•  96
    Cornelius Castoriadis’ agonistic theory of the future of work at Amazon Mechanical Turk
    Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 1 (1): 1-20. 2024.
    Digital innovations are rapidly changing the contemporary workplace. Big Tech companies marketing algorithmic management increasingly decide on the Future of Work. Political responses, however, often focus on managing the impact of these technologies on workers. They leave the question of how these technologies are designed or how workers can determine their own futures unanswered. This approach risks surrendering the Future of Work debate to techno-determinist imaginaries aligned with corporate…Read more
  •  149
    While the challenges workers face in the gig economy are now well-known, reflections on emancipatory solutions in political philosophy are still underdeveloped. Some have pleaded for enhancing workers' bargaining power through unionisation; others for enhancing exit options in the labour market. Both strategies, however, come with unin-tended side-effects and do not exhaust the full potential for worker self-government present in the digital gig economy. Using the republican theory of freedom as…Read more
  •  214
    Within Michel Foucault’s own conceptualization of governmentality, there is little room for something like ‘ungovernable life’. The latter seems to hint at a form of social conduct beyond power-relations, which would offend Foucault’s basic philosophical postulates. I argue that this identification between governmentality and power as such demonstrates a one-sided focus on the history of Western power-relations. By opposing Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality t…Read more
  •  195
    A Thousand Agambens to Replace the One We Have
    Krisis 42 (1): 134-139. 2022.
    Review of Adam Kotsko (2020), Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 241.
  •  154
    Digital Working Lives: Worker Autonomy and the Gig Economy
    Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2022.
    Christiaens argues that digital technologies are fundamentally undermining workers’ autonomy by enacting systems of surveillance that lead to exploitation, alienation, and exhaustion. For a more sustainable future of work, digital technologies should support human development instead of subordinating it to algorithmic control.
  •  238
    Precarity as a Mode of Being-in-the-World in Michel Houellebecq’s Possibilité d’une Île
    Modern and Contemporary France 1 (Published online): 1-16. 2022.
    Michel Houellebecq’s Anéantir has received mixed reviews. Houellebecq’s focus on loving intimacy and care for the elderly within the nuclear family allegedly showcases his transformation from an embittered critic of the capitalist status quo to an apolitical novelist interested in the private sphere. I argue that this criticism overlooks Houellebecq’s concerns about old age and love in his earlier novels and how they relate to his social critique. Particularly Houellebecq’s Possibilité d’une île…Read more
  •  137
    Worker Co-Operatives for the 21st Century (review)
    Critical Sociology 48 1-7. 2022.
  •  6
    10. Destituent Potential and Camus’s Politics of Rebellion
    In Marcos Norris & Colby Dickinson (eds.), Agamben and the Existentialists, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 174-190. 2021.
  •  232
    In The Republic of the Living, Miguel Vatter argues that, at the end of the 1970s, Michel Foucault did not convert to but criticized neoliberalism from a republican point of view. Neoliberal governmentality allegedly represses the capacity of human collectives to democratically govern themselves. The potential for republican self- government would then constitute the basis for an affirmative variant of biopolitics. I argue that this creative reformulation of Foucault’s oeuvre does not work as an…Read more
  •  312
    Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and Grossman’s Ethics of Senseless Kindness
    Journal of European Studies 1 (Online). 2022.
    In his early works, Giorgio Agamben argues that some Auschwitz inmates practised a ‘silent form of resistance’ by shutting themselves off from the world until nothing could harm them. I argue that this conception of ‘bare life’ is both too abstract and too individualistic. Agamben’s idea of bare life’s resistance first neglects the socio-historical context that has produced particular instances of it, effectively barring the investigation into how to avoid future occurrences of sovereign violenc…Read more
  •  117
    Giorgio Agamben en de Kerk van Corona
    de Uil van Minerva: Tijdschrift Voor Geschiedenis En Wijsbegeerte van de Cultuur 1 (34): 45-58. 2021.
  •  266
    The burgeoning field of economic theology constitutes primarily a critical device against the Nachleben of medieval providential theology in modern economic governance. Especially Agamben has highlighted the role of the notion of oikonomia in providential and modern economic thought to promote humble acceptance in light of the problem of evil. I show how economic theology can also be a vantage point for affirmative critique. I discuss Negri’s interpretation of the Book of Job and the Italian fem…Read more
  •  285
    Performing agency theory and the neoliberalization of the state
    Critical Sociology 46 (3): 393-411. 2020.
    According to Streeck and Vogl, the neoliberalization of the state has been the result of political-economic developments that render the state dependent on financial markets. However, they do not explain the discursive shifts that would have been required for demoting the state to the role of an agent to bondholders. I propose to explain this shift via the performative effect of neoliberal agency theory. In 1976, Michael Jensen and William Meckling claimed that corporate managers are agents to s…Read more
  •  958
    The entrepreneur of the self beyond Foucault’s neoliberal homo oeconomicus
    European Journal of Social Theory 23 (4): 493-511. 2020.
