Massimiliano Tomba

Marx's temporalities

The book rethinks key categories of Marxs work beyond any philosophy of history, showing how the plurality of temporal layers that are combined and come into conflict in the violently unifying historical dimension of modernity are central to Marxs thought.

Clash of Temporalities: Capital, Democracy, and Squares

This article analyzes the current crisis in terms of a conflict of temporalities, arguing that the pace of the economic temporality and its speed in decision making clashes with the temporality of the state and the slowness of the democratic process of decision making. The synchronization of these different tempos configures the present crisis of democracy and its different reactions, such as the recent Occupy and antiausterity movements, which have expressed their disenchantment with formal democracy. The article examines these disjointed temporalities of capital, state, and popular insurgencies, to explore the possibilities of radical change.

Marx as the Historical Materialist: Re-reading The Eighteenth Brumaire*

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to re-read Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire by highlighting the political meaning of a materialist historiography. In the first part, I consider Marx’s historiographical and political intention to represent the history of the aftermath of the revolution of ’48 as a farce in order to liquidate ‘any faith in the superstitious past’. In the second part I analyse the theatrical register chosen by Marx in order to represent the Second Empire as a society without a body, a phantasmagoria in which the Constitution, the National Assembly and law – in short, everything that the middle class had put up as essential principles of modern democracy – disappear. In the third part I argue that Marx does not elaborate a theory of revolution that is good for every occasion. What interests him is a historiography capable of grasping, in the various temporalities of the revolution, the chance for a true liberation.

Accumulation and time: Marx’s historiography from the Grundrisse to Capital

This article investigates the way in which Marx combines different historiographical approaches in order to draft the possibility for both new forms of social relationship and a new anthropology. The classic unilinear and historicist paradigm and its idea of pre-modern, pre-capitalist and pre-political social forms does not help in understanding the interaction of different temporalities and the combination of formal and real subsumptions. The representation of ongoing accumulation requires different temporalities, which conflict and intertwine with one another.

Adorno’s Account of the Anthropological Crisis and the New Type of Human

‘To think that the individual is being neck and crop liquidated is over-optimistic’ (Adorno, 2005, §88; see also Schweppenhauser, 1971). Theodor W. Adorno’s assertive statement sounds not only overly pessimistic but also elitist. One could imagine Adorno as the last representative of a declining critical tradition contemplating the decay of Western culture. This perspective changes, however, if we consider Adorno not a witness to but a part of the horizon he was sketching out. Without any form of the hypostasisation of human nature, Adorno poses the question of the crisis of the individual in terms of the individual’s recent transformation within the capitalist relations of production and reproduction. Adorno assumes the Marxian category of the organic composition of capital and translates it into an anthropological context by inventing the concept of the ‘organic composition of man’. This seemingly marginal concept is particularly useful if we want to understand, beyond postmodern enthusiasm and romantic whining, the new possibilities that open anytime certain human skills seem to be absorbed by capital and reproduced in collective form and objectified in machines. Rereading Adorno’s conception of the liquidation of the individual against the backdrop of Marx’s idea of the new subject that arises within the capitalist form of production allows us to ask ourselves, on the one hand, whether the golden age of the individual ever really existed and, on the other, what the causes and the results of that liquidation might be.

Marx's temporal bridges and other pathways

In this article I reply to three critics. Responding to Cinzia Arruzza, I argue that capital encounters a large spectrum of differences of gender, religion and ethnicity, as well as differences generated by racism. Capital is able to use these differences to its own profit in order to differentiate wages and intensities of exploitation and thereby divide the working class. Responding to Peter Osborne, I contend that my temporal-layered framework elucidates how capital organises and synchronises different temporalities according to the dominant temporality of socially-necessary labour time. I combine Bloch’s idea of ‘multiversum’ and Benjamin’s idea of history in order to show how conflicting temporalities can disclose new political possibilities of liberation. Responding to Harry Harootunian, I articulate the relationship between my reading of Marx and the Postcolonial critique.