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This essay traces the genealogy of the concept of the postmodern in Jack Amariglio's body of work. It recognizes the collaborative accent of Amariglio's writing practice and renders visible a field of discourse that has materialized through the network of collaborations that Amariglio, through the concept of the postmodern, has thereby activated. According to Amariglio, the postmodern, as an epistemological rather than ontological concept, is a discursive byproduct of modernist discourses that emerge endogenously from within the latter but always in a relation of heterogeneity toward their native discourses. A key characteristic of Amariglio's writing has been to highlight these extimate tendencies and trace their consequences on economics as a postmodern discourse. In the spirit of his deconstructive drive, this essay extends his thinking on the postmodern through a number of postmodern moments he has identified, especially in his work with David Ruccio, through the psychoanalytical concept of the uncanny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a productive engagement with some of the themes brought forward by Carole Biewener and David Ruccio in their respective comments on Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian (MIT Press, 2012). This effort elucidates further some scattered discussions on subjectivity implicit throughout the book, arguing that inscribed in the very structure of the book itself are the contours of a nonreductionist, nonessentialist theory of subjectivity that escapes the pitfalls of both choice-based theoretical humanisms and mechanistic structuralisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years a growing literature on biopolitical governmentality, prompted by the work of Michel Foucault, presents subjectivity as the decisive locus of both the rule of neoliberal capitalism and the production of the common. While sharing its central focus of subjectivity, we are concerned with what this literature leaves out (due to what we discern to be certain implicit tendencies of behaviorism): the constitutive role that subjective investments and “enjoyment” (jouissance) play in the crisis-ridden formations of capitalism and in the constructive turns to communism. We proceed from the premise that there is no balanced relation to jouissance and that class antagonism is irreducible. From this perspective, we propose to approach capitalist and communist subjectivities in terms of two different “forms of the commune”: that is, as two distinct subjective orientations toward enjoying the impossibility of instituting the common once and for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is both a critique and an affirmation of the “postmodern” Marxist debates on communism. It claims that any serious discussion of ethico-political concepts, such as exploitation and class justice, should include how subjectivity animates class. In particular, it insists that communism is predicated upon a shift at the level of subjectivity, in the very ideological coordinates that define what is just and what is unjust. Rethinking class analysis by locating the question of sexual difference at the ethico-political and theoretical core of class analysis makes it possible to differentiate exploitative class structures and communist class structures as two distinct modes in which communities fail to domesticate the Real of class antagonism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the ideological distortions and manipulations of real images in conceptual art. Computer-generated manipulations of images; Paradoxical definition of the real; Concept of sublimation; De-contextualization of gestures.