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Reified Life - Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition (Hardcover)
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Reified Life - Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition (Hardcover)
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Even as the 2008 economic crisis solidified the dominion of
neoliberal and financial capital to organize human societies much
to the detriment of the world's populations, important questions
remain. Among them, what forms of life are free and what forms are
perceived legally and economically as surplus? Which of them, human
and otherwise, are most expendable? Reified Life theorizes the
dangerous social implications of a future where human agency is
secondary to algorithmic processes, digital protocols, speculative
financial instruments, and nonhuman market-based technological
forces. Employing new readings of Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault,
Marx, Gramsci and others, J. Paul Narkunas contends that it is
premature to speak of a posthuman or inhuman future, or to employ
any sort of "ism," given how dynamic and contingent human practices
and their material figurations can be. Over several chapters he
diagnoses the rise of "market humans," the instrumentalization of
culture to decide the life worth living along utilitarian
categories, as well as the varied ways in which discourses of human
rights and humanitarianism actually throw members of the species-
refugees, for instance - outside the human order. To combat this,
Reified Life argues against posthumanist calls to abandon humanism,
proposing instead the category of the ahuman. Doing so offers us a
way to think alongside the human, and to argue for the value of
speculative fiction as a critical mechanism for envisioning
alternative futures and freedoms from the domineering forces of
speculative capital, whose own fictions have become our realities.
To that end, Narkunas provides a novel interpretation of the
post-anthropocentric turn in the humanities by linking the
diminished centrality of humanism to the waning dominion of
nation-states over their populations and the intensification of
financial capitalism, which reconfigures politics along economic
categories of risk management.
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