In Remaindered Life Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new conceptual vocabulary and framework for rethinking the dynamics of a global capitalism maintained through permanent imperial war. Tracking how contemporary capitalist accumulation depends on producing life-times of disposability, Tadiar focuses on what she terms remaindered life—practices of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending. Through this heuristic, Tadiar reinterprets the global significance and genealogy of the surplus life-making practices of migrant domestic and service workers, refugees fleeing wars and environmental disasters, criminalized communities, urban slum dwellers, and dispossessed Indigenous people. She also examines artists and filmmakers in the Global South who render forms of various living in the midst of disposability. Retelling the story of globalization from the side of those who reach beyond dominant protocols of living, Tadiar demonstrates how attending to remaindered life can open up another horizon of possibility for a radical remaking of our present global mode of life.
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface: What This Book Is About
- Acknowledgments
- Part I. In a Time of War
- 1 • The War to be Human: Value
- The No Longer
- The War to Be Human
- Figures of Inhumanity
- Discourses of Dehumanization
- Political Emancipation and the Rule of Law as Assault on Social Reproduction
- Living in a Time of War
- To Remain Human, to Finally Become So
- After Man, after Freedom
- 2 • A Global Enterprise: Waste
- A Global Story
- The War to be Human Is a Global Enterprise (of Punishment)
- Waste Is the Product and Productive Strategy of Capitalist War
- Waste Is the Object of the New Imperialism
- Late Imperialism Is the War for the Expanded Reproduction of Capital over All Life
- Original and Abiding: Nonhuman Milieus of Capitalist Accumulation
- Land
- Ground Rules of Dispossession
- Modern Codes of Value: Land, Labor, Life
- 3 • Becocoming-Human in a Time of War: Remainder
- The Life-Form of Value
- In Servitude to the Commodity Form
- Neither Simply Cheap Inputs, nor Extra-economic Costs, but Live and Living Forces
- Other Modes of Living: Serving a Way of Life
- Living and Dying for the Life of Capital
- “Still Unconquered Remnants”: Unreckoned Forces of Sociality
- Remaindered Life
- Interregnum
- Times of War
- A Time of War . . . in Reverse
- Part II. Life-Times
- 4 • Of Labor and Fate Playing
- New Political Economy of Life
- Surplus and Disposability
- Fate Playing and the Surplus of Social Reproduction
- Primitive Survivals
- 5 • Of Disposability
- Discrepant Times of Neoliberalism
- Cleavages and Thresholds
- Land, People, Time
- 6 • Of Survival
- People as Rubble: Temporalities of Spectacular Destruction
- International Aesthetics, Transnational Politics
- People as Coin: Temporalities of Stagnant Liquidity
- Uneven Times
- Part III. Globopolis
- 7 • City Everywhere
- City Everywhere
- Uber-urbanization: Connection as Content, Content as Connection
- Total Mediatic Dominion
- Fractal Enterprise: City Emulants
- Metropolitan Platform, Global-National Franchise
- Turning Bases of War into Bases of (Capital) Life
- Eddies: Servers and Servants, Servility and Servitude
- Vital Infrastructure
- Liquidity, Mobility
- Subaltern Fuel: Infinite Life-Times of Waste
- Congestion and Bypass
- Subaltern Driver: Vital Platforms
- Excursus
- Servitude
- Sinister Design, the Splitting of Life-Times
- Submerged Lineages, Subaltern Forces
- Media, Milieu, Machines
- A “Free” Pathway out of Absolute Expendability
- Vitality
- Mortality
- Part IV. Dead Exchanges
- 8 • Powers of Defending Freedom
- Constraints of Freedom
- Fields of Dead Exchanges
- Imperial Codes in the Making of Global Infrastructure
- Imperial Shift: After Normative Culture, after
Economy
- Ratios of Life and Death
- Calculus of Words: The Waning of Content, the Withering of Subjects
- Time of Persistence, Powers of Sustaining Life
- 9 • Powers of Expending Life
- Just War
- Insurgent Shadow Urbanism of the Provinces
- Derivative Enterprises
- Populism, Platform Totalitarianism
- Objects of Punishment
- Power Signs: Bodies, Money, Help
- Zones of War Are Times of Living
- Kin, Clans, Dividuals
- 10 • Live Borrowings, Living Connections
- Waste as Art
- Art as Counterattack
- Live Media, Live Exchange
- Irreverent Borrowings, Serious Play, Irredeemable Flourish
- Many Pasts Continue, Many Presents Lie in Wait
- Thresholds
- At the Farthest Distance from a Life Worth Living
- Numbers
- Liminalities, Shifting and Holding
- Multifarious Forms of Life
- Mixed Passages
- Part V. By the Waysides
- 11 • Bypass and Splendor
- Bypass
- Striving
- Strife
- Splendor
- Nightmare Landscapes, Ambient Dreams
- In the Weeds
- The Time of Expectation
- 12 • And then Some
- The End and All
- Not Consumed in the Moment of Action, Not Subsumed by Politics
- And Then Some
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
Login to your account