Table Of ContentLANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY
General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley
Published titles
Stanley Aronowitz
THE CRISIS IN HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
SCIENCE AS POWER: Discourse and Ideology in Modem Society
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen
THE FREUDIAN SUBJECT
Norman Bryson
VISION AND PAINTING: The Logic of the Gaze
Teresa de Lauretis
ALICE DOESN'T: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema
FEMINIST STUDIES/CRffiCAL STUDIES (editor)
TECHNOLOGIES OF GENDER: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction
Mary Ann Doane
THE DESIRE TO DESIRE: The Woman's Film of the 1940s
Alan Durant
CONDITIONS OF MUSIC
Jane Gallop
FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: The Daughter's Seduction
Peter Gidal
UNDERSTANDING BECKETT: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the works
of Samuel Beckett
Peter Goodrich
LEGAL DISCOURSE: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis
Piers Gray
MARGINAL MEN: Edward Thomas; Ivor Gamey; J. R. Ackerley
Paul Hirst
ON LAW AND IDEOLOGY
Ian Hunter
CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT: The Emergence of literary Education
Andreas Huyssen
AFTER THE GREAT DIVIDE: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism
Nigel Leask
THE POLITICS OF IMAGINATION IN COLERIDGE'S CRITICAL THOUGHT
Michael Lynn-George
EPOS: WORD, NARRATIVE AND THE ILIAD
Colin MacCabe
JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD
THE TALKING CURE: Essays on Psychanalysis and Language (editor)
BROKEN ENGLISH
Louis Marin
PORTRAIT OF THE KING
Christian Metz
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: The Imaginary Signifier
Jean-Claude Milner
FOR THE LOVE OF LANGUAGE
Jeffrey Minson
GENEALOGIES OF MORALS: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentri-
city of Ethics
Laura Mulvey
VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES
Douglas Oliver
POETRY AND NARRATIVE IN PERFORMANCE
Michel Pecheux
LANGUAGE, SEMANTICS AND IDEOLOGY
Jean-Michel Rabat~
LANGUAGE, SEXUALITY AND IDEOLOGY IN EZRA POUND'S CANTOS
Denise Riley
'AM I THAT NAME?': Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History
Jacqueline Rose
THE CASE OF PETER PAN or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction
Brian Rotman
SIGNIFYING NOTHING: The Semiotics of Zero
Michael Ryan
POLITICS AND CULTURE: Working Hypotheses for a Post-Revolutionary
Society
Raymond Tallis
NOT SAUSSURE: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory
David Trotter
CIRCULATION: Defoe, Dickens and the Economies of the Novel
THE MAKING OF THE READER: Language and Subjectivity in Modem
American, English and Irish Poetry
Jean-Marie Vincent
ABSTRACT LABOUR: A Critique
Cornel West
THE AMERICAN EVASION OF PHILOSOPHY
Peter Womack
IMPROVEMENT AND ROMANCE: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands
Abstract Labour:
A Critique
Jean-Marie Vincent
Professor of Political Science,
University of Paris-VIII
Translated by
Jim Cohen
M
MACMILLAN
French Edition @Presses Universitaires de France, 1987
Translation C The Macmillan Press Ltd,l991
First published as Critique du travail, le Faire et l'Agir by
Presses Universitaires de France, 1987.
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First published 1991
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Vincent, Jean-Marie
Abstract Labour: A Critique
(Language Discourse, society series).
1. Factors of production. Labour. Marxist theories
I. Title II. Series
331.01
ISBN 978-0-333-51381-1 ISBN 978-1-349-21744-1 (eBook)
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Contents
Preface by Stanley Aronowitz xi
Author's Preface to the English Edition xxiii
Translator's Note xxx
Introduction 1
1 Luk&cs: Individuality and the Teleology of Works 12
The young Luk4cs as philosopher of existence
Antagonisms: soul vs. life, art vs. life
The refusal of individualism and subjectivism
The crisis of bourgeois individuality
From Dostoyevsky to Hegel
The proletariat as a collective actor: the subject-
object identity
The teleology of labour
The inversion and the reversal of the inversion
Labour as value
Marx's anthropological model of the artisan and the
engineer
Liberation of production or liberation from production?
