Nihilist Optimism

There is a recurring tendency in contemporary debates about communism to oscillate between two unsatisfying positions. On one side lies a melancholic archaeology of lost revolutions: the twentieth century revisited as a graveyard of organizational forms, exhausted strategies, and failed futures. On the other side is a speculative enthusiasm for post-political transformation – networked uprisings, decentralized swarms, and algorithmic collectivities – that sometimes dissolves politics into a metaphysics of circulation. What tends to disappear between these poles is the question of how revolutionary thought mutates as it travels through different historical and geographical conditions. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s Communism After Deleuze is a fascinating intervention precisely because it situates itself in that terrain of mutation. The book asks what it might mean to think communism through the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, but it does so by displacing the familiar E...

Characters • LEX – a tired lecturer holding a placard. • PAT – another lecturer, equally tired, eating a slightly stale biscuit. • A PASSING ADMINISTRATOR – occasionally appears with confusing updates. • A VOICE FROM MANAGEMENT EMAILS – disembodied. Outside the gates of the university. A picket line. A banner flaps in the wind: “SAVE OUR JOBS.” A coffee thermos sits between them like a sacred object. LEX: Well? PAT: Well what? LEX: Has she gone yet? PAT: No. LEX: Ah. (Pause.) PAT: Maybe today. LEX: You said that yesterday. PAT: Yesterday had promise. LEX: So does a restructuring document, apparently. (Pause.) PAT: What are we waiting for again? LEX: Frances. PAT: Right. (They stare at the university buildings.) PAT: You’d think if someone threatened half the place with redundancy and hinted at shutting a campus, they might… I don’t know… appear? LEX: Communication is happening. PAT: Where? LEX: In principle. (Pause.) PAT: I heard she said she can’t take a pay cut. LEX: Yes. PAT...

Michael Muhammad Knight’s Sufi Deleuze: Secretions of Islamic Atheism arrives less as a contribution to “Islam and philosophy” than as an intervention into how theory travels, who it forgets, and what it cannot see from where it stands. Published by Fordham University Press in 2023, the book refuses the polite format of comparative theology. It stages instead a set of collisions: between shrine and seminar, baraka and assemblage, the Qur’an and the Orientalist residue sedimented even in radical European thought. If Deleuze once treated the Qur’an as the exemplary authoritarian “root-book,” Knight answers not by defending Islam within Deleuze’s schema but by prying Deleuze loose from his own archive and forcing him to think from the dargah outward. The book opens at a tomb. Knight purchases the musty orange paperbacks of the Inayati order and approaches the grave of Inayat Khan, remembering that his former mentor Hakim Bey had stood there decades earlier. The scene is intimate and crac...

Today we’re reading two sections from Workers and Capital : “Marx Yesterday and Today” and “Factory and Society” by Mario Tronti. What strikes me immediately is that Tronti is not trying to interpret Marx historically. He’s issuing a methodological and political challenge. He writes that any research project concerned with the contemporary validity of Marxism “has to engage with Marx not in his time, but in our own.” Capital should be judged on the basis of the capitalism of today. So the question is not: what did Marx mean in 1867? But: what does Marxism become when confronted with the most developed form of capitalism now? Tronti insists on a key methodological principle taken from Marx: it is the most developed point that explains the backward, not vice versa. Capital explains ground rent, not the reverse. This becomes a way of thinking politically: the highest development of capitalism reveals its inner structure most clearly. That means analysis must begin from the advanced forms ...