In the last lecture, we briefly discussed the philosophies of Alain Bidou and Shlazhov-Zizek. This was hardly an in-depth overview of their works, but even in our discussion of this minor confluence of ideas, as represented by various articles on lacan.com, we find the kernels of their philosophies following the financial crash of 2007-2008. Bidou most explicitly is concerned with the emergence of the new. Wotter's work is notoriously difficult due to his frequent entwining of ontology and mathematics. his is nonetheless a philosophy that can be rudimentarily grounded upon an affirmation of negative events, at least in the creative sense described last week. His is a philosophy of ruptural circumstances that keep thought on its toes, forcing it to always adapt and become new.
We might argue that this makes his philosophy an abstract philosophy of surplus. In Marx's analysis of capitalism, surplus is understood as that extra something that is produced beyond what is needed, that which is surplus to requirements. In a specifically capitalist sense, it is related to the notion of profit. More abstractly, we can cast Arnett more broadly to include, for instance, various forms of culture that may escape the bounds of the market, but which are still produced by it nonetheless. For Jacques Lacan, this included the surplus of jouissance, a kind of subjective surplus that exceeds our basic biological needs. It is arguably this surplus that capitalism exploits most effectively. We are hooked on it. We might also say that it is this surplus that keeps us stuck in place.
Our desires are overfed, which at once produces a permanent desire for revolution and also keeps it at bay. The new, in this sense, is reduced to our next fix, to a new habit, to a new lick of paint, to a new form of capture, rather than a movement into a wholly new field of understanding. It is the overarching aim of Perdue's philosophy to emphasise the distinction between the two and draw us out of the grey area in between them. A new field of understanding is what we need, and science and the arts have arguably already contributed to this, but philosophy has struggled to keep up. This is of particular concern to Perdue. Perdue hopes to help midwife this new philosophy by interrogating the relationship between philosophy and its non-philosophical conditions of emergence.
In his various works, he explains that philosophy does not emerge solely from itself, that is, from its own activities, but rather in response to non-philosophical events, be they artistic, scientific, political or intersubjective. In his 2012 book Philosophy for Militants, for example, Badiou suggests that new philosophies have often been called for to clarify and help with the birth of a new science, pointing to the relationships between Plato and the birth of mathematics, Kant and Newtonian physics, Hegel, Marx and history, Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze and biology. But Badiou does not limit the conditions of philosophy to the comings and goings of science alone. He terms the four poles of his non-philosophical conditions for the emergence of philosophy
as science, politics, art and love. Bidieu has pursued this position through a number of other works that explore the philosophical implications of political events in much more detail. He first attempted this retrospectively in his 2005 book The Century, in which he attempts to construct the 20th century as an object for thought, that is, as a philosophical object rather than a purely historical one. In this sense, the 21st century is not an arbitrary block of time from 1900 to 2000. Defined by its events, Bidoux argues, it could instead begin with the First World War in 1914 and end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Bidoux's events needn't be catastrophes, however. We could similarly use the mapping of the human genome,
or the introduction of the euro as a continental currency, as bookends for different versions of the same century. In searching for a method by which to approach this strange epoch, Badiou deploys three knotted philosophical centuries, defined as much by their political events as by their lives of the ideas that informed them. These centuries include the totalitarian century, encapsulating the rise and fall of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Castro. The Soviet century, centred around the inception, deployment and collapse of the so-called communist enterprise, envisaged as a planetary enterprise. And the liberal century, arguably the overall victor. It is the hegemony of the liberal century that is most likely to blame for this crisis of negation. On this final century, Bajou writes,
When all is said and done, the 20th century would be the century of the triumph of capitalism and the global market. Having interred the pathologies of an unbridled will, the happy correlation of a market without restrictions and a democracy without shores would finally have established the meaning of the century lies in pacification or in the wisdom of mediocrity. The century would thereby express the victory of capital, economising on the unreasonable passions of thought. Capitalism has similarly constricted thought to a particularly capitalist variant of what is reasonable. However, the fact that we are able to think this does not elevate philosophy as a discipline somehow above the mechanisms of reasonable capitalist discourse. On the contrary, everywhere we look we see philosophy reduced to sophistry, whereby the utility of thought or knowledge is defined by its market value.
