CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Vinketa, Darko |
|---|---|
| Title | Dispossession and Futurelessness: At the Confluence of Marxism and Queer Theory |
| Summary | The following thesis focuses on reading Lee Edelman‘s concept of futurelessness against the backdrop of Marxist theory. It explores the possibilities for reframing queer negativity, which Edelman understands as an ahistorical condition of possibility of the social as such, in historical materialist terms as negativity inherent in the logic of capital accumulation. It signals the way in which David Harvey‘s notion of dispossession can be recast as an account of that negativity. More specifically, through an engagement with György Lukács‘s understanding of reification‘s subjective moment, combined with regulationist analysis of the historical, objective social structures within which capital accumulation can take place, Edelman‘s sinthomosexual is reconceptualized as a skillhomosexual to whom futurelessness is never individually but rather always collectively ascribed, within a specific social formation brought into being through epistemological, skilled labor of determining counter-hegemonic use-values to subjects and objects produced within capitalist totality. Through combining Edelman‘s death-drive with Butler‘s melancholy we will propose rethinking these negative subjectifications in terms of Harvey‘s spatio-temporal fixes; as instances of capital extending to the level of the body by fixing it as variable capital. Additionally, this thesis will delineate the political significance of rereading negativity in queer Marxist terms within the contemporary neoliberal crisis in which death-drivenness is increasingly exposed as located within capital‘s internal logic, rather than within the historical as such. |
| Supervisor | Ryder, Andrew |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/vinketa_darko.pdf |
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