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22Money and the meaning of life: The fantasy of instant wealthHuman Affairs 29 (4): 470-478. 2019.Is the meaning of life to get rich quick? That would certainly explain the way many people have lived under the spell of a constitutive fantasy: the fantasy of instant wealth. Drawing on Lacan’s Discourse of the Capitalist, the article explores the fantasy of instant wealth and its relationship to addiction, especially addiction to shopping. The article concludes with a meditation on how the fantasy of instant wealth supplants and in some ways contradicts another fantasy: the fantasy of labour.
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737New Waves in Philosophy of TechnologyHistorical Materialism 18 (2): 195-207. 2010.Essay Review of New Waves in the Philosophy of Technology (Olsen/Selinger). Treats issue of difference of technology in Marx and Heidegger at some length.
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13The Ruling Ideas: Bourgeois Political ConceptsLexington Books. 2012.The concepts that organize our thinking wield, by virtue of this fact, a great deal of political power. This book looks at five concepts whose dominion has increased, steadily, during the bourgeois period of modernity: Labor, Time, Property, Value, and Crisis. These ruling ideas are central not only to many academic disciplines— from philosophy and law to the political, social, and economic sciences— but also to everyday life.
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173Partial LiberationsInternational Studies in Philosophy 34 (2): 169-185. 2002.Examines Marx's account in Capital of a machine burned at the stake in a public square in 1685 as an emblem of modern attitudes to technology.
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361Crisis Theory and the False Desire of Home OwnershipPhilosophy Today 55 (2): 199-210. 2011.Marx claims that economic crisis is endemic to capitalism and will worsen as capitalism develops. The article situates Marx’s crisis theory within the discipline of political economy, explains its relationship to mainstream economics, charts economic crises that have happened since the 1840s, and explains Marx’s crisis theorem of the fall in the rate of profit. In conclusion, the 2008 economic crisis, and the notion of crisis in general, are speculatively considered. Special attention is give…Read more
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274Rough, Foul-Mouthed Boys: Women’s Monstrous Laboring BodiesRadical Philosophy Today 5 49-67. 2007.Karl Marx claims that alienation inheres in all wage labor. I raise questions about the applicability of this claim to subjects of patriarchy. In the first section, I discuss industrial wage labor and its allure for women who were trying to escape the norms of familial patriarchy. In the second section, I extend this criticism of Marx’s claim by considering the racially enslaved subjects of the Antebellum American South, for whom economicallyrecognized wage labor was still a bloody political bat…Read more
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94Karl Marx on technology and alienationPalgrave-Macmillan. 2009.Introduction -- Karl Marx's concept of alienation -- Objectification, alienation, and estrangement -- Other origins of alienation and objectification -- Marx's account of alienation : from early to late -- The alienated object of production : commodity fetishism -- The alienated means of production : machine fetishism -- Machines and the transformation of work -- Marx's energeticist turn -- The first law of thermodynamics -- From arbeit to arbeitskraft -- The second law of thermodynamics -- Mach…Read more
Omaha, Nebraska, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
19th Century Philosophy |