Good to have you post to the list. I am reading your book Digital Labor and Karl Marx (and having my Cyberculture students look at it as well). I am still not entirely convinced about there being something called "digital labor" that unites all the activities you mention, but chapter 2 is laying some good groundwork for this conceptualization. As careful as you are being in updating Marx, I am eager to see what you will do with Smythe. And either way it is certainly more relevant and substantial than most of Zizek's recent work. Still, I will check out your review.
Thanks for sharing.
Best Sean On Oct 21, 2014 5:28 PM, "Christian Fuchs" <christian.fuchs at uti.at> wrote:
> Fuchs, Christian. 2014. The dialectic: Not just the absolute recoil, but
> the world’s living fire that extinguishes and kindles itself. Reflections
> on Slavoj Žižek’s version of dialectical philosophy in “Absolute recoil.
> Towards a new foundation of dialectical materialism“. tripleC:
> Communication, Capitalism & Critique 12 (2): 848-875.
>
> http://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/640
>
> Abstract
> Slavoj Žižek shows in his book "Absolute Recoil" (and previous Hegelian
> works such as "Less than Nothing") the importance of repeating Hegel’s
> dialectical philosophy in contemporary capitalism. Žižek contributes
> especially to a reconceptualisation of dialectical logic and based on it
> the dialectic of history. The reflections in this paper stress that the
> dialectic is only the absolute recoil, a sublation that posits its own
> presuppositions, by working as a living fire that extinguishes and kindles
> itself. I point out that a new foundation of dialectical materialism needs
> a proper Heraclitusian foundation. I discuss Žižek’s version of the
> dialectic that stresses the absolute recoil and the logic of retroactivity
> and point out its implications for the concept of history as well as
> Žižek’s own theoretical ambiguities that oscillate between postmodern
> relativism and mechanical materialism. I argue that Žižek’s version of the
> dialectic should be brought into a dialogue with the dialectical
> philosophies of the German Marxists Hans Heinz Holz and Herbert Hörz.
> Žižek’s achievement is that he helps keeping alive the fire of dialectical
> materialism in the 21st century. Such a dialectical fire is needed for a
> proper revolutionary theory.
>
>
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