Kevin S Amidon

Bioequivalence of Oral Products and the Biopharmaceutics Classification System: Science, Regulation, and Public Policy

The demonstration of bioequivalence (BE) is an essential requirement for ensuring that patients receive a product that performs as indicated by the label. The BE standard for a particular product is set by its innovator, and this standard must subsequently be matched by generic drug products. The Biopharmaceutics Classification System (BCS) sets a scientific basis for an improved BE standard for immediate‐release solid oral dosage forms. In this paper, we discuss BE and the BCS, as well as the issues that are currently relevant to BE as a pharmaceutical product standard.

Critical Theory and the Limits of Academic Economics: Resolving the Political in Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

This essay assesses the central arguments of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. We note Piketty’s limited engagement with and active distancing from the writings of Marx. Piketty’s location within the disciplinary boundaries of academic economics seems to have profoundly shaped his surprisingly apolitical analysis. Engagement with the political dimensions of capital is further constrained to increase the book’s influence upon policy. We analyze important limitations to Piketty’s work that result from these disciplinary constraints. Important politically implicated concepts, problems, and approaches that relate to Piketty’s substantial empirical work are: labor process studies, research on speculative capitalism, and literature highlighting institutional and political determinants among varieties of capitalism.

On Subjectivity and the Risk Pool; or, Žižek's Lacuna

This economic system cannot do without the ultima ratio of the complete destruction of those existences which are irretrievably associated with the hopelessly unadapted. Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development1 Slavoj Žižek poses more than a few heavy-gauge questions in his In Defense of Lost Causes (2008). Foremost among them, at the beginning of chapter nine: “The only true question today is: do we endorse this ‘naturalization’ of capitalism, or does contemporary global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction?”2 This vast question—as well as its possible answers—develops in Žižeks…

Sex on the brain: the rise and fall of German sexual science

Throughout the nineteenth century, German medical, scientific and legal scholars found themselves puzzled and engaged by the diverse forms of human sexuality. Psychiatrists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing who were interested in explaining deviance encountered scientifically trained advocates for emancipation like Magnus Hirschfeld, and the result was the new--if unstable--discipline of sexual science. Because they based arguments for social intervention on knowledge of nature and the body, the fields proponents--like the advocates of eugenics and racial hygiene--argued that they were biologists. After 1900, this mutual biological engagement of sexual science and eugenics revealed itself in overlapping debates between the proponents of both fields.

On Rereading Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies

Klaus Theweleits Male Fantasies has generated broad interest in the literature of several academic disciplines. His analysis of the symbolic and gender dynamics of the leaders of the German Freikorps (German paramilitary mercenary units of the period 1918-1923) has been widely generalized into a theory of modern masculinity. Two issues inadequately explored in Theweleits work nonetheless must be read through more recent empirical and theoretical work in history and sociology: (1) the formative role of colonial military experience in the careers of the German Freikorps officers who provide the material for his analysis and (2) the complex historical problem of the facticity of rape in Freikorps activity.

The Constellation of Social Ontology: Walter Benjamin, Eduard Fuchs, and the Body of History

“The Constellation of Social Ontology” says that Walter Benjamin, best known among scholars for his work on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” in which he argues that all visual art, including its modern emanations like film, has always been constituted through modes not just of production, but also of reproduction. Relatively unknown, however, is that these claims about art and reproduction took shape as part of a larger set of arguments about the nature of historical knowledge and the ways that knowledge emerges and derives from embodied, corporeal practices. Benjamin made these arguments in his essay on “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian” (1937). This essay and its history further show that Benjamin’s thought belongs at the center of the Frankfurt School’s emergent Critical Theory in the mid-1930s, and reveals significant institutional and methodological links between Fuchs, Benjamin, and the major figures of the Frankfurt School like Max Horkheimer. More broadly, Benjamin’s work on Fuchs can be seen as a methodological attempt to demonstrate how critical methods that do justice to the material of history by attending successfully to the forgotten remnants of social, political, and economic life can create the possibility of concrete social ontology in the present.

