Margherita Pascucci

Genesis and structure of exploitation Introduction. For a critique of the metaphysics of capital Chapter I: On money as transcendent metaphysical power Chapter II: The rationes seminales: the birth of Capital as transcendental physical power Chapter III: On presupposition. Capital, immanent axiomatic. Production of differential. Chapter IV: Production of differential. Deleuze and Guattari on Marx Chapter V: Desire, ‘plus of being’ and differential relation Chapter VI: Sohn-Rethel precursor: For the critical liquidation of apriorism or the genesis of the conditions of validity of knowledge Appendix: For a pre-modern philosophy of welfare

The core of my research is poverty in relation to the genesis of capital. I contextualized the reflection on poverty in relation to the gnoseological error of capital, a gnoseological error which is immediately also an ethical and ontological one. The thesis at which I arrived is that the productive mechanism of capital contains within itself a gnoseological error which causes the production of poverty instead of “true” wealth: true wealth being the common good for and of all. Poverty is the litmus test of this gnoseological, and therefore ontological, ethical, and political error of capital.

Potentia of Poverty opposes to the surplus-value of capital a surplus-concept of life - of the worker, of the non-worker, of the poor, of the rich: an excess of being with the power to undo capital by using its own mechanism. Antonio Negri writes in the preface that 'The poor is the powerful, Pascucci tells us. She interprets Marx as a reader of Spinoza; however, maybe there is something more here than there is in Spinoza and Marx themselves. A further passage is necessary to grasp this "more": namely, to tie the experience of poverty to an ontology of "cupiditas" [desire], that is, of "amor" [love]'

Moving from the contemporary transformations of labor as form of production, this dissertation tries to question the role that 'knowledge' has, both as element of capitalist production and as its subverting tool. By setting a parallelism between Capital's mechanism and the workings of the Imagination, this study tracks the genealogy of 'Immaterial labor', main figure of this transformation, back to Marx's notion of phantasmagoria and to the reading that Walter Benjamin gave of it . It develops a path still latent in Benjamin's work but already by him indicated---whose importance has been neglected by the critical work of the last twenty years---, of a positive role of the image within the event of phantasmagoria. Such positive role of the image is detected by this study as knowledge that occurs, in contemporaneity, mainly through images. It is so defined a first feature of this knowledge, common to both capital and imagination. By inserting itself within the contemporary attention to the productive aspect of Imagination and its influence on economy ; this study conjugates this 'knowledge in images'--- with the 'creative, materialistic' role of the image in contemporary theories of knowledge . A powerful figure comes out of this reflection: sense , which this study proposes as materialist Concept and opposes to the aconceptual relations established by capital. Product of phantasmagoria and opening to poetics, sense is the concept able to function as bridge to the possibility of a 'practical knowledge'. With these elements, this study proposes to add to the contemporary notion of 'cognitive capitalism' , a notion of 'cognitive materialism' which, by giving justice to a material side of immaterial labor, chooses to give back to poverty the force of potentia, of affirmative activity

"Causa sui" is the second volume of a trilogy (first: "Potentia of poverty", it. 2006, english: Brill, 2023, "Capital Machine. Genesis and structure of exploitation", it. 2022): it analyses the parabola of Capital as fake causa sui, that is a mechanism that steals our own capacity of producing our life. It counterposes to Capital the true causa sui, that is our force of producing life which cannot be neither extracted nor appropriated, because it is the elementary matter that constitutes us. This element resists exploitation and constitutes the seed of a possible revolution not only in labour but in all relations of power.