The IAS is delighted to welcome Visiting Research Fellow Dr Max Haiven for this talk.
Respondent: Professor Esther Leslie (BBK)
Event link: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/events/2020/may/online-ias-talking-points-seminar-ours-age-revenge-capitalism
May 20, 6pm BST (2pm EDT)
This event will occur online and the public is welcome to watch the broadcast. Please see the event page for technical details.
This talk presents some of the key arguments from Dr Haiven’s forthcoming (May 2020) book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (Pluto Books). Against a tendency to see “anger,” “resentment” and “populism” as exceptional pathologies of today’s political sphere, the author argues that they stem from, and help to reproduce, a global capitalist economy that itself might be understood as systemically vengeful. Matters are complicated by the way such a system also influences how we imagine what revenge is and does. Revenge capitalism has its roots in the history of colonialism and empire and is today is characterised by the global rule of unpayable debts, the plight of surplussed populations, and the processes of the hyperenclosure of social life. In contrast to the explosion of destructive revenge fantasies to which revenge capitalism gives rise, the author proposes the cultivation of an avenging imaginary as a project of collective liberation.