[lbo-talk] cynicism, opportunism and fear (was lefties, fulfillment)

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Tue Jan 25 13:24:40 PST 2005


Tom,

Are you saying "idle hands are Cupid's workshop" ?

Charles

^^^^^^

Tom Walker :

As long as there seems to be a somewhat engaged thread developing on

this multitude business, I'll mention my own misgivings about Virno. I

had a hard time at first putting my finger on where the airy abstraction

comes from that constitutes the filler between his occasional very

constructive and clear insights. I'm too charitable to just dismiss such

abstrusenss out of hand as either the writer's arrogance or my own lack

of culture. My crickets finally gave me a clue. I breed and raise

crickets to feed to my son's gecko. Friday night, the first of the

current cohort of crickets began to chirp. Crickets specialize it two

activities: feeding and breeding. Chirping is associated with the latter.

Now, Virno is writing about emotions and about socialization outside of

work but nowhere in the two essays and a book that I've read does he

address the (Freudian) theme of eros and its repression and

sublimation. This absence of eros is even more remarkable when one

considers that Marcuse's _Eros and Civilization_ had already half a

century ago raised the spectre of "repressive desublimation", easily a

counterpart for Virno's "communism of capital" and Eros and Civilization

prospectively posed many of the same questions about the "future" of

work that Virno is examining retrospectively.

The Sandwichman



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