by M.I. Asma
Kersplebedeb Publishing
08/20/2021, paperback
SKU: 9781989701140
As the pandemic transitioned from science fiction to reality in early 2020, a number of writers and thinkers in the imperialist metropoles declared the impossibility of writing in the face of a future that is foreclosed. And yet, due to the nightmare that capitalism has been since its beginning, numerous writers and thinkers from the margins have always written in the face of such foreclosure. Meanwhile, other contemporary thinkers sought to conceptualize the unfolding pandemic according to conceptions of bio/necropolitics, forgetting the foundation upon which these conceptions have always existed.
The M.I. Asma writing group came together to stake out a different terrain, thinking through the pandemic as events unfolded while also always working to think beyond the capitalist imaginary. Writing between April 2020 and May 2021, the authors set out to produce a serial theoretical-philosophical project focused on class struggle in the midst of the COVID--19 pandemic. The authors approached the pandemic as an occasion to think capitalism according to what it always has been, what the pandemic reveals about its current ideological deployment, and how we can think about a communist alternative in the face of extremism.
This book collects, with some revisions and with a new epilogue, the entries from the On Necrocapitalism blog, where M.I. Asma's interventions first appeared.
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Reviews:
"Is the pandemic really unprecedented? Not according to these authors, who demonstrate that the events of the last two years are wholly predictable within the logic and imprisoned imaginary of capitalism itself. Part manifesto, part chronicle, part theoretical rumination, On Necrocapitalism recasts debates about defunding police, essential workers, dystopian codification, and reformist temptations, providing necessary revivification of communist horizons that de-exceptionalize crisis and dispense with pragmatism. An inspiring read." -- Jasbir K. Puar, Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University and author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
About the Contributors:
M.I. Asma is the collective designation for six authors from Canada and the United States, representing a variety of revolutionary anticapitalist theoretical persuasions: J. Moufawad-Paul, Devin Zane Shaw, Mateo Andante, Johannah May Black, Alyson Escalante, and D. W. Fairlane.