The Body Ontology of Capitalism

Critical social theory powerfully negates symbolic structures of political economy and imaginary projections of ideological culture but never quite knows what to do with corporeal bodies. “The Body Ontology of Capitalism” reviews Marx’s account of body ontology in his post-1859 writings (especially Capital, Vol. 1), in which value (abstract labor) is extracted from the concrete bodies of laborers caught in capital’s grasp. Body ontology is analyzed in Marx’s work as well as Lacan’s psychoanalytic social theory, exploring the relationship between structurally wounded bodies and imaginary projections. Zižek’s embodied account of wounded subjects of sublime ideological objects is also used to interpret the body fantasies of late capitalism (undead, cyborg, armored subjects). Following Marx and psychoanalytic theorists, Krier and Amidon conclude that body ontology is necessary to adequately comprehend and critique symbolic and imaginary productions of capital.

Easing the Encumbered Subject: Security, Speculation, and Capitalist Subjectivity

Go to Online Edition Edited by Daniel Krier, Iowa State University and Mark P. Worrell, SUNY Cortland Capitalisms’ Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique frames 21st century economic and social possibilities in a dialogue between two forms of critical social theory: Marx’s critique of political economy that analyzes capitalism and the critique of political psychology that analyzes authoritarianism. Contributions from social theorists in sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies are brought together to dissect and critique capitalist crises, left-liberalism, left-Thatcherism, resistance to risk-pooling, idealist philosophy, undemocratic social character, status wages and authoritarian spectacles. Throughout, Marx’s centrality to critical social theory is confirmed, both alone and in in powerful combination with Adorno, Durkheim, Dubois, Lacan, Veblen, Weber and others. This book outlines conjoined critiques of commodity-fetishism and authority fetishism as the emancipatory agenda of 21st century critical theory. Disciplines Economic History | Economic Theory | Inequality and Stratification | Other German Language and Literature Comments This is a manuscript of a chapter from Capitalisms Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique (2016): 136-153. This book chapter is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/language_pubs/108 Chapter 5: Easing the Encumbered Subject: Security, Speculation, and Capitalist Subjectivity Kevin S. Amidon and Daniel Krier Introduction: Universal Capital, Alienation, and Critique Capitalism has, across its history, often seemed a single and coherent object. Not only within Marxist historical narratives that have critiqued capital, but also within histories and critical analyses that focus on the global elaboration of capital, capitalism has appeared to be a unitary – if not historically invariant – phenomenon (Hall & Soskice 2001; Esping-Anderson 2013; Streeck 2010). Furthermore the capitalist homo oeconomicus has, despite recent critiques from the standpoint of behavioral economics, seemed similarly isomorphic across geographic, cultural, and even historical boundaries (Feldner & Vighi 2015). Karl Marx’s foundational critique of capital is a major source of strategies of representation that render capitalism into a unitary global force. Marx’s arguments furthermore trace the accumulation of all capital to the specific phenomenon that enables it: the alienation of surplus value from productive labor. Thus the history of critical theory down to the present day has been a history of the conceptual power of universal capital, within which the forces of alienation stand at the center (Marx [1844]1980; Horkheimer & Adorno [1947]2002; Marcuse ([1964] 2012). Major critical theorists today take a variety of approaches to the analysis of universal capital. Slavoj Zizek focuses, in his critiques of the “naturalization of capitalism” derived from his reading of elements within Alain Badiou’s thought, on how This is a manuscript of a chapter from Capitalisms Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique (2016): 136-153. capitalism ontologically subsumes other forms of being, particularly in their political stakes. In doing so, he emphasizes capitalism’s global reach: Badiou thus recognizes the exceptional ontological status of capitalism whose dynamic undermines every stable framework of representation: the task that should normally be performed by critico-political activity...is already performed by capitalism itself.... Badiou gets caught here in an inconsistency: he draws the “logical” conclusion that, in a “worldless” universe (which is the contemporary universe of global capitalism), the aim of emancipatory politics should be the precise opposite of its “traditional” modus operandi... (Zizek, 2008, p. 398). For Zizek, critique of one mode of argument about the universality of capital thus undergirds claims that it is universal in other ways. Frederic Jameson, engaging in direct and close reading of Marx in his Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One, explores how, in the chapter from Capital on “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” Marx’s narrative construction of the originary moment of the alienation of value from labor seems to generate the universal character of capital that appears to surmount historicity itself: So here too with capitalist production (whose systematicity Marx