The Economies of Theory and Resistance

Abstract

Although contemporary theory reflects upon and registers the achievement of thinking literature and its related disciplines, that theory also ponders developments in extra-textual reality. In doing so it gestures to other disciplinary knowledge. One of these disciplinary domains which I think has been engaged but which has not been appropriately acknowledged in thinking about theory is economics. In my essay I will show how theorists have engaged economic reality but also how contemporary theory helps us understand mutations in the nature of capital (financialization, globalization, neoliberalism). I focus on these themes because I hold that these issues constitute the problem that figures, in different ways, in the most relevant contributions made by theory to the thinking of the contemporary world. However, there is another reason for focusing on the analogies between mutations of capital and prevailing theoretical positions and accounts. Namely, if as a rule theory has given voice to those who have been exploited, dispossessed, or marginalized by dominant economic structures, the latest conceptions of texts seem to be complicit with the said mutations putting into question theories’ oppositional relation to the world.