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Since 1990, northern Madagascar has been overwhelmed by successive and overlapping resource booms and busts. Erratic commodity markets—including those for gold, sapphires, vanilla, and rosewood—have sent rural Malagasy residents moving back and forth between various forms of extraction and production with unprecedented volatility. This article explores the history and lives of northern Madagascar's makeshift miners-turned-loggers-turned-cash-croppers in order to rethink small-scale resource extraction in a highly speculative, late-capitalist global economy. Resource workers in the region, we argue, have transformed from migrants who view extractive activities as temporary complements to subsistence agriculture to mobile subjects chasing one resource boom after another, often abandoning stable agrarian aspirations altogether. Although originating in the cosmopolitan global North, late-capitalist economic volatility nonetheless shapes extractive subjectivities in the global South, contributing to more flexible extraction and livelihoods. Flexible extractive subjects in northern Madagascar, we conclude, provide a rural parallel to the late-capitalist subjects of the global North. They represent a growing class of flexible labor in the global South that bears notable resemblance to the gig economy workers currently dominating discussions of precarious work in the twenty-first century.

Resumo: A partir da reconstrução de aspectos da teoria social de Theodor Adorno, o objetivo deste artigo é uma interpretação de sua crítica à mecânica de sedução fascista em democracias. Se elementos de continuidade entre o nazifascismo e o imediato pós-guerra nos países centrais já foram ressaltados em Dialética do esclarecimento, Adorno aprofunda suas reflexões sobre condições objetivas e os pressupostos subjetivos que mantinham o fascismo como uma tendência imanente nas chamadas décadas de ouro do capitalismo. Mais do que uma tradicional historiografia das ideias, o propósito deste artigo é também sublinhar contribuições que as interpretações do frankfurtiano podem trazer ao debate sobre a ascensão de líderes e movimentos de direita radical contemporâneos. Abstract: Through a reconstruction of aspects of Theodor Adorno's social theory, this paper aims to analyze his interpretation of the mechanics of fascist seduction in democracies. If Dialectics of Enlightenment had drawn attention to elements of continuity between the Nazi-fascism the immediate post-war period at the core countries of capitalism, Adorno shed light on the objective conditions and subjective assumptions that maintain the fascism as an immanent tendency of the so-called golden age. Rather than a traditional historiography of ideas, my objective is also to highlight contributions that the Frankfurt scholar could bring to the current debate on the rise of contemporary far right leaders and movements. Resumen: Reconstruyendo aspectos de la teoría social de Theodor Adorno, el objetivo del artículo es una interpretación de la mecánica de seducción fascista en las democracias. Si aspectos de continuidad entre el nazi fascismo y la posguerra en los países centrales ya fueran subrayados en Dialéctica de la ilustración, Adorno profundiza sus reflexiones sobre las condiciones objetivas y los elementos subjetivos que mantuvieron el fascismo como una tendencia inmanente en los llamados años dorados del capitalismo. Al revés de una tradicional historiografía de las ideas, el propósito de este artículo es hacer hincapié de las contribuciones que las interpretaciones del frankfurtiano pueden agregar al análisis de la ascensión de líderes y movimientos de derecha radicales contemporáneos.

Through a reconstruction of aspects of Theodor Adorno’s social theory,this paper aims to analyze his interpretation of the mechanics of fascist seductionin democracies. If Dialectics of Enlightenment had drawn attention to elementsof continuity between the Nazi-fascism the immediate post-war period at thecore countries of capitalism, Adorno shed light on the objective conditions andsubjective assumptions that maintain the fascism as an immanent tendency ofthe so-called golden age. Rather than a traditional historiography of ideas, myobjective is also to highlight contributions that the Frankfurt scholar could bring tothe current debate on the rise of contemporary far right leaders and movements. Reconstruyendo aspectos de la teoría social de Theodor Adorno, elobjetivo del artículo es una interpretación de la mecánica de seducción fascistaen las democracias. Si aspectos de continuidad entre el nazi fascismo y la posguerraen los países centrales ya fueran subrayados en Dialéctica de la ilustración,Adorno profundiza sus reflexiones sobre las condiciones objetivas y los elementossubjetivos que mantuvieron el fascismo como una tendencia inmanente en losllamados años dorados del capitalismo. Al revés de una tradicional historiografíade las ideas, el propósito de este artículo es hacer hincapié de las contribucionesque las interpretaciones del frankfurtiano pueden agregar al análisis de laascensión de líderes y movimientos de derecha radicales contemporáneos. A partir da reconstrução de aspectos da teoria social de Theodor Adorno,o objetivo deste artigo é uma interpretação de sua crítica à mecânica de seduçãofascista em democracias. Se elementos de continuidade entre o nazifascismoe o imediato pós-guerra nos países centrais já foram ressaltados em Dialéticado esclarecimento, Adorno aprofunda suas reflexões sobre condições objetivase os pressupostos subjetivos que mantinham o fascismo como uma tendênciaimanente nas chamadas décadas de ouro do capitalismo. Mais do que umatradicional historiografia das ideias, o propósito deste artigo é também sublinharcontribuições que as interpretações do frankfurtiano podem trazer ao debatesobre a ascensão de líderes e movimentos de direita radical contemporâneos.

The theme of this special issue of Feminist Dissent focuses on the ways in which religious fundamentalist movements have become hegemonic in many secular states around the world. This purported paradox of fundamentalist politics gaining power in secular states is all the more challenging to analyse in the context of both the consolidation and re-articulation of neoliberalism as an ideology and framework for organising economy and society in the era of late capitalism and its successive crises. Specifically, we are interested in exploring the ways in which these transformations within state, society and the economy have affected women’s positions and gender relations. The illustrative case studies we examine in this issue are India, Israel and Turkey.

The article reveals the understanding of property in institutionalism and in classical political economy with an emphasis on the Marxist direction of the latter. It is shown that in the works of modern authors belonging to the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism – one of the main directions of modern theory of classical political economy in Russia – the specific, concrete historical content of property relations is firstly investigated. This content in the framework of this direction, inheriting the tradition of the “Tsagolovskaya” school of political economy, is connected through the system of production relations of a particular society. It is shown that both private and public forms of property have different socio-economic contents in historically different socio-economic systems – pre-bourgeois, bourgeois, post-capitalist. The author proposes political and economic systematization of patterns of property that are characteristic of the modern stage of economic development, which in the article is defined as late capitalism. These forms include not only different types of private and public property, but also transitional forms that contradictory combine private-capitalist and associated forms of appropriation. It is specially emphasized that public property is not reducible to state property and includes a special type of relationship – “ownership by everybody of everything”, which is characteristic of the sphere of co-creation. It is shown that in certain types of economy, state ownership can hide relations not only of public, but also of private-capitalist appropriation, as well as non-economic coercion. The contradictions of the transformation of property relations under the conditions of late capitalism and the most relevant practical problems associated with this are revealed.The article includes a polemic dialogue of the author with representatives of the institutional direction and the works of George B. Kleiner.

This paper intends to present the basic structure of Jameson’s concept of dialectical critique in the manner it is developed in Marxism and Form and Political Unconscious. Author’s intention is to give an analysis of specific constitutive dualism by which Jameson approaches the tradition of dialectical thinking, such as ‘philosophy – history’, ‘Hegelianism – Marxism’, ‘critique – understanding’, and its abolition. Starting from the fact of this concept’s immense analytical power, this paper endeavors to affirm Jameson’s project of revitalization of critique as an unsurpassed mode of Marxist intervention within the world of late capitalism.

Theodor W. Adorno often made reference to Immanuel Kant’s famous essay on enlightenment. Although he denied that immaturity is self-incurred, the first section of this article will show that he adopted many of Kant’s ideas about maturity in his philosophically informed critique of monopoly conditions under late capitalism. The second section will explore Adorno’s claim that the educational system could foster maturity by encouraging critical reflection on the social conditions that have made us what we are. Finally, this article will demonstrate that Adorno links enlightenment to Kant’s idea of a realm of ends.

This paper aims to be a theoretical reflection on the ruptures and new articulations of the forms of political mobilization in the post-crisis period. We propose that in the 2010s, catalyzed by digital technologies, three major ruptures crystallize: socioeconomic, in which the precariousness of working and vital conditions implies the re-emergence of a material social critique; temporary, in which the accelerated dynamics of late capitalism intensify the primacy of the short term; and cultural, in which fragmentation translates into a sense of insecurity and uncertainty. All of this results in a transformation in the forms of mobilization, which tend toward ephemeral, spasmodic collective action. This can lead to the emergence of the Great Event, where the main thing is to physically bring people together and recover the sense of community. El presente trabajo pretende ser una reflexión teórica sobre las rupturas y nuevas articulaciones de las formas de movilización política en el periodo postcrisis. Proponemos que en la década de 2010, catalizadas por las tecnologías digitales, cristalizan tres grandes rupturas: socioeconómicas, en las que la precarización de las condiciones laborales y vitales supone la reemergencia de una crítica social material; temporales, en las que la dinámica aceleradora del capitalismo tardío intensifica la primacía del corto plazo; y socioculturales, en las que la fragmentación se traduce en una sensación de inseguridad e incertidumbre. Todo ello deriva en una transformación en las formas de movilización, que tienden hacia una acción colectiva efímera, espasmódica. Esta puede dar pie al surgimiento del gran evento, donde lo primordial es juntar físicamente a personas y recuperar el sentido de comunidad.

Stand-up comedy has emerged as an immensely resonant youth-oriented pop-cultural form within the Indian landscape. This article studies the form and content of stand-up comedy to foreground its implicit banality. By analysing the subtleties of this banality, we argue that contemporary stand-up comedy has the capacity to produce a peculiar kind of enjoyment. The moment of laughter and the consequent enjoyment instills a sense of fleeting thought. This unintended contemplation, coupled with banality, has the potential to produce an enjoyment and a cultural form that can possibly resist complete appropriation.

Drawing on researches that diagnosis the experience of time in Late Capitalism the article focus on the themes of labor time and basic income, connecting them to the social and economic crises we live nowadays. Based on the analysis of these two related themes, I deal with the debate of these subjects from the 1970’s to the present moment. I argue here that the neoliberal option for a market fundamentalism lead to an increase in poverty and social inequality, situation aggravated by the actual Covid19 Pandemic. In order to fight poverty and extreme social inequality, I conclude by proposing the adoption of a universal basic income, not only as an emergency measure during the Pandemic, but as a permanent strategy to protect the social tissue from the destructive effects of an uncontrolled widespread market logic on peoples’ life., Partindo de estudos sobre a experiência de tempo no capitalismo tardio, o artigo concentra-se nos temas de tempo de trabalho e da renda básica, vinculando-os às crises social e econômica que vivenciamos atualmente. Com base na análise desses dois temas relacionados, eu lido com o debate a respeito deles desde os anos 1970 até o momento presente. Argumento que a opção neoliberal por fundamentalismo de mercado levou ao crescimento da pobreza e da desigualdade social, situação agravada pela atual pandemia de Covid19. Para combater as extremas pobreza e desigualdade social, concluo propondo a adoção de uma renda básica universal não apenas durante a pandemia, mas como uma estratégia permanente para proteger o tecido social dos efeitos destrutivos de uma expansão descontrolada da lógica de mercado sobre a vida das pessoas.

Benatar has a principle of asymmetry, i.e. that coming into existence as a human being is coming into a world in which harm is more likely than well-being. This is Thesis 1. Thesis 2 is that thesis 1 entails that one should not procreate. The threat of the end of civilization and the extinction of humanity by climate change (which Benatar does not mention) renders ‘do not procreate’ a notion no longer counter-intuitive. Thesis 3 concerns ‘population and extinction’: he envisages ‘population zero’ as a desirable consequence of thesis 2 even though ‘The last generation to die out would bear heavy burdens’. Benatar writes, ‘It would indeed have been better if no people had been added to the Edenic Lives of Adam and Eve’. The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck one hated. Benatar cites two schools of thought in the Talmud—the House of Hillel who thought the creation of humans was good and the House of Shammi thought it bad. Christians following Aquinas’ omne ens est bonum may find some Jewish notions quite the opposite of a Christian conviction, that, to be, is simply good.

Books reviewed: Horacio Machado Aráoz, Mineração, genealogia do desastre. São Paulo: Editora Elefante, 2020; Martín Arboleda, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 2020

In this cultural study we will discuss how the cinema from the last four decades has shown the urban space dedicated to the upper classes: those are very distinctly marked spaces and the upper-lower exchange areas are strictly marked out. During late capitalism cities have been designed according to a markedly bipolar scheme, with small fenced areas reserved to the lucky elite, and large slum areas around them. The films from these years have captured this view, as this art is a diffuser of ideas among large audiences. This analysis has taken into account movies from several genres, kinds and origins: fantasy, drama, cult movies, blockbusters, Hollywood, European cinema, South American movies… The proposed part of the viewing of several movies, plus a theoretical basis of bibliographical references that sustains the discourse. En el presente estudio cultural se expondrá cómo el cine de las últimas cuatro décadas ha mostrado el espacio ciudadano dedicado a las clases altas, espacios muy marcados y con las zonas de intercambio con las otras clases estrictamente delimitadas. Durante los años del capitalismo avanzado las ciudades se han pensado según un esquema bipolar muy acentuado, con pequeñas zonas valladas dedicadas a la élite afortunada, y grandes extensiones de chabolas alrededor de ellas. El cine del periodo lo ha plasmado, al ser un arte difusor de ideas entre grandes audiencias. Para el análisis se han tenido en cuenta películas de géneros, tipos y procedencias muy variados: fantástico, drama, de culto, blockbusters, Hollywood, cine europeo, suramericano… La propuesta parte del visionado de varias películas, más una base teórica de referencias bibliográficas que sustentan el discurso.

The centenary of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920a/1955) falls in 2020, a year dominated globally by the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the effects of the pandemic has been to reveal the increasingly fragile interconnectedness of human and non-human life, as well as the ongoing effects of social inequalities, particularly racism, on the valuing of life and its flourishing. Drawing on earlier work, this paper develops the notion of a ‘maternal death drive’ that supplements Freud’s death drive by accounting for repetition that retains a relation to the developmental time of ‘life’ but remains ‘otherwise’ to a life drive. The temporal form of this ‘life in death’ is that of ‘dynamic chronicity’, analogous to late modern narratives that describe the present as ‘thin’ and the time of human futurity as running out. I argue that the urgency to act on the present in the name of the future is simultaneously ‘suspended’ by the repetitions of late capitalism, leading to a temporal hiatus that must be embraced rather than simply lamented. The maternal (death drive) alerts us to a new figure of a child whose task is to carry expectations and anxieties about the future and bind them into a reproductive present. Rather than seeing the child as a figure of normativity, I turn to Greta Thunberg to signal a way to go on in suspended ‘grey’ time.

Capitalist development since the 1940s has been fueled by global oil extraction. Cheap oil was the core energy input in the post–World War II expansion. By the 1970s, the limits of this oil...

As it emerged in the late twentieth century, Empire promised a new era of global cooperation and stability through a seamless integration of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy. Premised as ...

A historical and global phenomenon, the contemporary sense of the future distances itself, inmany ways, from that experienced by other past futures. Acting as a type of bio-political machineof the possible, it has the most minute effects on subject’s daily life. A hypervisibility of the futurewhere the pretentiously precise images participate in the installation of anticipation as a generalprogram in the culture of risk. In this neoliberal governmentality, however, not all predicted riskscan (or should) be visible: a hermeneutic gradient about these risks and non-risks is installedin everyday life. Reality that weakens collectivities and reduces the spectrum of the possible toeconomic diagrams of late capitalism. Fenômeno histórico e global, o senso contemporâneo de futuro se afasta, em vários sentidos,daquele experimentado em outros (futuros) passados. Atuando como uma espécie de máquina nabiopolítica dos possíveis, tem efeitos capilares no cotidiano do sujeito. Trata-se de uma hipervisibilidade do futuro em que imagens pretensamente precisas participam da instalação da antecipaçãocomo um programa geral necessário à cultura do risco. Nessa governamentalidade neoliberal,entretanto, nem todos os riscos previstos podem (ou devem) ser visíveis: um gradiente hermenêutico acerca desses riscos e “não riscos” instala-se na vida cotidiana. Realidade que enfraqueceas coletividades e reduz o espectro do possível aos diagramas econômicos do capitalismo tardio.

The article analyses the way in which Fredric Jameson’s notion of “nostalgia film” was developed in contemporary film studies. In the text I argue that although Jameson’s critique of post-modernism and its nostalgic orientation is provocative and inspiring, his category of “nostalgia film” turns out to be of little use for film studies, when it’s disconnected from the whole Jameson’s project of critique of late capitalism ideology. The definition of nostalgia film, which Jameson pro-posed and theoreticians of film developed after him, is too wide and sketchy, therefore its applicabil-ity remains problematic. This turns out to be evident in the uses of “nostalgia film” in film studies over the last thirty years. In my article I demonstrate some limitations not only in Jameson’s own movie examples, but also in film studies reflection on “nostalgia film”. Drawing mainly on fem-inistsʼ critiques of Jameson’s work, I argue that they suffer a lack of strict criteria, by which film theorists could convincingly differentiate “nostalgia film” as a separate film genre. That’s why in my opinion future research on cinematic nostalgia should re-double its efforts to re-think Jameson’s term or try to find a more promising conceptualisation, going beyond “nostalgia film”.

The cyberpunk genre has long been caught in a dystopian view of the future as opposed to the rest of science-fiction which has presented us many utopian scenarios of a future where humanity is saved by technology. This countercultural aspect of it comes from a critique on corporate power, which is thought to use technology in an attempt to reshape the human subject into a more efficient worker and consumer. The growth of digital corporations, the practices of internet surveillance and the ever-increasing presence of technology in our daily lives surely add to the plausibility of this cyberpunk future. In a corporate society, everything from information to human relations will be functioning by the logic of capital, every aspect of human life becoming something to be shared and exchanged for someone to make a profit. Nothing that is not quantifiable and marketable will be of any use, thus making it hard for the human subject to value human experiences outside of this system. The danger that augmentations advocated by transhumanists pose is that in the capitalist system they become consumer goods, that will act in the same way as any other product does, increasing already existing inequalities by giving more advantages to the rich that will afford them. Moreover, human nature itself will be modified when these off-the-shelf augmentations that are supposed to liberate us will contribute to the uniformization of character, our intelligence, charisma or beauty being a serial product that will hold nothing original. The cyberpunk literary genre starting with William Gibson’s novel “Neuromancer” can give us some insight into how to live with this dystopian future that seems imminent.

Lefebvre’s “right to the city” concept is often used to describe how individuals are challenging late capitalism and neoliberal development by appropriating urban space for collective use. While so...

In recent years, much attention has been paid to the rise of political populism and its relationship to neoliberalism and neoconservatism hitherto dominant in the West. In particular, some have spe...

El presente artículo introduce el debate posmoderno en la industria de la hospitalidad, planteándose la interrogante ¿qué aspectos de la posmodernidad influyen en el consumidor de la industria hospitalaria? Se analizan dos casos de estudio, primero en el sector cruceros y segundo en la plataforma virtual Airbnb por medio de la aplicación metodológica de Firat y Shultz (1997) y Brown (1995) respectivamente, concluyendo que el posmodernismo ofrece un medio para conceptualizar los cambios que están teniendo lugar en el ambiente de la hospitalidad contemporánea, evidenciados en la fragmentación de los mercados, el crecimiento de las alianzas estratégicas y el crecimiento de la práctica de comercialización anárquica, enfatizando la unicidad sobre la homogeneidad, investigando la cultura del simulacro y ofreciendo la oportunidad de considerar hasta qué punto la industria hotelera contemporánea representa la sustitución de una ética puritana de consumo, con la cultura consumista asociada con el capitalismo tardío.

The numerous interpretations and evaluations of 1968 that have been developed over the past half-century can arguably be divided into two. On one side, there are those accounts that regard 1968 as the threshold across which an older form of modernity passed to become what student revolutionaries of the period began to call late capitalism; and although late capitalism itself quickly became a fissured thing, this view has become orthodox. On the other side, there are those who insist that ’68 was a Badiousian event, an outbreak of liberatory possibilities to which we not only have a responsibility to remain faithful, but which provided a template for later more or less insurrectionary movements; undoubtedly the strongest argument for ’68’s enduring radical meaning and potential has been made by Kristin Ross in her 2002 book, May ’68 and its Afterlives. This article is partly committed to arguing for a middle way between these two views. I accept that the processes leading to and following the events of 1968 triggered the development of a new kind of capitalist society as well as formed the template for the radicalisms we now have. This mediation might seem to involve a contradiction, but in the end it is more accurate not to see these two views as they see themselves, namely as enemies, but rather as dialectically and functionally united. Without the kind of capitalism that the 1960s triggered, no radical movement politics; without radical, post-communist movement politics, no such late capitalism. To see that, we need to think about ’68 in larger contexts and terms than is usual. I will call the context I wish to bring to bear general secularization.

RESUMEN En este artículo se propone que la obra de Jorge Baradit es un dispositivo que procesa fragmentos de sujeto-cuerpo, espacio y tecnología para construir el mito de la historia de Chile. En su operación, esta máquina convierte el país en cuerpo y el cuerpo en espacio, y los usa como piezas que conforman tecnologías violentas de dominación que esclavizan a los sujetos poniéndolos al servicio de poderes desconocidos en función de intereses superiores y malignos, en una concepción en que el tiempo es maleable y las palabras son mágicas pues inciden en lo real. De este modo se va construyendo una "historia secreta" en la que se relatan, entre otros episodios, la conquista de América, el golpe de estado de 1973 y la dictadura de Pinochet, historia mítica que participa en la creación del imaginario social del capitalismo tardío como se configura hoy en Latinoamérica.

In My Kill Adore Him, Mexican American poet Paul Martínez Pompa uses the realm of sexuality as a lens through which to explore the ideological, social, and affective shifts that have accompanied the rise of late capitalism in the U.S. In these poems, Martínez Pompa implies that our experience of neoliberalism has resulted in our affective withdrawal from politics, which he allegorizes as a decline in our libidos, as well as a distancing from what Slavoj Žižek describes as the Real of the body and a distortion in the way that we perceive suffering in the rest of the world.

Crematorio by Rafael Chirbes (2007) and La carne by Rosa Montero (2016) belong to the expanding genre of the Spanish crisis novel that arose in response to the global economic crisis of 2007–2009. The novels’ protagonists realize that neoliberalism is eroding the institutions associated with the welfare state model. These characters attempt to exorcise the anxieties that the crisis awakens in them by projecting them onto Eastern European immigrants, whom they associate with the depredations of savage capitalism in their countries of origin. Rather than casualties of globalization, immigrants are seen as emissaries of the new economic order that fosters fluidity and rootlessness, and are blamed for the hardship created by the structures of exploitation that are implicit within late capitalism.

This article reads Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland as novels similarly preoccupied with the surreptitious linkages between risk, financial speculation, and terror. In doing so, it argues that Hamid and O’Neill mark a shift away from the post-9/11 novel’s prevailing investment in traumatic domesticity in order to develop nuanced treatments of how, in the wake of 9/11, risk, speculation, and terror are intensified along racial lines, and unevenly distributed across geopolitical divides between the Global North and South. In this way, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland reveal the superficial nature of risk society’s ideal subject. Beyond this, however, these novels also demonstrate risk society’s continued production of speculative or dissembling narratives designed to shield precarious subjects against future risks, while also projecting risky affective and political reinvestments in national contexts presumably consigned to vestigial status in an otherwise global imaginary.

This article offers an ethnographically informed discussion of the hybrid discourse of authenticity of two New Age Judaism (NAJ) communities that were active in Israel in the beginning of the millennium. The article argues that the discourse of authenticity of the two communities was a hybrid discourse which interweaved two overlapping understandings of expressive authenticity: genealogical or historical (origin) and identity or correspondence (expressive content). The members of the communities aspired for self-realization and fulfillment by discovering their authentic self and at the same time articulated and legitimized their mission of renewal by referring to earlier, allegedly more spiritual time periods in Jewish history. This discourse is understood in terms of the “inward turn” and the “turn to tradition” of contemporary Jewish life as well as the penetration of consumer logic into Jewish forms of spirituality. As such it showcases the complexities of Jewish individualization whereby the focus on the self and self-authenticity is tightly linked to the cultivation of identity and communal belonging.

The article addresses the issue of property and income inequalities as well as the mechanisms of their formation and growth. It is suggested that these inequalities are primarily an outcome of an ability for capital accumulation depending on the income volume and the needs structure. The thesis is verified by means of a theoretical model of material capital accumulation that is based on the relationship between income, on the one hand, and socially and culturally conditioned needs, on the other. The model is applied to the analysis of capital accumulation in late capitalist societies, Polish society in particular. As a result, four income spheres are identified, each characterized by different mechanisms of accumulation. The basic factor determining the ability to accumulate capital is structural (the place in the social structure). This structural factor is further conditioned by cultural (e.g. consumption patterns), institutional (e.g. tax burden), economic (e.g. rate of return for investments), and other structural (e.g. overall inequalities) factors in determining the ability for capital accumulation.

This article brings the writing of Marie Darrieussecq into dialogue with the philosophy of Catherine Malabou, exploring how both think the mutability and transformability of the body in relation to recent scientific and technological discovery and innovation. From the metamorphosis of a woman into a sow in Truismes (1996) to the cloning of human life in Notre vie dans les forêts (2017), Darrieussecq’s novels foreground the body as a site of constant change and reinvention. Meanwhile, Malabou’s interdisciplinary elaboration of the concept of ‘plasticity’ between continental thought and the biological sciences reveals all structures and forms of life to be plastic and intrinsically open to change, from the neuroplasticity of the human brain to the epigenetic development of organisms. This article presents both Darrieussecq and Malabou as writers and thinkers of plasticity, exploring how their respective plasticities develop through a relationship to science which is itself changeable and ambiguous. In different but converging ways, both suggest how science discovers and innovates with the plasticity of life, whilst often also controlling and manipulating this same plasticity in the context of late capitalism. More optimistically, this article proposes that Darrieussecq and Malabou also envisage a becoming plastic of the sciences themselves, liberating plasticity as a discourse of freedom as a thinking with science, literature, and philosophy., Cet article établit un dialogue entre l’écriture de Marie Darrieussecq et la philosophie de Catherine Malabou, afin d’explorer la façon dont les notions de mutabilité et de transformabilité du corps dans l’oeuvre de chacune se développent au sein d’une rencontre avec les discours scientifiques et technologiques récents. De la métamorphose d’une femme en truie dans Truismes (1996) au clonage humain dans Notre vie dans les forêts (2017), les romans de Darrieussecq mettent en scène le corps comme un lieu de changements et de réinventions constants. En parallèle, dans l’oeuvre de Malabou, l’élaboration interdisciplinaire, entre philosophie et biologie, du concept de « plasticité », suggère un déploiement de cette plasticité à travers toutes les structures et toutes les formes de la vie. La neuroplasticité du cerveau humain et le développement épigénétique de l’organisme font partie des exemples de ces structures intrinsèquement ouvertes à la transformation. Cet article présente Darrieussecq et Malabou comme écrivaines et penseuses de la plasticité tout en montrant que leurs plasticités respectives se développent à travers une relation aux sciences qui est elle aussi mutable et ambiguë. De manières différentes mais convergentes, Darrieussecq et Malabou donnent à voir la façon dont les sciences se découvrent et s’inventent à travers la plasticité, tout en manipulant et instrumentalisant cette même plasticité, notamment dans le contexte du capitalisme tardif. En outre, de manière plus optimiste, ce travail envisage aussi le devenir-plastique des sciences elles-mêmes chez Darrieussecq comme chez Malabou. Le discours sur la plasticité devient discours sur la liberté, où s’entremêlent science, littérature et philosophie.