Philosophy and critical theory 

For those of us on the left who want to shift how we do politics, we have to get clearer on what liberalism looks like, how it is rationalised, and how everyone is implicated, to differing degrees and effects. More than just ‘clarifying misconceptions’, we have to identify and unlearn the liberalism that runs through our lives.

Is it possible to write a collective review of Insurgent Empire across the lines of colour and colonialism in our group? Perhaps, but this is not our agenda here. What we offer instead is a suite of vignettes that reflect on how we, a group of readers interested in understanding place and race, came together to think about the ideas in Insurgent Empire.

We continue to study and dance and sing and eat in order that we might remind each other of our own incompleteness and continue to assemble again and again and again. Or we make a mixtape so that we might feel the intensity of pleasure, and in doing so find our way back to the principle of incompletion – a small reminder that undercommon sociality cannot be stilled by enclosure of flesh and land that is the imposition of private property.

Institutions perpetuate themselves and, being geared towards their own reproduction, they make it so that the incentives to complain are few, especially for those of us who want a future in the academy.

If we take seriously the idea that our personhood in some way inhabits cyberspace, what should we do with the digital remains we leave behind?

What we missed told us something about what we are: not the calculating units of neoliberal legend, but social beings first and foremost, whose sociality – whose embodied sociality – is the precondition of our individuality. We missed each other, in other words.

The Morals of the Market confronts the modern high priests of economic theology with the ruin wrought under the banners of their speculation.

To insist upon the death of the old and the arrival of the new is to enact a kind of modernist shock tactic. For Wark, this kind of catalytic move is necessary because our ways of describing capitalism as capitalism have become their own kind of ideological mechanism, a substitute for thought and a preventative against action.

I started composing this review during the peak of the bushfires in January. I returned to complete it as the coronavirus pandemic settled into its critical phase. The globalising, unifying elements of such crises are palpable, and resonate with Hägglund’s focus on fragility as an ineliminable element of political effort, just as it is for life as such. And yet his universal philosophy betrays a startling parochialism in the way it apportions which routes of anti-capitalism are viable and which aren’t.

Is today’s Marxism yet another vogue – perhaps in tandem with the current popularity of self-proclaimed democratic socialist politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – destined to be supplanted, in due course, by another, more trendy woke ideology? Or is the Marx of our time a potent, powerful continuation or resurrection of the vision and thought of history’s most dogged revolutionary?