Capital, Poverty and Common Being

Argues that capitalism expropriates human creative potential and proposes a philosophical framework, drawing on Spinoza and Judith Butler, to reclaim our capacity for self-creation and just life.

Capital as “concept” is born in the Middle Ages’ theological–political economic context as “self-fructification”: matter that self-fructifies thanks to a “virtual efficacy” inside it (ratio seminalis). This “virtual efficacy” can be extracted, separated, and appropriated. I define it as the “virtual of Capital.” I oppose to the “virtual of Capital” a “virtual of the causa sui,” meaning by “causa sui” that notion (born with Plotinus, but radically innovated by Spinoza) which expresses our capacity of producing our own life, exemplified in the strong yet delicate relation between our virtualities (imagination, desire, encounters) and their actualization (our everyday life), the inner movement of becoming that each life has, which is the production of further life. Whereas this capacity of self-creation (“causa sui”) was characteristic of the One (Plotinus), and prerogative of God, of the substance (in Spinoza), this book affirms that we can apply this notion to human beings in their capacity to produce a just life. This capacity is taken away from them by the mechanism of Capital, and what the “economical original sin” marks: the separation of our capacity to produce our own life and the means/conditions that allow for this production. The alienation is born as a rupture in the relation that we have with ourselves: our virtuality is stolen, made a “virtual efficacy” for the self-fructification of the “machine Capital,” of the market. The first, most radical separation from the means of production, is within us: it is the separation from ourselves as means of production of our lives.
To counter this long culture of expropriation of our own capacity to produce ourselves in just lives, I engage in a reading of Judith Butler’s radical call for an insurrection at the level of ontology. Their philosophy embodies the “ethico-political” causa sui in that it provides the instruments of unmooring our body–mind from gender/sex, from power, from violence, from the law. We will think with them the notions of alienation and vulnerability, of phantasm, of a more general conatus, of constituent time.
As example of the reflection, we take Palestine {Life Sentence of an occupied country}, extreme Poverty {Dhaka, Bangladesh}, Sickness {Vulnerated by life}, Death {Denise Riley’s Time Lived, without Its Flow}.
We will propose three images of thought: potentia of poverty, revolutionary materialism, the political causa sui.