Matthew MacLennan, writing on Boudou's debates with the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, summarises this sophist state of affairs most succinctly. He notes, for instance, how philosophy as a profession in the 21st century increasingly flirts with absorption into the very discourse of economic efficiency that undermines it. It finds a place at the table by pleading its utility, as training for the flexible lateral thinking often said to be essential to economic and professional success. Philosophy may also be tapped for its therapeutic value, to the effect that the wisdom of the great philosophers alongside yoga and other techniques helps to cultivate the contentment, health and productivity of economic contributors. Moreover, the philosopher increasingly finds a role in practical ethics training, an explosive growth field by which she contributes
not only to genuine ethical deliberation, but to the alibis of institutions and the individuals who populate them. In this sense, it is within the bounds of capitalist productivity that philosophy goes to die. For Perdue, then, it is philosophy's responsibility to always go one step further. Capitalism, we might argue, has complicated the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic and turned it into an ideological hall of mirrors. Trapped within the capitalist dynamics that Marx himself described, thought struggles to push beyond its use value for the market, but it must or else the very function of philosophy itself is lost. Bidou has explored the development of this notion within the 21st century blow by blow. In 2008, for instance, he connected the problem of liberal
philosophy to the election to the French presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. Sarkozy symbolises, for Bidou, the near death of something, most specifically that revolutionary spirit by which France is best, albeit mistakenly, known, but also something more amorphous and global. This is to say that France is not only the nation of the revolution, of the Paris Commune, of May 68. It is equally, according to Badiou, a deeply conservative country, which responds to the revolutionary episodes in its history with long sequences of black reaction. Today we are in such a period of reaction, a new interval phase, a phase in which the adversary appears to have won, an interval phase dominated by the enemy in which new experiments are still tightly circumscribed.
What is to be done remains an open question, but for Bidoux, the general direction in which we must travel seems clear. It involves a new relationship between the real political movement and ideology. The philosophy of Slasov Zizek, a close friend and admirer of Bidoux's, complements this reading. If Bidoux is the philosopher of real political movement, we might refer to Zizek as the philosopher of ideology par excellence. lance. There is, of course, plenty of overlap between the two, but for argument's sake, it may be useful for us to consider the relationship in this way. Zizek provides the diagnosis whilst Boudou formulates a possible treatment. As we discussed previously, this relationship truly came into its own following the financial crash of 2007-08. Indeed, Zizek truly came into his own
during this period as well. His popular and accessible rhetoric made him something of a spokesperson for a new political consciousness to come. This is most apparent in a speech Zizek gave to Occupy protesters in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, which of course contains one of his famous jokes. He said to the crowd, let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends, let's establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says this letter. Everything is wonderful here.
Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink. This is how we live. We all have the freedoms we want, but what we are missing is red ink, the language to articulate our non-freedom. By 2011, it was arguably already too late. In fact, in hindsight, it seemed strange that there was such a delay between the financial crash and the populist response to it. Almost four years had passed since the crash and the occupation of Zuccotti Park. Why was there such a delay? Perhaps Zizek was providing the protesters with an answer. He confirmed the critiques supplied by those opposed to the movement. You have no red ink. You know you are not free, but you are ideologically
incapable of articulating your demands. Zizek's joke goes some way towards explaining the decade that followed. A decade not only defined by leftist impotence, but also leftist self-harm. With no red ink to speak of or with, the left began drawing on its own lifeblood. The spirit of sacrifice Badiou and Zizek had called for took on the form of a melancholic bloodletting that is yet to cease. We might describe Black Lives Matter as one such sacrifice, a description of capitalist violence writ large in the blood of the fallen. Is this another form of the negation of the negation, a violent affirmation of the violence wreaked upon the body of the proletariat, or is it something else? Furthermore, whilst we might acknowledge the Black Lives Matter movement offers up one answer to the question what is to be done, we might ask ourselves, but is it the
right answer or the most effective one. In the blogosphere of the late 2000s, Stephen Shaviro turned to the writings of Gil Deleuze to explore this kind of affirmation in response to the crisis of negation. Deleuze's Kantian philosophy, he argues, is an affirmative philosophy in that it gives itself over to an ethics of the possible. It is a philosophy that sees the hope and promise of the revolutionary event despite all that goes wrong when that revolution is later institutionalized. And this, he continues, is essentially a Kantian position, and one that I think is necessary for us to maintain today. It is our absolute categorical moral obligation to reject the ideology of no alternative, and to act as if something other and better than today's universal market capitalism were possible.
