Technics of production: Irony and capital in Marx and Baudelaire (Karl Marx, Germany, Charles Baudelaire, France)

The present dissertation examines the relations between language and political economy with a view to rethinking the situation of the political today. Focusing on key texts by Marx and Baudelaire, it sets out to demonstrate how both thinkers present a more complex theory of revolution, and thus of changing or transforming the world, than has previously been understood, suggesting that these theories are as much conditioned as called into question by their formulation of ironic as well as capitalist tendencies. Drawing on recent work in literary theory and political philosophy, the study takes issue with the notion that both language and economy are destined to exceed or fall short of the “properly” political—language because it is removed from “real life,” economy because it can only conceive of man as a creature of natural need and thus as a biopolitical entity—arguing instead for a conception of the political that would be informed in an essential way by what both thinkers describe as a decidedly technical revolutionary potential.; Each of three chapters articulates Marx with Baudelaire around one site or figure of this potential. The first chapter takes up the problem of labor, tracing the subversion of its ostensibly human nature by way of its mechanization and autonomization under capital and examining the relation between this process and the mechanization and autonomization of language in and by the ironic text. The second reads Baudelaire's massive and fragmentary Pauvre Belgique! against the background of Marx's analysis of the capitalist appropriation, drawing out the consequences for their statements of an originary superfluousness of property. The third extends these theses along a temporal axis, by way of Marx's and Baudelaire's writings on credit. It is, the study ultimately suggests, only once we look beyond the traditional understanding of capital as a finite historical moment to be brought to a close by a conscious, reappropriative movement that we can conceive of its end; only once we recognize an ironization of the mechanisms of capital, already in Marx, that it becomes possible to think a certain originary capitalization as the founding operation of politics.