

• Subjectivity
• Common
• Communism
• Libidinal Investment
• Race
• Gender

Notes

¹The comments in this section refer to a previous version of the article by Madra and Özselçuk.

²On a closely related topic, although there is an approximation in Louis Althusser's attempt to rethink the Marxist concept of “ideology” to a certain problematic in the work of Michel Foucault (Montag 1995), I think more work would have to be done in order to show that Foucault's notion of biopolitics as “interface” is assimilable to the use of it made here by Madra and Özselçuk. Although not the subject of Madra and Özselçuk article, I think it would be fruitful to investigate more directly the parallels and tensions between what Foucault termed his “ontology of the present” and the contemporary deployment of theories of “articulation.”

³A strong argument could be made that this development was in fact forced into being by the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

⁴A philosophy of production in a strict sense, which stands in sharp contrast to a “theory of the productive forces”, is most extensively elaborated by Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. He attempts to carefully distinguish a philosophy of singularity from a number of ontologies that attempt to tie difference to representation (Deleuze 1991, chap. 2). Although the complexities of such a philosophy are certainly too extensive to examine more fully in this article, the very general parameters of such a philosophy are well summarized by Kenneth Surin. “In a universe of absolute singularities, production can only take the form of repetition: each singularity, in the course of production, can only repeat or proliferate itself. In production each simulacrum can only affirm its own difference, its distanciation from everything else. Production, on this account, is a ceaselessly proliferative distribution (of all the various absolute singularities). Production is always repetition of difference, the difference of each thing” (Surin 1994, 26).

⁵For an impressive analysis of the formation of this internally split subject and its relations to the formation of racialization, see generally Da Silva (2007); for the specific role that Locke played in the formation of this vision of the subject, see chapter 3, pages 37–68 of her book.

⁶For a discussion of cooperation as an ontological precondition of capitalism in the related context of the status of cooperation within “formal subsumption” versus “real subsumption” in the work of Antonio Negri, see Surin (1994, 21–2, as well as a series of notes on this very subject in Surin 1993). For a general critique of the tendency within certain theorizations of communism to reduce communism to a derivative phenomenon to capitalism as well as its relation to a certain process of racialization, see generally Robinson (2001).

⁷For a similar point that powerfully details the “other side” of “hope” in the postracial era, see James (2009).