Here, Shaviro interjects a resurgent post-capitalist politics with Kant's categorical imperative. the revolutionary deployment of Kant's maxim that I ought never to act in such a way that I couldn't also will that the maxim on which I act should be a universal law. For Kant, it is not enough to simply treat others how you would like to be treated, especially under a socio-economic system as sadomasochistic as capitalism. After all, we see capitalists deploy this acutely Protestant maxim every day. It all too easily slips into a cynical affirmation of capitalism's dog-eat-dog world, the passive nihilism of capitalist individualism. Kant's maxim instead arguably provides us with a starting point for communism. He insists that you must act how you would prefer
all people to act. We can see such a principle enacted in, for instance, vegetarianism or veganism. To refrain from eating meat is not simply a moralising gesture that elevates the vegan to a moral high ground, although that might be how it often manifests in practice. It is instead to do what you can in the hope that a majority will later follow. It is to become the change you hope to see in the world. This is surely a revolutionary principle, but what if we do not know how we should all act, as seems to be the case under late capitalism? Cast adrift in a perpetual and mandatory individualism, this leads the post-capitalist imperative to sound like little more than a recipe for Catholic guilt. However, Shiveru adds that the dissensus that often responds to a categorical imperative
is precisely where the power of Deleuze's affirmation lies. The vegan that moralises those unlike them only undoes the power of their position. For Deleuze, this is to say that if the categorical imperative is to retain its relationship to what Kant calls practical reason, then it cannot be restricted to a set of institutional tenets, as is often the case within organised religion. As such, Deleuze does not condition the imperative by reifying it into a doctrine. Instead, he affirms the categorical imperative's relationship to becoming. its reciprocal relationship to change. A militarized discipline, on the contrary, is a kind of steadfastness in the face of contingency, a blind loyalty to the unmoving state in a constantly moving world. This is why Badiou asks if a non-military discipline is
possible, and it is in this sense that Zizek's call for a new leftist discipline modelled on Spartan warriors is a sort of grotesque parody of the categorical imperative, according to Shaviro, it is the result precisely of betraying it by institutionalising it. A few other writers later chimed in to offer their two cents on this question of what is to be done, most notably Mark Fisher on his K-Punk blog, who sought to strike a balance between Zizek's thirst for a dialectical negativity and Deleuze's abjuring of the negative altogether. Fisher argues that Deleuze's hectoring call to renounce all negativity constitutes an assesas of the positive that chimes in all too well with contemporary capitalism's obligatory positivity. This is to say that capitalism has appropriated our becoming for itself. Indeed, we could even argue that our understanding of
capital's becoming has superseded our own in every meaningful sense. Think about what the left has long called pink capitalism, or that which even the right has also begun to acknowledge and instead call woke capitalism. This has occurred to the extent that any practice of affirmation remains in thrall to a dreary and reductive model of good health, which it prosecutes with all the zeal of a happy, clappy Anglicanism. Shaviro nonetheless stands by his argument, which he thinks K-Punk has misunderstood. The crucial point for Deleuze is not to affirm capitalism in general, which it is more than capable of mandating for itself at the level of ideology. The point is rather to move in new directions, he says. We need to get out of the trap of merely reversing or giving the exact
opposite of dominant discourse. The important thing is not to reverse direction, but to move in another direction altogether. The problem with Zizek's original article on 300, then, is that he in effect gives the exact same analysis of postmodern capitalism as the fundamentalist Christian right does, and offers a pseudo-solution, discipline in the spirit of sacrifice, that, like theirs, only serves to preserve the world market system from its own disaggregating tendencies. For Javiro, this is to say that the malaise of a late capitalist subject cannot simply be dismissed as a problem of perspective. The impotence of affirmation precisely comes from that suggestion that we must simply buck up our ideas, as if this were possible without dealing with the root of the problem, like telling a depressed person to just stop it and smile.
Looking on the bright side is little more than its own form of repression. What is required is the dismantling of that which is blocking out half the light in the first place. The root of the problem for Javiro is what Marx described as the process of capital accumulation. This process is not simply about the accumulation of capital by capitalists, but also dictates how the working class relates the system to which they are subjected. As Marx writes, the mechanism of the accumulation process itself not only increases the amount of capital, but also the mass of the labouring poor, i.e. the wage labourers, who turn their labour power into a force for increasing the valorisation of the growing capital, and who are thereby compelled to make their relation of dependence on their own product, as personified in the capitalist, into an eternal relation.
This is to say that it isn't good enough to simply do your work. You also have to be a good worker. Valorisation is a two-way street. In improving the value of your work, you improve the value of yourself as a worker. As a result, the production of commodities becomes entangled with the production of subjectivity. However, when that subjectivity runs into problems, particularly, as in our present moment, issues of mental illness, any critique of the role of capitalism in our disintegrating sense of selves is jettisoned and made into a convenient crutch for the lazy. And what is laziness is not a byword for being a bad worker. A few years later, Mark Fisher would offer a similar analysis to this, making use of a similar analogy. Depression is the shadow side of entrepreneurial culture, he writes.
What happens when magical voluntarism confronts limited opportunities? Here, the negative feedback loop of affirmation becomes more clear. How are we supposed to will ourselves out of capitalism when capitalism itself has monopolised our will? de Luz's deinstitutionalised affirmationism may be more nuanced than Capel gives it credit for but the question of what is to be done still persists. A year later, Shavira would turn to this question and its relevance to our crisis of negation. Today we are no longer able to believe that the capitalist order is fated to collapse from its own contradictions, he writes, rehearsing that now familiar accelerationist argument. If capital could speak, it might well say in the manner of Nietzsche's overman that whatever does not kill me makes me stronger. Given the prescience
of Marx's capital, perhaps we should return to his unfinished total critique of political economy instead. And yet, despite the unfinished nature of Marx's capital, in many respects he succeeded in describing the system a little too well. Shaviro asks, how else but with a sense of utter helplessness could we respond to a world in which Marx's insights into the tendencies and structures of capitalism have been so powerfully verified. As a result, the more we see the world in the grim turns of capitalist logic, the less we are able to imagine things ever being different. This is undoubtedly due to capitalism's insidiously adaptive nature. The genius of capitalism lies in its ability to turn to its own account whatever destabilises it, and whatever is raised against it. Shavira argues that this is why cultural Marxism,
that is, a presently dominant version of Marxism that is diminished by the pacifying effects of aesthetics over politics, not to be confused with Jordan Peterson's more recent appropriation of the term, rather than returning to Marx's capital, has instead turned inwards towards the subject of capitalism, leading precisely to the blinkered perspective of valorisation and being a good worker described previously. This critique has its roots in the Marxism of Antonio Gramsci and Gregory Lukács, who considered the impact on class consciousness of capitalism's creep into culture and organised religion, placating the proletariat and dissuading them from revolt by internalising and bastardising the values expressed in their religious principles. This is to say that we know all too well how capitalism works and functions, but we still
struggle to understand its impact on our cultural understanding and indeed on our very ontological understanding of ourselves, most specifically our agency and our desires. This deficiency in our understanding certainly rings true today, and yet Shavira worries that this shifting focus onto the subject is at risk of being a misstep if it is not attentive to capitalism's institutionalising nature. After all, in many respects this turn towards the subject too closely resembles a retreat into subjectivism, a belief that the key to our emancipation lies in the parochial understanding of one's own experience, a Cartesian position that the German idealists, and indeed Marx himself in his negation of Hegelian dialectics, spent over a century trying to productively move away from. We might note as an aside that this problematic is a common theme
within Zizek's work, in which he often interrogates the strangely persistent tension between idealism and materialism that is returned to the fore following the rise of psychoanalysis. For him, the Western world is not so much haunted by the specter of communism, but instead the specter of Cartesianism. In this sense, capitalism traps our understanding of our own agency. Cartesian philosophy is affirmed and then bastardised into an opera ergo sum. I work, therefore I am. However, harking back to the blogosphere's debate from the year before, in orbit of Zizek's analysis of 300, Shaviro describes the strange capture that results from an awareness of this very situation, what Zizek referred to as our ideologically closed world. Shaviro notes, however, that this awareness is not in itself new. Along with Gramsci and Lukács, it was arguably
