Survival, or, the War Logic of Global Capitalism
Speaker(s): Prof. Edgar Illas (University of Indiana)
The logic of global capitalism is no longer cultural (as Fredric Jameson argued), but has evolved into a logic of war. Consequently, I argue that the frame of cultural recognition that became dominant during postmodernity has been superseded by a frame of survival. While recognition aimed to save subjectivities from the total destruction of twentieth-century wars and project them onto a postmodern marketplace, survival is composed of immanent singularities that take place within the creative destruction of global war. Singularities are neither egalitarian nor subaltern. They simply emerge as Althusserian aleatory events whose causes are immanent in their effects. Singularities within global capitalism are acts of freedom dissociated from a position of structural barring and linked to the production of war that organizes the new conjuncture.