Divesting

Means basically
Without ends.

If it is to be found here,
it's in the question of the value
of this norm--the value
of the question of how
this mode of intellectual labor
makes possible a
new relation to the object--
that is, the object of one's
toil, passion, love,
then, we're looking
at this overlap--this double
set--of labor and love,
from which we turn to psychoanalysis
and marxism, as indicated,
a daunting task, to look for that
precarious doubling of psychoanalysis
and marxism that elsewhere goes by
the name of Marxism for Infants
(Denise Riley, from George Orwell)
and has much to do with, again,
the overlap of cathexis and storehouse
in Besetzung. Beieinanderliegen, to
lie together (Barthes,
A Lover's Discourse). But the only
correlation is inadequate; this is the call
for divestment. A term that does
not have an easy theoretical equivalent
in the German histories of these
beieinanderliegende discourses and yet
it would be quite laborious itself
not to note the proximity to Enteignung
expropriation|dispossession
and the turn that marx
accumulation. a moment, the double set
flips the terms into one another again, producing not
surplus but reproducing the work of critical endeavor:
it's this object, this relation, in which the object
is always reproduced again for a field for a discipline
and so trades the dullness of sustenance up
for a better model. in changing modes of production
it's often easy to miss the fact (well, so, yes)
that the exchange extracts, expropriates, exacts
a loss on the subject, the individual critic
who undergoes this process.
since it's also
negative anyways
it's preferable to
ignore it if you
can and so many
do. it's negative not because
it's the loss of a good thing
but because it's the loss of a bad thing
and so doubly negative the double
negative of a double set
it's the loss, through attrition
of one's destructiveness
of one's potential to destroy
rather than to submit to
the coercive structures of society
of which we perform daily divestments
to get by
but to
get to
destroying
is something else.

Response, of the poetic sort, to the ACLA panels on Critical Divestment (NYU, March 20-23) organized by Anne-Lise Francois and Anahid Nersessian. There were also conversations with fellow panelists that converge here, in particular with Michelle Ty, Adam Ahmed, Seulghee Lee, and Anne-Lise Francois.
Pictures: the only 2 shots of NYC taken while I was there. Well, I actually took two of each of these scenes, but these were, in my opinion, the better of each.