Unworkable

Delusions of an Imploding Civilization

Fabio Vighi

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781438487267, 9781438487250
• eBook ISBN: 9781438487274
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

Explores the slow but inevitable implosion of our civilization by considering the correlation between capital, work, and ideology.

Unworkable discusses the ongoing implosion of our globalized world from three distinct angles: the capitalist elimination of labor through technological automation, the dissolution of our shared social narratives, and the subtle imposition of an increasingly pervasive ideological order. Aiming to root out the lost cause of this implosion, Fabio Vighi returns to Marx by way of Hegel, Lacan, Gorz, Baudrillard, and other thinkers who, in different ways, have reflected on the complex dialectical structure of modernity and its hidden conditions of possibility. Capitalism, Vighi argues, fundamentally redefined the meaning of work and prevented the emergence of alternative forms of life. In our own time, the delusions of work and the values that propel life under capitalism have become, in Vighi's analysis, unworkable. And yet, even as we become an increasingly "workless" society, we continue to abide by the same laws of productivity and profit.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue. Loss of Gravity in the Capitalist Galaxy
• Chapter 1. Labor, Value, and Other Capitalist Delusions
• Chapter 2. Implosion of the Work Society
• Chapter 3. The Missing Cause
• Chapter 4. Dialectical Short Circuits
• Chapter 5. The Financial Demon
• Epilogue. Emergency Capitalism and the Exhaustion of a Form of Life
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover