Fabio Vighi 
Unworkable [EPUB ebook] 
Delusions of an Imploding Civilization

Unworkable discusses the ongoing implosion of our globalized world from three distinct angles: the capitalist elimination of labor through technological automation, the dissolution of our shared social narratives, and the subtle imposition of an increasingly pervasive ideological order. Aiming to root out the lost cause of this implosion, Fabio Vighi returns to Marx by way of Hegel, Lacan, Gorz, Baudrillard, and other thinkers who, in different ways, have reflected on the complex dialectical structure of modernity and its hidden conditions of possibility. Capitalism, Vighi argues, fundamentally redefined the meaning of work and prevented the emergence of alternative forms of life. In our own time, the delusions of work and the values that propel life under capitalism have become, in Vighi’s analysis,
unworkable. And yet, even as we become an increasingly ‘workless’ society, we continue to abide by the same laws of productivity and profit.

Tabla de materias

Acknowledgments



Prologue: Loss of Gravity in the Capitalist Galaxy



1. Labor, Value, and Other Capitalist Delusions

Dialectical Totalities

Brief Encounters

Setzung der Voraussetzungen

Hegel after Marx

The Fantasy of Surplus-Value

Hegel in and out of Political Economy



2. Implosion of the Work Society

Modernity’s Self-deployment

Self-caused and Self-realized Reason

Real Work and Labor-time

Calling the Bluff

André Gorz’s Critique of Work

Disaster Economics

The Difficulty of Letting Go



3. The Missing Cause

Chronic Constipation

A Worldless Discourse

The New Master

Colonization of the Productive Mind

Clouds of Impotence

Labor as Vanishing Presupposition

Marx’s Teleology

The Transcendental Schema of Capitalist Time

Beyond Exploitation



4. Dialectical Short Circuits

The Catastrophe of Liberation

Blindness of the Automatic Subject

Hegel: Being as Self-mediated Groundlessness

The Speculative Breakthrough

The Labor Decoy

Big Data and the Fanaticism of Breathing



5. The Financial Demon

Shackled by Nostalgia

Capitalist Bulimia

The Anatomy of Finance Is the Key to the Anatomy of the Real Economy

Genie out of the Capitalist Bottle

Neoliberal Perversions

Populist Symptoms

Viral Simulations



Epilogue: Emergency Capitalism and the Exhaustion of a Form of Life



Notes

Works Cited

Index

Sobre el autor

Fabio Vighi is Professor of Italian and Critical Theory at Cardiff University. He is the coauthor (with Heiko Feldner) of
Critical Theory and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism.