Anchored in Marxism

Marxism is primarily concerned with defining and evaluating "work" qua alienation. This is as non-controversial a provisional definition as I can muster for a theoretical datum that is already extremely variegated. It is necessary to dispel a certain fog or stupor characterized by Derrida as spectral, all those fever-dreams of revolution must be purified and worked-through (inasmuch as we are concerned with a communist "hypothesis" whose implementation has so far apparently failed). Those of us involved with politics grow fatigued with variegated poltroonery and rampant corruption. One might say that of other social theories, but I am qualifying Marxism as being concerned with a theory of work in the sense that the theory of work it offers combines multiple philosophical idioms and fields into one, making its particular way of conceptualizing work robust enough to include numerous phenomenological, existential, epistemological and, above all, dialectical components. Work is defined first of all negatively as that which is "in excess of" work, i.e. the "non-productive", what Bataille called "expenditure", "transgression" , "the accursed share." The sexual drives partly exceed work inasmuch as the "conditions" of work do not fully sublimate it, there is always an excess that "escapes", a schizophrenic "line of flight" into the Outside (a daydream, an obsessional refrain, a drug experience). Secondly, the alienation of the subject under capitalism can only be properly comprehended from a dialectical-materialist point of view. Marxist theory unfolds itself dialectically and thus persists in its surpassing or rejection of any supposed death of metaphysics (which is not to say that it does not retain the resources of analytic philosophy), cleaving to the Hegelian process of Absolute Knowledge. Conservatism is, in a sense, the philosophy of the ruling class. It illuminates the intersection of "leisure" and "tradition", culminating in the figure of the "gentleman" (or of "America's British Culture", as the title of one of Russell Kirk's books polemically puts it). But the precarious subject, the Kafkaesque subject, if you will, is the realized consciousness of this very alienation. And the emancipation of the subject is precisely the subliated rim (Lacan) of abject erotic exess/exteriority/filth, i.e. the carnivalesque "logic of sense" of transgression, inasmuch as the ultimate transgression is revolution a la Robespierre (and thus the ultimate conservative slogan is supplied by its most perceptive exponent, Russell Kirk: "Down with the Revolution!", and in Kirk's precursor, Edmund Burke and to a certain extent, in Nietzsche, although Nietzsche straddles both left and right wing possibilities of theoretical capture). Anyways, through the looking-glass of dialectical sense-making, we find emancipation through alienation's labor (see Laboria Cubonik's "Xenofeminist Manifesto", Godard's "La Chinoise", or, from a literary perspective, Kafka's "The Castle", Blanchot's "Aminidab", Coover's "Noir", etc). The ecstasies of the subject qua body "in the spirit of music" give the facticity of utopia's dreaming. The concrete project of utopian dreaming is the total ensemble of theoretical practices, which interweave and dovetail uneasily, combining the various narcissisms of individual thinkers into healthy group identifications, group narcissisms. "The Soul at Work" (Berardi) is therefore the pneuma of self-inspiration where a kind of pantheism-telepathy (superstition as the limit-threshold/rim of the rational) assembles the political qua theoretical soul-force, as the agon that combines individual geniuses (or subjects making ingenious moves within a strategy-space) in a continuous innocence of chance.