The presupposition of decadence
Luk4cs' scorn of internal experience
Individual immediateness and the practical-political
sphere
Social crisis and individual crisis
Restoration and rejection of modem art
2 Ernst Bloch: Concrete Utopia and the Ontological Trap 28
The theme of retreat in contemporary thought
The unity of society and the individual in official
Marxism
Bloch against solidarity with the old world
The incompleteness of humankind
The world from the standpoint of objectivity
vi Contents
The ontology of the 'not-yet'
Society as multiversum
Class struggle as the reorganisation of consciousness
and the bringing of the past into the present
The fragmented character of contemporaneity
Religion as struggle against theocracy
The Communist Manifesto in the Bible
Marxism, eschatology and ethics
Docta Spes (the hope principle) and subversive
practices
Bloch and labour
The proximity of the future
The deconstruction of the objective spirit
Bloch's materialism: nature and human history
The aporia of the dialectics of nature
3 Heidegger with Marx: Politics in the Element of Finitude 46
Part I 46
Heidegger's philosophy of retreat
Problematic man
Daily life and the subject-object dialectic
The will-to-will as a unilateral relation to the world
Mastery as illusion
The ambivalence of retreat
Existential analysis and the critique of daily life
in capitalist society
The moralistic view of labour in the workers' movement
The suppression of capital as conservation/
valorisation of labour
Marx, thinker of technology?
No privilege for production in the procedure of
explanation
Technology as a social relation
The 'technological veil'
The servitude of the productive forces
Marx and science
The critique of political economy as critique of
Contents vii
the traditional meanings of theory and practice
Knowledge as ascetic activity and as relation
of production
The logics of identity and specificity
Heterogeneity of the notion of law in Capital
Part II 61
The fruitfulness of the Marx-Heidegger
confrontation
History and the surpassing of Western metaphysics
The Hegelian dialectic as critique of metaphysics
within the limits of metaphysics
The ploy of reconciliation unmasked in Capital
and Being and Time
Convergence between Marx's critique of fetishism
and Heidegger's critique of ontology: representation
as reification
The real abstraction of labour
The social and Heidegger's Dasein
Technology as world-view and as total mobilisation
of individuals
Technology as deviation of thought and as crystallis
ation of social practices
Part III 71
The principle of technology or the historic schism
of social practices
The tight embrace of the processes of valorisation
Displacement of sociality towards non-productive
activities
Marx's anticipated critique of Weber's notion of
disenchantment
Poeisis and praxis ('doing' and 'acting')
The teleology of means and collective interaction
The politics of power and the wait-and-see attitude
of thought
Political institutions and the languor of the social
Revolutionary politics in the element of finitude
viii Contents
4 The Fetish of Labour and its Dominion:
The Critique of Economy as Critique of
the Value-Form 79
Part I 79
The so-called monism of Marx
Marx beyond Marx
Surpassing the objectivationlalienation
dichotomy
From the critique of Proudhon's 'labourism' to the
critique of Ricardo's concept of value
The peculiar battle of political economy
Decomposition of the objectivity of value
Dialectics of the finite and the infinite in Marx's
Capital
Representative thought as abstraction of labour
Part II 86
The dialectical character of the economy
The unlimited and open character of the valorisation
process
The variations of capitalism and economic science
The naturalism of value and critique of the value-form
The critique of political economy as radical questioning
of the mechanisms of representation and valorisation
or as utopia of crisis realisation
Technology as the logic of abstract labour
Socialism as realisation and rationalisation
of labour
The positivist aspect of Marxist economics
Labour-value and utility-value as expressions of
symmetrical social subjectivities
Class struggle and accumulation
The economic and political dialectics of the wage
relation
The development of the state as a forward flight
Contents ix
Part III 102
The aporia of the future
The destabilisation of labour
The intellectualisation of production
The de-realisation of social relations and the
sur-realisation of the symbolism of seduction
by objects
Pragmatic realism and the domestication of the
imaginary
5 Transforming the World or Transforming Action:
Reflections on Art, Labour and Politics 108
Part I 108
The legacy of Marxism
Against the concept of collective subject
The constraint of repetition in Marxism
The psychic repression of concrete utopia
The unity of theory and practice in question
Refusal of the non-identical in contemporary thought
Science as mythical model of successful practice
Teleology in social relations
Automatic reactions of the object and the subjectivism
of the individual
Towards a historical critique of individuality:
the conformism of spontaneity
The repetitive character of representations of
the future
Part II 118
Art as ascetic intellectual activity
Artistic reason as the superseding of productivism
and aestheticism
The mass majority and the industry of the imaginary
