The following study does not pretend to present thinking—expert, inside, or otherwise—about the market. Rather, it asks whether the marketitselfnames a certain kind of thinking.

Stated differently, this study does not analyze a socioeconomic topos, the market, in relation to an intellectual dominion, knowledge. In truth, the market is not simply either an economic or a social field. Nor is it reducible to a site of media explosions and corruption, multinational corporations, unbridled technological development, Western expansion, cultural homogeneity, crass individualism, cybernetics, or teenagers milling about the mall.

Instead, as I will try to illustrate, the...

Three components of Antonio Gramsci’s work have spearheaded a recent resurgence in Gramscian studies: (1) his examination of how cultural representations and institutions of civil society¹ shape rather than reflect social realities; (2) his formulation of the “subaltern”; and (3) his notion of the “organic intellectual.” This initial chapter will analyze certain trends in contemporary political thought through a reanalysis of these Gramscian topoi, focusing on Gramsci’s observations on language rather than representation.

In “Language, Linguistics and Folklore” (a selection fromThe Cultural Writings), Gramsci condemns linguistics as a discipline, then advances a counterlinguistic, alternative theory of language:

Artificial languages...

Recalling our fundamental question—how does a state/market division reproduce a global and globalized neoliberal consensus?—let us begin this chapter with a brief reading of Carl Schmitt’sThe Concept of the Political.¹ I intend to address only one of the most salient points of this provocative work, however, leaving more extensive analyses to others.

Schmitt argues that politics is, by definition, “state” politics (although he definesstatenot only as “polis” but also as “status”). “State” politics in turn is confined to the acts of a sovereign. Schmitt’s point here is less that the state is sovereign than the...

It is now the moment to expand upon Gramsci’s thoughts on the subaltern by relating them to recent theses put forth in Rancière’sDisagreement:

Politics exists wherever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part. It begins when the equality of anyone and everyone is inscribed in the liberty of the people. This liberty of the people is an empty property, an improper property through which those who are nothing purport that their group is identical to the whole of the community. Politics ceases … wherever...

It is odd, but not surprising, that for all the debates concerning deconstruction’s viability within Latin America, Derrida’s “Geopsychoanalysis … and the Rest of the World,” delivered at a French–Latin American meeting held in Paris, has received scant attention.¹ Perhaps this is because the 1980 essay appears as little more than a harsh critique of the International Psychoanalytic Association’s refusal to condemn the practices of torture deployed by the Argentine junta in the late 1970s, even though it was asked to do so by its Australian contingent.

The IPA contended that, given the plethora of human rights violations taking...

One might argue that, if prior to 1989 the world was split in three—First, Second, and Third Worlds—after 1989 the ideology that these partitions nourished is preserved, perhaps in altered forms, through the division between “human rights abusers” and “non–human rights abusers.”

That situation may well have changed on September 11. Since then, transnational politics seems guided by the split between “terrorist” and “nonterrorist” zones. Human rights groups are well aware of the adjustment, as indicated by the statement of Irene Kahn of Amnesty International in theNew York Times: “One cannot pick and choose countries where...

Although few would deny that recent global developments demand a rethinking of the contemporary nation-state and, possibly, of the entire history of the state form, such a revaluation is easier said than done. Indeed, current efforts to recast the state through theories of transnationality or globalization tend to recuperate the traditional nation-state (often as part of a notion of internationalism) as their ground, hence to reassert the state form as the indispensable horizon of all political inquiry—either to subvert or embrace it. It is as if the state form holds the same sway over politics that metaphysics holds over...

In his well-known meditation “Postmodernism and the Market,” Fredric Jameson works to demonstrate the nonnecessity or nonabsoluteness of the market.¹ Although Jameson argues that the free market is not the perfection of Western history, as others have famously claimed, he does not try to locate an external political structure or economic model, an “outside the market” that would “prove” his point by attesting to the market’s nontotality. Rather, he discloses the contradictions or antinomies (his preferred term) within capital that index its gaps, cracks, and limits. It is the finitude of late capitalism’s market, and not its exterior, that Jameson...

My purpose in this chapter, mainly through a reading of Antonio Negri’sMarx beyond Marxand Marx’sGrundrisse, is to respond to a question that, although similar to the one to which I have been replying throughout this study, has not yet been explicitly posed: Why should language as cast by the Heideggerian and deconstuctionist tradition—language as irreducible to communication and representation, hence subjectivity, utility, and all “cultural constructionisms”— matter to Marxism?

Let us begin with a statement put forth in 1997 in a local newspaper by one Frank Pennella, a spokesperson for Telespectrum, a marketing firm located near...

In this chapter, I will attempt to analyze the politics of the Academy, in particular the Academy’s staging of the “culture wars,” in terms of a state/market duopoly. Three introductory comments are necessary, however.

First, one might assume that the politics of the university rests in the struggle between the genuine intellectual pursuits of teachers and students, on the one side, and the crass political interests of bureaucracy—administrators or actual politicians—on the other. Whether informed by neutral, right-wing, or left-wing beliefs, the professor/scholar labors on behalf of knowledge, whereas bureaucracy stymies this labor by operating according to the...

Criticism suggesting that deconstruction is “apolitical” is by now commonplace. Such allegations, though emerging from a myriad of perspectives and ideologies, have until recently been humanist, identitarian, or classically Marxist in nature. Materializing today, however, are a series of political-theoretical discourses that, even as they discount most key components of identity politics, humanism, and even classical Marxism—including the key issue: the subject—continue to serve up, directly or obliquely, the idea of deconstruction’s “apoliticality.” I am thinking of the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Hardt, and Alain Badiou, among others. In this chapter, through a reading of...

Like many before him, Foucault draws a strong connection between language and death. Indeed, in his early work, he describes the aversion of discourse in almost the same terms he later uses to posit the biopolitical “ban” on death (see chapter 2): “I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures,whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers….”¹

What I have been calling “language” or “saying”—language that presents a “danger” to consensus—Foucault calls “statement,” for him, the smallest...

Let us begin this conclusion with Althusser’s concept of “interpellation” or “hailing,” which he in fact adapts from Lacan,¹ and which orients the third section of “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation.” Judith Butler centers her examination of the concept on an analysis of the rather comical “example from life” that Althusser offers: when the policeman calls out in the street, “Hey, you!” nine times out of ten the subject who is hailed turns around (and not only because the subject feels guilty). According to Butler, this means that the law and power, both embodied by the...