Double Binds of Neoliberalism

Guillaume Collett is an honorary research fellow in the Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent and currently based in the University of Malta. He is the author of The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), and the editor of Deleuze, Guattari, and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity (Bloomsbury, 2019). He has edited two special issues and previously co-edited the journal La Deleuziana. Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone is a visiting senior lecturer in English at the University of Malta, a research fellow at the University of Kent, and a research assistant in refugee law with the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Giappone has published in the areas of digital games, critical theory, and the history of subcultures and is coeditor of Comedy and Critical Thought (Rowman and Littlefield International 2018).Iain MacKenzie teaches political theory at the University of Kent. His research focuses on the nature and scope of critique, and he is coeditor of Comedy and Critical Thought: Laughter as Resistance (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018).

In The Double Binds of Neoliberalism, the contributors provide a detailed and astute unveiling of our contemporary dilemma. Neoliberalism has proven itself adept at offering a false sense of progress by mimicking (but not offering) many of the demands that came from the late 1960s in terms of racial, gender and sexual justice. In doing so, Neoliberalism has effectively separated political and economic forms of determination—commandeering the product of work for their own purposes. This is the double bind of the title: fake moves towards negative freedoms based on identity with a concomitant usurpation of positive, economic freedoms at the same time. The double bind means that leftist modes of organizing and fomenting change are readily coopted by neoliberalism to further reaction and the accumulation of capital by the one percent. If you want to read a volume that explains exactly how we got into the mess we are in and learn how many leftist solutions are bound to fail from the get-go (although these contributors do give a sense of new and better directions to go in), this is the book for you.

• List of Figures Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Revolution Today Guillaume CollettPART I: 1968 AND MARXISM2 Communism as the Riddle Posed to History Jose Rosales3 Workers and Capitalists: Two Different Worlds? Immanenceand Antagonism in Marx’s Capital Daniel Fraser4 The Unfulfilled Promises of the Italian 1968 Protest Movement Franco ManniPART II: FREEDOM AND RIGHTS5 On Ludic Servitude Natasha Lushetich6 Contrasting Legacies of ’68: Deleuze and Human Rights Christos Marneros7 ’68 and Sexuality: Disentangling the Double Bind Blanche PlaqueventPART III: COLLECTIVE PRACTICES AND INSTITUTIONS8 Two Kinds of Critical Pragmatism 161Iain MacKenzie9 May ’68: An Institutional Event Gabriela Hernández De La Fuente10 Communist Guilt, Public Happiness and the Feelings of Collective Attachmentaylon cohen11 Community, Theatre and Political Labour: Unworking theSocialist Legacy of 1968 Ben DunnIndex About the Contributors