Theodor Adorno and the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School who rendered this ontological crisis of negation most lucidly and most negatively. As Shaviro writes, by rehabilitating agency and by foregrounding particular practices of resistance, cultural Marxism hopes to find some sort of potential for overcoming capitalism. This reinvention of the subjective element takes many forms. At one extreme there is Zizek's hyper-volunturism, his fantasy of enforcing a rupture within capitalism and imposing communism by dint of a sheer willful imposition of ruthless terror. At the other extreme Adorno's ultra-pessimism, his hopelessness about all possibilities for action, is really an alibi for a retreat into the remnants of a shattered interiority,
a subjectivity that remains pure and uncontaminated by capitalism precisely to the extent that it is impotent, and defined entirely by the extremity of its negations. Despite their differences, both of these positions can be defined by their invocation of the spirit of the negative. Adorno's and Zizek's negations alike work to clear out a space for the cultivation of a subjectivity that supposedly would not be entirely determined by and would not be entirely subordinated to capital. For my part, I cannot see anything creative or pragmatically productive in such proposals. Neither Zizek's manic voluntarism nor Adorno's melancholia is anything more than a dramatic and self-dramatising gesture. That is to say, in spite of themselves, they both restore subjectivity in the form of a spectacle
that is precisely a negotiable commodity. In the world of aesthetic capitalism, Critical negativity is little more than the consoling and compensatory fiction. Here the Ouroboros of negating the negation has devoured so much of its tale that there is little space left for manoeuvrability, constricting the subject newly revealed at its core to the point of suffocating stasis. But the affirmation of this position is no less useless. The question of what is to be done then hardly seems a question worth asking of ourselves without first prying ourselves apart from our innately blinkered perspective. Javiro points to a number of other theorists who find themselves similarly on this sliding scale between affirmation and negation. J.K. Gibson Graham, for instance, the authors of The End of Capitalism As We Knew It from 1996
and A Post-Capitalist Politics from 2006. Like Zizek, albeit less provocatively, they denounce the Marxist image of capitalism as a closed, voracious and totalising system. But they also come perilously close to saying that the only thing keeping capitalism alive today is the inveterate prejudice on the part of Marxists that it really exists. Apparently, if we were just a bit more optimistic, we could simply think all the oppression away. There are plenty of other theorists who do not hold such a position, of course. Shaviro points to Michael Hart and Antonio Negri, authors of the hugely influential book Empire from 2000. But Shaviro sees their work as little more than the 21st century update of the messianic side of Marx's vision, of the negation of negation,
whereby the increased socialisation of labour leads inevitably to the expropriators becoming expropriated. Thus we have come full circle back to the position that we initially rejected, Shaviro continues, one according to which the restoration of agency is not needed for the internal dynamics of capitalism themselves lead inexorably to its ultimate abolition. Here we find two equally impotent positions, one of affirmation, in which simply acting as if capitalism no longer exists will make it so, and another which remains all too loyal to Marx's belief that capitalism will eventually destroy itself without any need for action from us. Still, the question remains unanswered. What is to be done? Do the only appropriate answers really rely on us falling back upon a materialist idealism or a materialist inhumanism. In response
to Shaviro's blog post, the writer and academic Benjamin Noyes penned a post of his own to concur with Shaviro's findings. I share his scepticism concerning the symmetry between absolute pessimism and volunturism slash subjectivism. He writes on his blog No Useless Leniency, although Noyes tentatively believes that there remains an untapped version of negativity that acts on the ontological fabric of capitalism qua real abstractions. What constitutes real abstractions is a much debated issue within 20th century Marxism. Abstraction, in a most general sense, is central to Marx's theory of the commodity. In volume one of Capital, he famously uses the example of a coat to demonstrate the ways in which labour can be abstracted from the material
conditions of its creation. By equating, for example, the coat as a thing of value to the linen it is made of. We equate the labour embedded in the coat with the labour embedded in the linen. However, Marx points out that this is blatantly not the case. Woven linen, which is used to make a coat, is not worth the same amount as the coat it eventually becomes. Linen, despite how it is made and how it might later be used, is reduced to a kind of raw material, like the flax plant from which it is derived, and so it is tailoring that becomes the value-creating form of labour, rather than the weaving of linen itself. As a result, in the tailoring of a coat, weaving is more or less erased from the equation. The quality of the material is strangely considered in itself.
