“A live monster that is fruitful and multiplies”: Capitalism as Poisoned Rat?

Michael Morris, Oliver J. Sheldon, Daniel R. Ames, Maia J Young, “Metaphors and the Market: Consequences and Preconditions of Agent and Object Metaphors in Stock Market Commentary,” Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes 102 (2007): 174-192, 175.

See ibid.

Judith Butler, “So, What Are The Demands? And Where Do They Go From Here?,” Tidal 2 (March 2012): 8-11, 11.

See Thomas Keenan, “The Point Is to (Ex)Change It: Reading Capital, Rhetorically,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 152-185, here 171f.

The latter concept was created by Michael Taussig. See his Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 99.

Steven Shaviro, “Commodity Fetishism,” Pinocchio Theory, →

Mark Fisher, “The Religion of Everyday Life,“ K-Punk, →

Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,“ in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4 (1938-1940), ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2003), 31.

Ibid., 32.

See William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1993), 119-151, here 145.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: Form Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 188.

See, for example, Lars Bang Larsen, “Zombies of Immaterial Labor: The Modern Monster and the Death of Death,” e-flux journal 15 (April 2010), →.

See Pietz, 130.

Ibid., 146.

Ibid.

Ibid., 147.

Ibid., 148.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 167.

Gean Moreno, “Notes on the Inorganic, Part I: Accelerations,” in e-flux journal 31 (January 2012), →; and Moreno, “Notes on the Inorganic, Part II: Terminal Velocity,” in e-flux journal 32 (February 2012) →.

Ibid., Part I.

Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 99: “Post-capitalist animism means that although the socioeconomic exploitative function of fetishism … will supposedly disappear with the overcoming of capitalism, fetishism as an active social force inherent in objects will remain. Indeed it must not disappear, for it is the animate quality of things in post-capitalist society … that ensures what young Marx envisaged as the humanization of the world.”