Radical Philosophy Review

This lecture offers a reading of the work of the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, particularly focusing on his writings on the question of space. It suggests that this is a simultaneously political and philosophical project and that it needs to be understood as such. Accordingly we need to examine and work with both terms in Lefebvre’s book The Production of Space — thinking about the Marxist analysis of production and the question of space which goes beyond the resourcesMarxism can offer. The paper concludes by offering some reflections on Lefebvre scholarship through the relation of space and history.

Through a structural analysis of the concept of labor in the Paris Manuscripts and the Grundrisse, and in response to critics of Marx such as Hannah Arendt and Alfred Schmidt, the author argues that freedom in Marx is not simply freedom from labor or free time. In accordance with the essence of the human being as a working organism, the goal of the socialist revolution is also free labor. Finally, the transformation of the human being brought about by the development of laboras poesis in turn entails the transformation of labor necessarily performed because of human dependence on nature.

This paper seeks to examine the images and discourses that have allowed for the declaration of the state of exception and the use of sovereign power. Examining the Abu Ghraib prison photographs as iconic emblems of the civilizational discourses that allow for exercises of sovereign power, I argue that these photographs articulate a dual interpellation of the Islamic Other as the terrorist/uncivilized Other and the viewer as a normative, national subject. I identify this moment as a perverted conversion in which the Islamic Other is hailed as one who necessitates an imperial crusade yet whose uncivilized state undermines the efficacy of that crusade.