In recent years, after decades of largely avoiding engagements with political economy, discussions of the new forms of capitalism, neoliberalism, and the information society have become central again to critical theory. Following this recognition of the importance of political economy, this article aims at honing our conceptual tools to examine the political and social economies of contemporary capitalism, which I understand with Yann Moulier Boutang as "cognitive capitalism."1 I am particularly interested in how changing economic and social practices inflect our (...) political institutions and political and social practices and sensibilities, while at the same time these changes are not necessarily reflected in the... (shrink)

This article takes up Balibar’s treatment of fetishism as central for understanding Marx as thinker of transindividuality and to develop a materialist account of the appearance of isolated individuality. The article shows how Balibar elaborates a critique of a cryptonormativity in those accounts of transindividuality that diagnose problems of capitalism as a loss of ‘proper’ forms of individuation. I argue that this critique rests in Balibar’s rereading of commodity fetishism that foregrounds the reality of imaginative effects, which is irreducible to (...) an only psychic reality. Moreover, I explain how Balibar’s proposition of a secondary ‘fetishism of legal and moral personhood’ challenges mainstream left theoretical critiques of the subject of rights as illusory abstraction. (shrink)