This edition of Periscope considers revenge, capitalism, debt, and narrative fantasy in light of Max Haiven’s recent book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts. The dossier is edited by Max Haiven and includes contributions from Haiven, Bedour Alagraa, S. L. Lim, Anna-Esther Younes, Eunsong Kim, and Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Hannah Appel.
The contributions to this Social Text Periscope dossier are the outcome of a pandemic year’s worth of online conversations between scholars, artists, and activists on themes related to my 2020 book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of … Continue reading “Introduction: Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge Culture”
In the early twenty-first century, we live in capital’s utopia—not a utopia for particular capitalists, but a utopia for capital itself, where the world is reconfigured to suit its needs, where all values must articulate themselves in its arithmetic. Living … Continue reading “Theses on Revenge Capitalism”
Our god who is good to us orders us to revenge our wrongs. He will direct our arms and aid us. Throw away the symbol of the god of the whites who has so often caused us to weep, and … Continue reading “And the Last Shall be First: On the (Im)possibility of Revenge”
I write from the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation to address revenge in fiction and in fact—what it is, why it’s compelling, and how the concept might transcend its reactionary connotations to be part of a … Continue reading “Climate, Literature, Revenge”
My characters change the course of the war. Now, that didn’t happen, because my characters didn’t exist. But if they had have existed everything that happens [in the movie] is fairly plausible.-Quentin Tarantino While newspapers around the world, including, notably, … Continue reading “Figurations of Naziism as a Foil for (Violent) Revenge Fantasies: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and the Making of a “New White Man” Post-9/11”
In capitalist society, free time is produced for one class by the conversion of the whole lifetime of the masses into labour-time. —Marx, Capital I You see, the video that I really want to watch is a snuff, a snuff … Continue reading “A Work Fatality: Parasite and Class Antagonism”
The following forum represents an expansion on a conversation held on April 23, 2021, moderated by Catherine Cumming, and which also included Denise Ferreira da Silva and Max Haiven. A recording of that conversation can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/vengeance-of-debts. Let … Continue reading “The Vengeance of Unpayable Debts: Art, Activism, and Agitation in Puerto Rico and the United States”
