Table Of ContentThe Body Productive
ii
The Body Productive
Rethinking Capitalism, Work and the Body
Edited by
Steffan Blayney, Joey Hornsby and Savannah Whaley
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Dedicated to the memory of Didier Deleule
(1941–2019)
vi
Contents
List of contributors viii
A cknowledgements xii
1 Introduction: Rethinking capitalism, work and the body
Steffan Blayney, Joey Hornsby and Savannah Whaley 1
2 The Productive Body revisited François Guéry Translated by
Philip Barnard 21
3 Do we still not know what a body can do? Spinoza, Arendt and
The Productive Body Dan Taylor 37
4 Corporeal and abstract: Is there a ‘left biopolitics’ of bodies?
Marina Vishmidt 59
5 Empty promises: The financialization of labour Phil Jones 81
6 The dialectical body: Bringing science back into socialism
Graham Jones 99
7 Neither appropriated nor expropriated: Notes towards an
autonomist cripistemology of the productive body
Arianna Introna 119
8 The Quantified Self, the ideology of health and fat Dawn Woolley 137
9 The artefact of losing: The (bio)poetics of miscarriage Helen
Charman and Christopher Law 157
10 (Re)productive data-bodies: Privacy, inequality and anti-abortion
politics in the age of tech-capitalism Grace Tillyard 179
11 Algorithmic capitalism, digital machinofacture and the
productive body Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard 203
F urther reading 219
Index 221
Contributors
Philip Barnard is Emeritus Professor of English at University of Kansas.
His publications primarily address the cultural politics of the novel during
the revolutionary age, US novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810),
and poststructuralism and historical materialism since the 1960s. Recent
publications include Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and
World-Systems Culture (2017, co-authored with Stephen Shapiro) and The
Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown (2019, co-edited with Hilary
Emmett and Stephen Shapiro). He has also translated The Literary Absolute
by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, as well as texts by Philippe
Sollers, Alain Kirili, Severo Sarduy and others.
Steffan Blayney works for a trade union in London, and is an honorary
research fellow in the Department of History at the University of Sheffield.
He is the author of Health & Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work
and the Making of the Working-Class Body (University of Massachusetts
Press, 2022).
Helen Charman teaches in the English Studies department at Durham
University. Her first book, Mother State, is forthcoming from Allen Lane. Her
poetry has been shortlisted for the White Review Poetry Prize and the Ivan
Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment.
François Guéry born 22 March 1944, alumnus of the École Normale
Supérieure, is Professor Emeritus of philosophy and formerly the dean
of the Philosophy Faculty at Université Lyon-III. He has participated in
several radio programmes on philosophy. His research interests include
Marx, notably in Le Corps productif (The Productive Body), written with
Didier Deleule in 1972, and Industrial Society and Its Enemies, published
in 1989; Heidegger, for his thinking on technology, in Heidegger rediscuté
Contributors ix
(Heidegger Revisited), published in 1995, and Nietzsche; he translated the
second Untimely Meditation with commentary, and partially translated
Thus Spake Zarathustra, to which he returned in Archéologie du nihilisme
(Archeology of Nihilism), published in 2015. His work engages with
civilizational problems, such as ecological crisis (La politique de précaution,
The politics of precaution, with the minister Corinne Lepage, 2001), and
feminism, which he will consider in a forthcoming work, La loi du plus faible
(The Survival of the Weakest).
Joey Hornsby recently completed a PhD in French Studies at King’s College
London, her degree being awarded in August 2021. Her research considered
the role of economic, labouring relationships in the work of Georges Bataille.
She is the author of ‘“Working Girl”: Sex Work and Intersubjectivity in
Georges Bataille’s Madame Edwarda’ published in Nottingham French Studies,
spring 2022.
Arianna Introna received her MLitt and PhD in Scottish Literature from the
University of Stirling and is now Associate Lecturer with the Open University.
Her research interests range from Scottish literature, disability studies and
the medical humanities to Marxist autonomist theory, critical theory and
the social history of the welfare state. Her first book, Autonomist Narratives
of Disability in Modern Scottish Writing: Crip Enchantments (2022), explores
the intersection between imaginaries of disability and representations of
work, welfare and the nation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Scottish
literature.
Graham Jones is a writer currently based in the Midlands, UK, and is the
author of The Shock Doctrine of the Left (2018) and Red Enlightenment: On
Socialism, Science, and Spirituality (forthcoming).
Phil Jones is a researcher for the think tank Autonomy. He regularly writes
for publications such as the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the New
Statesman and Novara Media. He is the author of Work Without the Worker:
Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism (2021).
