The Institute for the Radical Imagination presents:
WARS AND CAPITAL:
A CLOSE READING OF OUR CONTEMPORARY SITUATION
A six-week seminar, beginning May 23, 2022
Mondays at 6 PM EST
Michael Pelias presenting and facilitating
Readings:
Correspondence 1949-1975 (Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger) - Part II
Wars and Capital (Eric Alliez Maurizio Lazzarato Ames Hodges)
Gilles Deleuze - A Thousand Plateaus - The War Machine
About this Seminar:
This seminar will engage in a close reading of the new collaborative work of Eric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato, Wars and Capital, Semiotext(e), 2016, and attempt to situate this original historical and speculative text in the current conjuncture of the warfare state (circa 1938-present).
We will begin with an early work by Ernst Junger, Towards the Line (Uber die Linie), and give a brief background regarding its rewriting by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. For the first week, the “subjectivation of civil wars” amidst the age of the world picture(s) and the construction of new war machines (as reserve stock) will be thought through alongside the close connection of capital, industrialism, technology, and the military and the militarization of everyday life.
The seminar will ground us in new theoretical territory and give us new weapons of conceptualization and tools for struggle in a time of massive geopolitical shifts. Of course, the questions of governmentality, maintaining hegemonies, and creating new subjectivities will be problematized throughout our reading of what now is termed the “3D” capital era: deregulation, departitioning, and deintermediation (allowing investment banks to act as banks). Alongside these symptoms, we will discuss the continual everyday weaponizing of class struggle against positive individuation, the theft of time limiting reflection and militant practice, the refined techniques of deflection by the propaganda industry, and the ongoing war against education which has materialized in an over-bloated class of non-thinking pencil pushers and planners of “job-ready“ schooling rather than developing subjectivity and an ethos of freedom and responsibility.
$115 Suggested Contribution for 6 Sessions or or $20 per seminar*
* Sliding scale registration, if you cannot pay the full registration email info@radicalimagination.institute
* Zoom details will be emailed shortly before the seminar starts
