The Body Ontology of Capitalism

Subjectivity, 2016

Opening up Bodies for Harvest: Embodiment and Global Capitalism, 2018

This article explores the ways in which global capitalism, enabled by developments in transplantation technology, cuts into human flesh, leading to reimagining bodies as complex assemblages of various replaceable parts. It traces the extent to which, the ontos of the human vanishes into this fragmented flesh, that manifests an existence which is no longer tied to the presence of the human body. It further reads the fictive kinship narratives, weaved between donors and receivers, as social responses aimed at suturing the traumatic ruptures of our embodied reality and at accepting the disconcerting hybrid body as one's own.

This paper argues that Marxist feminism offers a powerful approach to body formation theory. Building on social reproduction theory's key innovations, as well as its recognition that Marx's 'critique' of political economy is unfinished business, I develop my argument through a constructive critique of three manifestations of the fetishism of wage form, respectively problematizing the distinction between labor and labor power, the limits of the concept of labor within production-centered approach, and the embodied nature of labor power. In recovering the centrality of the body for critical social theory, social reproduction theory sheds new light into our understanding of the complex processes by which the contradictions of capital are displaced and ultimately embodied in specific ways, and therefore offers a powerful approach attentive to the ways in which the physical body shapes, and is shaped by, social and material forces.

Concentric：Literary and Cultural Studies, 2015

This paper addresses the question of bio-politics that regulates and shapes people into different forms of life in today's societies, particularly in the post- 1989 neoliberal capitalist conditions that we can observe in China. I call it the aestheticization of neoliberal capitalism. My concern in this paper is with the aestheticization of the neoliberal capitalism that was manipulated and executed by the contemporary States. I shall discuss the double cycle of the use and consumption of bodies in the artistic labor through my reading of a contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing (徐冰 1955-). The primary process of the uses of the bodies by the State, the polis, took us to the question of the forms of life under the dictate of the political economy as discussed by Giorgio Agamben, and the question as to how and why human life, through the uses of bodies, is shaped, measured, calculated, regulated and processed into various forms of life. In order to think the power of life or the pote...

2017

In global capitalism biopolitical and necropolitical mode of life reproduce hand in hand, yet differ greatly in their management of life. However, the central thesis of the proposed text is that biopolitical mode is intensively passing into necropolitical mode, resulting in deprecation of the so-called good life, positing abandonment as the central structural contour of the global capitalism, making abandoned body its collateral damage. To delineate the concept of abandoned body and to demonstrate that its abandonment should be understood as the central structural process of global capitalism, this paper will first, by referring to Achille Mbembe, Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, and Marina Gržinić, illustrate that contemporary historical formation of capitalism is in fact a neoliberal global necrocapitalism, i.e. a structural formation, where capital’s surplus value is based on the capitalization of death, consequently urging us to critically address the concept of biopolitics, which, according to Gržinić “/…/ is a horizon of articulating contemporary capitalist societies from the so-called politics of life.” In this vein, the paper will propose that this engagement is done by a historization of biopolitics, evoking Giorgio Agamben’s work on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, only to further extend it by introducing Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics from 2003 and Gržinić’s conceptualization of biopower and necropower from 2009, where, as stated by Gržinić, biopower should be understood as the exercise of the power “to make live and let die” and necropower as the exercise of the power “let live and make die,” basically demonstrating that biopolitics and necropolitics are two distinctive modes of governmentality, yet necropolitics, in comparison to biopolitics, proving itself to be a lot more suitable concept for analysing contemporary societies, due to their prevalent use of the logics of war machine and state of exception. If the so-called good life is to be associated with biopolitics, this paper will propose that the abandoned body should be associated with necropolitics. In fact, the proposed formulation of the abandoned body needs to be understood as a specific topological figure, by which new modes of governmentality of current capitalistic mode of production could be addressed. The concept of the abandoned body will draw from the work of various authors, but mainly from Giorgio Agamben, Ariella Azoulay, Michel Foucault, Marina Gržinić, Achille Mbembe, Walter Mignolo, and Šefik Tatlić, although the main structural premise of the suggested concept will be based on the hybridization of a theoretical triangle of three authors and their unique theoretical positions: Foucault’s subtle envision of the effects of predominance of biopolitics in 1976; Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics in 2003 and Gržinić’s readings of Foucault and Mbembe, especially her thesis of necropower in 2009. If abandonment of the abandoned body is to be understood as the essential structural process of today’s global capitalism, is it still possible to talk about the potentiality of abandoned body’s emancipation? In its final remarks, the paper will suggest that the potentiality for abandoned body’s emancipation lies in decolonial articulation of potentiality, following Achille Mbembe’s political figure of “becoming the Negro of the world” in his Critique of Black Reason (2017).

The human is materially determined by that " irrational " hybrid of the physical and machine resulting in no more and no less sense than the " pure body " (if such thing is possible beyond mere postulation) is endowed with. The " rational " part of it or the " agency of making sense " remains outside the materiality of either the body or the machine—it is the automaton of signification or language. The automaton of capital and philosophy is individually substantiated as " subjectivity, " and more specifically that of the split capitalist self. The hybrid consisted of the physical (natural and machinic), on the one hand, and of the subject of signification, on the other hand, is the monstrosity that ultimately escapes sense: it is inhuman (Haraway) or non-human (Laruelle). It is that inhuman inanity that is neither subject nor merely body nor just a machine, the non-human. Similarly to Donna Haraway's claim about the radical constructedness of the human as cyborg (Haraway, 1991: 149–181), Marx argued that sociality, which includes both economic production and the so-called social reproduction (via the means of production), on the one hand and physicality on the other hand constitute the species-being of humanity. The human is radically constructed, yet, in the last instance, determined by the physical, argue both Haraway and Marx.

Are we postmodern? On capitalism, fluidity, and parataxis.

Course Overview: This course assists students in better understanding the degree by which global capitalism impacts daily embodied lives. Through a combination of a global level of analysis and an interdisciplinary approach, the course contests the idea of bodies as separated from culture, politics and economics, and from each other. In this sense, the themes explored engage with advances in transplant and cosmetic surgery that blur the boundaries between separated bodies, as well as between bodies and technology. The readings included bring students' attention to people's accounts of their particular experience of embodiment such as people who surgically altered the appearance of their bodies, who inhabit hybrid bodies after receiving a donated organ or incorporating a prosthesis, people who inhabit militarized bodies part of human-machine assemblages, as well as people whose bodies have been trafficked. Student Learning Objectives for this course: