Unworkable: Delusions of an Imploding Civilization(SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature)

Explores the slow but inevitable implosion of our civilization by considering the correlation between capital, work, and ideology. Unworkable discusses the ongoing implosion of our globalized world from three distinct angles: the capitalist elimination of labor through technological automation, the dissolution of our shared social narratives, and the subtle imposition of an increasingly pervasive ideological order. Aiming to root out the lost cause of this implosion, Fabio Vighi returns to Marx by way of Hegel, Lacan, Gorz, Baudrillard, and other thinkers who, in different ways, have reflected on the complex dialectical structure of modernity and its hidden conditions of possibility. Capitalism, Vighi argues, fundamentally redefined the meaning of work and prevented the emergence of alternative forms of life. In our own time, the delusions of work and the values that propel life under capitalism have become, in Vighi's analysis, unworkable. And yet, even as we become an increasingly "workless" society, we continue to abide by the same laws of productivity and profit.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Prologue: Loss of Gravity in the Capitalist Galaxy 1. Labor, Value, and Other Capitalist Delusions Dialectical Totalities Brief Encounters Setzung der Voraussetzungen Hegel after Marx The Fantasy of Surplus-Value Hegel in and out of Political Economy 2. Implosion of the Work Society Modernity's Self-deployment Self-caused and Self-realized Reason Real Work and Labor-time Calling the Bluff André Gorz's Critique of Work Disaster Economics The Difficulty of Letting Go 3. The Missing Cause Chronic Constipation A Worldless Discourse The New Master Colonization of the Productive Mind Clouds of Impotence Labor as Vanishing Presupposition Marx's Teleology The Transcendental Schema of Capitalist Time Beyond Exploitation 4. Dialectical Short Circuits The Catastrophe of Liberation Blindness of the Automatic Subject Hegel: Being as Self-mediated Groundlessness The Speculative Breakthrough The Labor Decoy Big Data and the Fanaticism of Breathing 5. The Financial Demon Shackled by Nostalgia Capitalist Bulimia The Anatomy of Finance Is the Key to the Anatomy of the Real Economy Genie out of the Capitalist Bottle Neoliberal Perversions Populist Symptoms Viral Simulations Epilogue: Emergency Capitalism and the Exhaustion of a Form of Life Notes Works Cited Index

About the Author :
Fabio Vighi is Professor of Italian and Critical Theory at Cardiff University. He is the coauthor (with Heiko Feldner) of Critical Theory and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism.