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Overview"Even as the 2008 economic crisis solidified the dominion of neoliberal and financial capital to organize human societies much to the detriment of the world's populations, important questions remain. Among them, what forms of life are free and what forms are perceived legally and economically as surplus? Which of them, human and otherwise, are most expendable? Reified Life theorizes the dangerous social implications of a future where human agency is secondary to algorithmic processes, digital protocols, speculative financial instruments, and nonhuman market-based technological forces. Employing new readings of Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Marx, Gramsci and others, J. Paul Narkunas contends that it is premature to speak of a posthuman or inhuman future, or to employ any sort of ""ism,"" given how dynamic and contingent human practices and their material figurations can be. Over several chapters he diagnoses the rise of ""market humans,"" the instrumentalization of culture to decide the life worth living along utilitarian categories, as well as the varied ways in which discourses of human rights and humanitarianism actually throw members of the species- refugees, for instance - outside the human order. To combat this, Reified Life argues against posthumanist calls to abandon humanism, proposing instead the category of the ahuman. Doing so offers us a way to think alongside the human, and to argue for the value of speculative fiction as a critical mechanism for envisioning alternative futures and freedoms from the domineering forces of speculative capital, whose own fictions have become our realities. To that end, Narkunas provides a novel interpretation of the post-anthropocentric turn in the humanities by linking the diminished centrality of humanism to the waning dominion of nation-states over their populations and the intensification of financial capitalism, which reconfigures politics along economic categories of risk management." Full Product DetailsAuthor: J. Paul NarkunasPublisher: Fordham University Press Imprint: Fordham University Press ISBN: 9780823280308ISBN 10: 0823280306 Pages: 304 Publication Date: 03 July 2018 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsIntroduction: Humanisms, Posthumanisms, and their Discontents Chapter 1: Market Humans: Homo Oeconomicus, Entrepreneurs, and Beings of Risk Chapter 2: Utilitarian Humanism: Culture in the Service of Regulating We Other Humans Chapter 3: The Hedge Fund of Reality: Ontology and Financial Derivatives Chapter 4: Human Rights and States of Emergency: Humanitarians and Governmentality Chapter 5: Translating Rights: The International Criminal Court, Translation and the Human Status Chapter 6: Speculative Fictions and Other Cartographies of Life with Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story Chapter 7: Between Words, Numbers, and Things: Transgenics and Other Objects of Life in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddams Chapter 9: Reification of the Human: Global Organ Harvesting and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go Conclusion: Ahumans: A Guide to Non-Market LivingReviewsReified Life brilliantly brings together seemingly opposing strands of contemporary theory: Marxist accounts of neoliberalism and financialization on the one hand and posthumanist accounts of the decentering of human life on the other. Rather than demonstrating these methodologies as incompatible, Narkunas reveals their intimacy. This intimacy is organized around a new kind of reification, one that produces the ahuman. A necessary read. -- Christopher Breu * author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics * Author InformationJ. Paul Narkunas is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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