About this item
Highlights
- If Marx's opus Capital provided the foundational account of the forces of production in all of their objective, machine formats, what happens when the concepts of political economy are applied not to dead labor, but to its living counterpart, the human subject?
- About the Author: Alexander Kluge is an author and filmmaker, known for launching the New German Cinema in the early 1960s.
- 544 Pages
- Philosophy, Political
Description
About the Book
An epochal archaeology of the labor power that has been cultivated in the human body over the last two thousand years.Book Synopsis
If Marx's opus Capital provided the foundational account of the forces of production in all of their objective, machine formats, what happens when the concepts of political economy are applied not to dead labor, but to its living counterpart, the human subject? The result is Kluge and Negt's History and Obstinacy, a breathtaking archaeology of the labor power that has been cultivated in the human body over the last 2,000 years.
Supplementing classical political economy with the insights of fields ranging from psychoanalysis and phenomenology to evolutionary anthropology and systems theory, History and Obstinacy examines the complex ecology of expropriation and resistance as it reaches down into the deepest strata of unconscious thought, genetic memory, and cellular life. First published in 1981, this epochal collaboration has now been edited, expanded, and updated by the authors in response to global developments of the last decade to create an entirely new analysis of "the capitalism within us." "This book is an astounding manifestation of an improbable constellation between a great writer/filmmaker and an important social philosopher. Readers will enjoy the illuminating insights and surprising discoveries from the revealing assemblage of ideas, arguments, and imaginations."-- Jürgen HabermasReview Quotes
...even when Kluge and Negt's way of approaching the history of labor and obstinacy is unsettling, the historic-philosophical and, above all, encyclopaedic endeavour undertaken in the book is thoroughly commendable. Kluge and Negt have accomplished a thought provoking and intelligently written volume on how the history of obstinacy shows when and where human beings have resisted the seemingly uninterrupted flow and overwhelming ideological power of capitalism.
--Radical Philosophy ReviewAbout the Author
Alexander Kluge is an author and filmmaker, known for launching the New German Cinema in the early 1960s. Oskar Negt is Professor of Sociology at the Universitat Hannover. Early in his career, he was a student of Theodor Adorno and assistant to Jurgen Habermas. Devin Fore is Associate Professor of German at Princeton University, author of Realism after Modernism (MIT Press), and an editor of the journal October.