    In his lectures on neoliberalism, Michel Foucault argues that neoliberalism produces subjects as ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’. He bases this claim on Gary Becker’s conception of the utility-maximizing agent who solely acts upon cost/benefit-calculations. Not all neoliberalized subjects, however, are encouraged to maximize their utility through mere calculation. This article argues that Foucault’s description of neoliberal subjectivity obscures a non-calculative, more audacious side to neolibera…Read more
  •  121
    L’effetto Italian Thought in Belgio
    Giornale Critico di Storia Delle Idee 1 181-192. 2019.
    In recent years, Italian Thought has become an influential school of philosophical reflection. This explains the reputation of thinkers like Agamben, Negri, and Esposito far beyond the borders of Italy. Not only has Italian Thought called attention to the crisis of Derridian deconstructive thought in recent years and replaced it with a biopolitical approach, but it also attests to contemporary political issues of key urgency. I aim to clarify this diffusion process with the specific case of Belg…Read more
  •  702
    Aristotle’s Anthropological Machine and Slavery
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (1): 239-262. 2018.
    Among the most controversial aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy is his endorsement of slavery. Natural slaves are excluded from political citizenship on ontological grounds and are thus constitutively unable to achieve the good life, identified with the collective cultivation of logos in the polis. Aristotle explicitly acknowledges their humanity, yet frequently emphasizes their proximity to animals. It is the latter that makes them purportedly unfit for the polis. I propose to use Agamben’s theo…Read more
  •  214
    Neoliberalism has installed an unending competitive struggle in the economy. Within this context activists have pushed for a reappraisal of laziness and inactivity as forms of resistance. This idea has been picked up by Maurizio Lazzarato and Giorgio Agamben in different ways. I start with explaining the former’s appraisal of laziness as a release of potentialities unrealizable under financial capitalism. Lazzarato’s appraisal of laziness however resembles neoliberal theories of innovation, beca…Read more
  •  291
    Financial Neoliberalism and Exclusion with and beyond Foucault
    Theory, Culture and Society 36 (4): 95-116. 2019.
    In the beginning of the 1970s, Michel Foucault dismisses the terminology of ‘exclusion’ for his projected analytics of modern power. This rejection has had major repercussions on the theory of neoliberal subject-formation. Many researchers disproportionately stress how neoliberal dispositifs produce entrepreneurial subjects, albeit in different ways, while minimizing how these dispositifs sometimes emphatically refuse to produce neoliberal subjects. Relying on Saskia Sassen’s work on financializ…Read more
  •  374
    Hayek’s vicarious secularization of providential theology
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (1): 71-95. 2018.
    Friedrich Hayek’s defense of neoliberal free market capitalism hinges on the distinction between economies and catallaxies. The former are orders instituted via planning, whereas the latter are spontaneous competitive orders resulting from human action without human design. I argue that this distinction is based on an incomplete semantic history of “economy.” By looking at the meaning of “oikonomia” in medieval providential theology as explained by Giorgio Agamben and Joseph Vogl, I argue how Ha…Read more
  • De wereld is alles wat het geval kan zijn. Agambens metafysische en politieke interpretatie van potentialiteit bij Aristoteles
    de Uil van Minerva: Tijdschrift Voor Geschiedenis En Wijsbegeerte van de Cultuur 28 (2): 113-132. 2015.
    Deze tekst vertrekt vanuit een van de meest invloedrijke denkers in de metafysica, namelijk Aristoteles. We lezen hem via de interpretatie van Giorgio Agamben in het artikel On potentiality. 4 Agamben werpt in die tekst een nieuw licht op het onderscheid tussen potentialiteit en act. De Westerse metafysica heeft vaak de act geprivilegieerd boven de potentialiteit. Enkel actuele entiteiten zouden bestaan, terwijl mogelijkheden behoren tot het domein van de verbeelding. Aristoteles ondermijnt dez…Read more
  •  636
    The recently rising field of Critical Data Studies is still facing fundamental questions. Among these is the enigma of digital subjectivation. Who are the subjects of Big Data? A field where this question is particularly pressing is finance. Since the 1990s traders have been steadily integrated into computerized data assemblages, which calls for an ontology that eliminates the distinction between human sovereign subjects and non-human instrumental objects. The latter subjectivize traders in pre-…Read more
  •  394
    Franco 'Bifo' Berardi en de economische wetenschap als ideologie
    de Uil van Minerva: Tijdschrift Voor Geschiedenis En Wijsbegeerte van de Cultuur 30 (1): 44-68. 2017.
    Wij presenteren Berardi’s herwerking van de ideologiekritiek in drie stappen. Eerst schetsen wij de context waarin Berardi de ideologiekritiek herdenkt. Hij bouwt verder op de ontdekking van Deleuze en Guattari dat de taal van het kapitalisme niet de code, maar de axiomatiek is. De economische wetenschap biedt, volgens hen, mensen geen identiteit aan, maar bestaat uit een reeks commando’s die stromen van geld, arbeid, elektriciteit, enzovoort reguleert. Daaraan koppelt Berardi de observatie dat …Read more