What in the hell …

Following on from the very funny binary joke in the last post, what are some funny bits in philosophy? ‘Philosophy’ here should be thought in the widest possible sense, so as to cast a wider net and thus ensare more jokes. (more…)

I just heard this joke, which is funnier than many of these.

There are 10 kinds of people in this world - those who understand binary numbers and those who don’t.

“The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” is a piece in the Philosophy of the Encounter culled from a longer unfinished manuscript of Althusser’s. (more…)

The “primitive” in primitive accumulation means “prior,” in two senses. It can mean historically prior, in the sense of simply being temporally prior. It can also mean logically prior, in the sense of being necessary (but not sufficient) condition. (more…)

“Underlying the I.W.W.’s activities in the pre-World War I period were efforts to derive, from the diverse pattern of activity and sources of political and cultural influence emerging out of the international labor community, an associational context that would augment concerted action among workers excluded from or in conflict with existing political and labor formations and contain the potential for alliance. The I.W.W.’s early years were, therefore, characterized by a constant interplay between activism and theoretical development in which the movement’s original principles were tested, modified, and redefined.”

(Salerno, _Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World_, page 5.)

I have previously argued that the permanence of simple circulation within capitalism means that the capital relation as such is biopolitical in the sense which Hardt and Negri give the term. This is because the sale of labor power as a commodity — L-M-C, a specific form of the circuit C-M-C which Marx calls simple circulation, where labor power is sold for money (wages) to buy means of subsistence — both historically and conceptually involves command over life.

I want to address these circuits further. I plan to use the following passages from Marx to address three other issues which are at least tangentially related. The first is what I call, for lack of a better term, ‘the conscience wage’ and its relation to money or nonmonetary commodity exchange (the permanence or recurrence of the elementary form of value). The second is the definitions of use value and exchange value. The third is the category of self-valorization used by Negri (more in his earlier work, I think) and by Cleaver, in connection or resonance with the aspects of Badiou and Ranciere that I find most compelling. (more…)

Marx writes in the introduction to the Grundrisse, “The human being is (…) a zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious [geselliges] animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.” Production by an isolated individual outside society (…) is as much an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.” He takes this point as foundational to such an extent as to be obvious, worth mentioning solely because some people - Bastiat and Carey, for example - have been foolish enough to miss it. (84.) (more…)

I really want a name for the Marx that Althusser doesn’t like. “Hegelian” doesn’t work for me. What’s the opposite of aleatory? (more…)