On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory.
04.03.2010
Nietzsche with Deleuze
The negative in the positive
04.02.2010
The notion of becoming in Deleuze and Guattari
Becoming
04.11.2009
On Esposito's concept of bio/politics
Biopotentiality
08.10.2009
Reading Althusser
07.10.2009
Rancière's farewell to Althusserian Marxism
La leçon d'Althusser
06.10.2009
Debating Althusser's philosophy of the encounter
What is aleatory materialism?
03.09.2009
Negri on materialism
Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo
02.09.2009
Tronti and Cacciari's concept of the political
The autonomy of the political
17.06.2009
"From Capital-Labor to Capital-Life" by M. Lazzarato
Invention
20.05.2009
Reading Simondon
Individuation
09.04.2009
Nancy on the singularity of death
Excess
11.03.2009
Agamben and Deleuze on pure immanence
Immanence
11.03.2009
Encountering Althusser
Preparatory meeting
11.03.2009
Workshop: becoming-major, becoming-minor
Preparatory meeting
07.02.2009
Foucault with Deleuze
The force of the outside II
06.02.2009
Superimposing diagrams: discipline and governmentality
The force of the outside
06.02.2009
Encountering Althusser
Preparatory Meeting
05.12.2008
Reading Jacques Rancière's "Dis-agreement"
Marx's Metapolitics
04.11.2008
Reading Balibar's "The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism"
The non-totalizable complexity of the historical process
05.10.2008
Reading Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx"
Deconstructing Value Theory
11.09.2008
Reading Moishe Postone's "Time, Labor and Social Domination"
Value and Capitalist Capacities
01.07.2008
Debating "The mirror of production" by Jean Baudrillard
Marx with Bataille
06.06.2008
The coming communities of commons
05.06.2008
Feminist comments on the relation between politics and labor
The arcane of reproduction
09.05.2008
Rancière on the inactuality of communism and the intelligence of the unqualified
07.05.2008
Virno on Marx's "Fragments on machines"
Notes on the general intellect
04.04.2008
Virno on the concept of bio-politics in Postoperaism
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy? II
03.04.2008
Jason Read on abstract and living labor
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy?
07.03.2008
Reading Negri's "Twenty Theses on Marx"
The autonomy of living labor
08.02.2008
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
The emergence of the socialised worker II
07.02.2008
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
The emergence of the socialised worker
07.12.2007
On Badiou's concept of truth procedure
Assigning a measure to the excessive power of the state
09.11.2007
Reading Jacques Ranciere's "Ten theses on politics"
The supplementary part that disconnects the people from itself
04.10.2007
Deleuze and Guattari on the concept of minoritarian struggle
Micropolitics
07.09.2007
On class composition and radical negativity
Domestic work and class struggle within the class II
06.09.2007
On class composition and radical negativity
Domestic work and class struggle within the class
02.07.2007
From class to minority
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism III
01.07.2007
On the concept of the concrete universal
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism II
30.06.2007
On Marx and Foucault
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism
30.05.2007
Dictatorship of the proletariat and council movement
The Soviet experience II
29.05.2007
Rosa Luxemburg on the Russian Revolution
The Soviet experience
06.04.2007
Negri on Lenin
Democracy beyond law II
05.04.2007
Lenin's concept of the dictatorship of protetariat
Democracy beyond law
09.03.2007
Benjamin's concept of mysthic and divine violence
To bring about the real state of exception II
08.03.2007
Agamben's reading of Benjamin
To bring about the real state of exception
09.02.2007
Agamben's sovereign theoretical turn in thinking potentiality
Potentiality of impotentiality II
08.02.2007
Agamben's theory of autonomous potentiality
Potentiality of impotentiality
We are going to debate two texts which frame the feminist critique of labor within or against operaist Marxism: the second chapter of Leopoldina Fortunati’s "The arcane of reproduction" and "Dissolved Boundaries and Affective Labor" by Susanne Schultz , in which she criticizes Hardt’s and Negri’s theses on the transformation of the relationship between productive and reproductive labor. Mainly, she aims at deconstructing the argument formulated in "Empire" that there is no difference between production and reproduction any more. After the real subsumption of society by capital any sort of activity would be equally productive, life and production would coincide. In contrast, she argues that the border between productive and reproductive labor has not been dissolved but displaced, especially through a feminization of labor in which reproductive labor has been made invisible within the patchwork activities of a flexibilized everyday life, and through a new international division of labor between women, in which migrant women as low paid houseworkers take over parts of the reproductive labor.
Fortunati’s text testifies to the historical grammar with which feminist authors have expanded Marxian terms in Italian workerism. The main argument in this short chapter consists of the productivity of reproduction and the dual character of the capitalist mode of production that posits itself as production of value and non-value
Fortunati assumes, that it is the positing of reproduction as non-value that enables both, production and reproduction, to function as the production of value, and it is the positing of reproduction as natural production that enables two workers to be exploited with one wage and the entire cost of reproduction to be unloaded onto the labor force.
Fortunati’s rigid and repetitive analysis of the connection that links reproduction with production through a mythological process of separation, naturalisation and gender specific individualisation is part of a theoretical and militant process that started when a group of women left Potere Operaio in 1971 and organised the nucleus of Lotta Femminista.
It exemplifies an operation with which all transcendental aspects of Marxism present in its language of immanence are transferred to a feminist critique of capitalism by extending them to reproduction, especially the idea of a historical law of value that is immanent to the social relations transforming relations of humans into relations of things.
One theoretical counter-dicourse would be a Foucauldian analysis, examining the family as local centre of power in which the sexual is distributed and intensified, ascetism as mechanism to intensify sexual pleasure, homosexuality as invention that is coextensive to heteronormativity within a process of surveilling, mapping and inciting perversions in the body.
Leopoldina Fortunati: The Arcane of Reproduction, Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital (Chapter 2: The Kingdom of Nature), New York: Autonomedia, 1995, pp. 17-27
Susanne Schultz: Dissolved Boundaries and Affective Labor. On the Disappearance of Reproductive Labor and Feminist Critique in Empire. In Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 17, No. 1 (March 2006), pp. 77-82