often names “totality”).... It is not capital but labor which is at the origin of the process; when the wages finally materialize and the act of exchange of money and labor power actually takes place, it is an “always-already....” This is then the way in which the present of capitalism as a system “extinguishes” its seemingly constitutive moments and elements in the past. This is the sense in which capitalist production is an infernal machine, an autotelic system; even though it is often exchange or the market this its critics and enemies identify in this manner (particularly in the age of globalization). (Jameson, 2011, p. 106-7; see also Jay, 1984). Capital, it seems, erases its own historicity, and not according to any Hegelian telos of an “End of History” (Zizek, 2008, p. 405), but within itself and through the forms of alienated being that it generates and exploits. In search of new ways to pursue the history of capitalist development with additional nuance, including through its attendant social dynamics of alienation up to today, this paper therefore turns the reception and critique of a canonical sociological text that has made a uniquely significant contribution to the analysis of the emergence and development of capitalism: Max Weber’s (1930) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber’s text is read here with its critics and against itself with the goal of developing a differentiated theory of capitalist subjectivity that reflects something of the diversity of the social forms that accrete to capital in different regions, nations, and periods.1 Central here is an analysis of an internal dialectic within the history of capitalism – and perhaps especially of that nebulous thing that Weber calls capitalism’s “spirit” – which conceptually counters unitary narratives of the emergence of capitalism and the forms of subjectivity adequate to it.2 This is the complex and mutually 1 Steinert (2010), in a careful and revealing critique of Weber’s essay, goes further to suggest that Weber’s conclusions, while contributing to the universalization and dehistoricization of capitalism, are themselves deeply historically contingent, and thus that the evidence upon which Weber based his conclusions must necessarily resolve into different arguments today. The authors, however, still see value in close engagement with Weber’s categories of analysis. 2 H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, in the wide-ranging introduction to their extensive 1946 collection of Weber’s writings in English, emphasize the ways in which Weber constitutive relationship between speculation and securitization, a problem that has received comparatively little attention in the theoretical literature on the social forms that accrete to capital. Capitalism, indeed, is no monolith. It has, across its history, been polyvalent and polymorphic, resolving into widely varying local, regional, and national forms (Hall & Soskice, 2001). Through a re-reading of Weber’s narrative of capitalism’s roots and “spirit,” this paper suggests a historical and conceptual framework that can advance critical theory by linking the analysis of capitalism to the consequences it has for the subjects who act and transact within it. Capitalism and Subjectivity Since the parallel disciplinary emergence of political economy and Enlightenment epistemological and moral thought in the later eighteenth century, analyses of capitalism have tended toward two poles to which the discipline of economics still often hews in the discourses of “macroeconomics” and “microeconomics”: macroscopic focus on largescale political-economic forms (cf. the focus on national forms of political economy in Smith, Spencer, Malthus, Ricardo, List, and many more, including much Marxist thought and analysis); and closer microscale attention to individuals and their sometimes collective proxies as firms or corporations (derived similarly from later eighteenth century arguments, but diverging toward the disciplinary economics of the Anglohimself, in contrast to Marx, tends to see capitalism as unitary: “The further back Weber goes historically, the more he is willing to see capitalism as one feature of a historical situation; the more he approaches modern industrial capitalism, the more willing he is to see capitalism as a pervasive and unifying affair” (Weber, 1946, p. 66). “Unlike Marx, however, Weber is not interested in investigating the problems of capitalist dynamics” (p. 68). American liberal marginalist tradition associated with Marshall). This macro-micro divergence has often distracted from close analysis of the dynamics of subjectivity within capitalism, not least because of the ways in which the discipline of economics has tended to build models on the basis of a universalized, rational, utility-maximizing individual subject and its common institutional proxy, the profit-maximizing firm. Recent critical theory of globalization (cf. Zizek, Badiou, Hardt & Negri) has further reduplicated this conceptual tension by treating capitalism as a global and globalizing phenomenon.3 Foucault’s later work, sketched out especially in the College de France lectures of the later 1970s (and therefore partly invisible to scholarship until recently because never fully elaborated in published work during his lifetime), proposes a vocabulary that can assist in mapping the historical dynamics and variants of capitalist subjectivity. Foucault’s arguments in the lectures published in English in the mid-2000s as Security, Territory, Population and T