Table Of ContentBurden of Reason. [Jean de la Fontaine, Fables choisies
pour /es enfants (Paris, E. Plon-Nourrit & Cie. [n.d.])]
History and Obstinacy
Alexander Kluge
Oskar Negt
Edited with an introduction by Devin Fore
Translated by Richard Langston
with Cyrus Shahan, Martin Brady,
Helen Hughes, and Joel Golb
ZONE BOOKS· NEW YORK
2014
The translation of this work was supported by
a grant from the Goethe-lnstitut, which is funded
by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
© 2014 Urzone, Inc.
ZONE BOOKS
633 Vanderbilt Street
Brooklyn, NY 11218
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except for that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 10 8 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public
press), without written permission from the Publisher.
Originally published in German as Ceschichte und Eigensinn
© 2008 Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt.
Printed in the United States of America.
Distributed by The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kluge, Alexander, 1932-
[Geschichte und Eigensinn. English]
History and obstinacy/ Alexander Kluge, Oskar Negt;
edited with an introduction bv Devin Fore; translated
by Richard Langston.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1 935408-46-8 (alk. paper)
1. Historical materialism. I. Negt, Oskar. II. Title.
D16.9.K5813 2014
335.4'119-clc23
Contents
Introduction 15
Notes on the Translation 69
Preface 73
PART l THE HISTORICAL ORGANIZATION
OF LABOR CAPACITIES
of
The Ori9ins Labor Capacities in Separation
of
(The Permanence Primitive Accumulation)
Different Forms of Property 81
"The Secret of Primitive Accumulation" 85
Man's Essential Powers 88
Hammer, Tongs, Lever:
Violence as a Labor Characteristic 88
Cautiousness, Self-Exertion, Power Grips,
and Precision Grips 89
Gripping 90
The Internalization of Labor Characteristics 92
Upright Gait, Balance, the Ability to Separate Oneself,
Coming Home 94
Robo sapiens, the Internet, a Relapse back into
"Simple Lived Time" 95
Maieutics: The Midwife's Art 96
II Self-Regulation as a Natural Characteristic
The Social Senses 98
An Interpretation of the Sentence:
"When those below are no longer willing,
and those above no longer can." 102
The Cantankerous Brain 104
Ice Age 104
Cells 105
Disobedience 105
Fraternite 106
Self-Regulation as Order 106
The Specific Capacity for Disruption 107
Self-Regulation against Consignment to the Junk Heap 108
Fingertip Feeling, Selectivity 109
Self-Regulation of Syntheses 110
Self-Regulation as History 111
The Double Meaning of Self-Regulation 113
Birth 113
The Second, Third, Forth, Etc. Social Birth 114
The Politics of the Body 116
Thermidor 117
ef ef
III Elements a Political Economy Labor Power
The Two Economies 120
What Does the Political Economy of Labor Power Mean? 121
The Two Economies in Relation to Wage Labor
and Capital 123
The First Contradiction in the Political Economy
of Labor Power 124
The Contradiction between Living and "Dead Labor" 128
The Contradiction between Individual Labor
and the Total Labor of Society 130
Labor Power as Result and Process 131
The Reversal in the Relation of Flow and the Disruption
in the Political Economy of Labor Power 134
The Balance Economy of Labor Capacities 135
Navigational Labor 136
Labor Capacities Aimed at the Unification of Forces 137
Trust as the Basis of Labor Capacities Aimed at Realism 139
The Differentiation of Strong and Weak Social Forces
and of Hermetic and Associative Forces 140
The Fulcra of Labor Capacities 143
A More Specific Designation of the Category of Labor 144
The Antagonistic Reality of Labor 145
Commentary 1: The Principle of Skin-to-Skin Closeness 148
Surface and Depth 148
The Nature of Love 149
Commentary 2: The Contemporaneity of Mental History 154
Commentary 3: On the Concept of the Real 156
Determinacy, Indeterminacy; Concreteness, Abstraction 158
PART 2 THE PUBLIC SPHERE OF PRODUCTION
ef
IV The Labor Intelligence
That Someone Is an Intelligence Worker Says Nothing
about the Intelligence of the Product That Person Produces,
but Rather that Someone Has Gone about Its Production
in a Professional Manner 166
That Portion of Intelligence Involved in the Process
of Self-Alienation 170
Its Decisive Role in the Political Economy of Labor Power 170
Knowledge Is Not Primary, but Thievery Is 173
On Building a House 175
The Relationality of Life and Labor;
The Unity of Sensory Relationships 176
Usefulness 181
The Weakness of Intelligence Lies in Its Motive 183
The Weakness that Results from the Intangibility
of Intelligence Labor 184
The Core Symptom of Malfunction 184
Cunning and Its Trade 185
A Comparison of Intelligence Labor and Trade 185
The Origin of Intelligence's Mode of Labor in Handwork 187
Intelligence Labor and Industrialization 190
The Brain as a Social Organ 192
The Fish in Us 193
The Pharaohs' Storehouses of Intelligence:
The Transformation of Knowledge and Education 193
The Balance Economy versus the Excess of Information 194
Intelligence that Seeks the Universal in the Fullness
of Particularities 197
The Principle of "Cowardice in Thought" 199
"Sense perception is the basis of all science" 201
Commentary 4: Five Stories about Intelligence 204
An Unintentional Stroke of Good Fortune: A Story of Displacement 204
Unintentional Revolution 205
In Praise of Crudeness 206
The Seven Spirits of Knowledge 20s
An Estimate of the Time Needed for a "Change in Powers of the Soul" 212
v The Historical Terrain Where Labor Capacities Emerae
The "Social Factory": The Relation of History 216
Who or What in History Is the Subject? 220
Commentary 5: The Labor of Separation Processes in Individual
Life Spans 223
Commentary 6: On Houses 230
Commentary 7: Subjective-Objective Elements of the Public Sphere of
Production (Pipes, Bones, Vessels, Baskets): Primitive Property 235
Identity/Rupture 235
Commentary 8: The Loss of Reality /The Loss of History: "The Landscape
of Industry Is the Open Book of Human Psychology" 242
Commentary 9: Reliability 247
Commentary 10: The Violence of Relationality:
"The Necessary Production of False Consciousness" 250
Commentary 11: On the Dialectical Gravitational Relations in History 256
The Dialectic Is Ungrammatical 256
The Difficulty with Rooting Dialectical Perception in Sensuousness 257
The Idiosyncrasy of Everyday Movements 250
The Turn of Master/Slave Relations, Outlasting Causality,
Thi rd-Party Damages 252
City/Bombs 263
The Differences among Clocks .265
"A horrendous act, committed in silence" 267
Commentary 12: The Ancient Naval Hero as Metaphor of the
Enlightenment; German Brooding Counterimages; "Obstinacy" 268
I. The Story of Jason 270
The Golden Fleece 271
The Violent Learning Process of Commodity Exchange
on the Mediterranean Sea 273
The Residents of Colchis, the Arrival of the Argonauts,
Different Social Speeds 274
The Law of Hospitality 275
Exporting Environmental Destruction;
The Aggressive Spirit of the Greeks 277
II. Why the Myths from the Continental Interior Speak Differently;
Labor Writes Its Myths in the Form of Objectified Production 279
The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids: Enlightenment as the Capacity
for Differentiation in the Defense of Home 280
The Temporal Core of the Brothers Grimms' Fairy Tales 282
A Few Distinctions in the Story of the Seven Young Kids 285
The Song of Blacksmith Volund 287
The Story of the Rejuvenated Little Old Man 289
The Sense of Collective Agency; When Nothing Collective Is Possible 290
"The Obstinate Child" 292
A Comparison of Antigone and "The Obstinate Child" 293
PART 3 THE VIOLENCE OF RELATIONALITY
VI War as Labor
I. 300
IL 300
III. The Division of Labor 300
IV. The Distinction between Individual Combat Labor and War 306
v. The Illusion of Leadership 309
VI. 313
VII. War as a Maze 315
1. Napoleon at the Gates of Madrid 320
2. The Fracturing of the Labor of War 321
3· 322
4. The Unintentional Strengthening of Asymmetry
on the Side of Those Attacked 322
5. Examining the Active Elements of Asymmetrical War
under the Concept of Labor 324
6. Can a Global Monopoly on Force Be Established Once
Again? What Form of Emancipation of the Community
Could Offer a Response to Asymmetrical Warfare? 325
VIII. How the Twentieth Century Derailed in August 1914 327
IX. The Illusion of the Blitzkrieg: Intelligence in War 329
x. The Prelude to War: The Production of War
as the Collateral Damage of Armaments Projects 331
Commentary 13: Six Stories about the Labor of War 334
Aspen in Summer 334
An Exam Topic at West Point 335
Karl Korsch's Theory of the Blitzkrieg 336
A Special Application of the Force of Labor:
Drilling into the Hills of Vauquois 337
In Constantinople in Eight Hours 338
Seeking with the Soul the Land of the Tigris and the Euphrates 340
ef
vu Love Politics: The Obstinacy Intimacy
Love Politics 341
The Search for Good Fortune in the Private Sphere 343
The Primary Production of All Human Social Characteristics
in the Intimate Sphere 345
The Subsistence Economy within Love 347
The Breeding Ground of Human Characteristics:
Authority and Family 348
Reliability 353
Damages Suffered by Third Parties 354
The Interaction between Sexuality and Child Rearing 356
The Libido's Resistance to Domestication 358
The Many Eyes 362
Measurements, Weights, and Rules 363
The Commodity Character in the Labor of Relationships 366