This is to say that the tailor's recommendation of a fine linen is not an opportunity to champion the skill of the weaver who made it, not least because weaving was a gendered and largely anonymous form of labour. Weaving, then, is abstracted labour in the overall production of a coat. It is, in effect, disregarded and superseded by the labour of tailoring. This process of abstraction is everywhere today in late capitalist society. Few commodities are untouched by it. This is most obviously true of fast commodities. So-called fast food and fast fashion refer to the production of abstracted commodities explicitly, where the material conditions of their production are at an ultimate distance from us, the consumer. With fast fashion in particular, tailoring is itself superseded by the sheer convenience of a commodity's availability.
Even many of our most fetishised commodities are wholly abstracted from their labour in this way. Take Damien Hirst's infamous spot paintings, for instance, infamously produced in a studio by a production line of assistants. Each painting is nonetheless worth around £500,000, but this is down to the abstract and fetishised brand of the artist attached to them, rather than the fact it is no longer painted by his hand. In this sense, the spot paintings are arguably quite ingenious, adding a whole new dimension to the concept of abstract painting. Money itself is not untouched by this process. In fact, money is arguably the highest level of abstraction capitalism has produced. Marx himself writes in Capital that since money does not reveal what has been transformed into it,
everything, commodity or not, is convertible into money. It is precisely this all-encompassing form of abstraction that governs our entire way of life, and yet, despite or because of its ubiquity, money is in many ways a wholly arbitrary concept. In 1900, the economist and sociologist George Simmel dedicated an entire book to this subject, The Philosophy of Money. Here he argues that money is an absolute abstraction above all concrete goods encumbered and distorted by every quality outside its original character This process of real abstraction whereby the very notion of exchange is abstracted as such is the new reality of capitalism This is essentially the end result of the law of equivalence
that necessitates capitalist exchange As Adorno once argued in describing the nature of this process of abstraction if you want to exchange two objects and as is implied by the concept of exchange if you want to exchange them in terms of equivalence and if neither party is to receive more than the other then the parties must leave aside a certain aspect of the commodities This is to say that to equate two objects that are different in kind we must necessarily abstract their kind in order to proceed if three coats cost 400 pounds for instance we are required implicitly to think of their relation fractionally three of three is equal to 400 or 400 their equivalence being reduced down from there to a shared status of one of one this differentiates capitalist exchange from gift
exchange and from a barter system both of which are explicitly devoid of a law of equivalence However, this law of equivalence is not irrefutably stable. There is room for a manoeuvre, innovation and indeed manipulation. There may be no better example of how far this process of real abstraction has escalated in the 21st century than Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency that is infamous today for its prevalent usage on the so-called dark web and the fact that many of its early investors have become millionaires overnight. Bitcoin has undoubtedly revolutionised how we think about capital. that is money that makes more money. Whereas for Marx, the circulation of commodities is the starting point of capital, what happens when capital itself is commodified, as seems to be the case with Bitcoin.
The key innovation here is that Bitcoin was initially invented as a way to provide secure monetary transactions online that do not rely on a third party. It is, in essence, a form of digital cash. Its inventors ask themselves, rather than having to purchase everything with credit or debit cards, what is the online equivalent of spending cash in your pocket? The cash we use in our day-to-day lives is legal tender because it has material indications of trust created by a mint. Banknotes have watermarks and serial numbers etc. validating their authenticity. A digital cash needs the same thing, but in wanting to dispel the need for third parties, in order to be truly international, like the internet itself, digital cash also requires a form of trust that does not need to be adjudicated by mints and states.
The result is Bitcoin, and whilst the idea takes some time to gather momentum, it has taken off, not only revealing how fickle and unstable our trusted financial systems are, but also revealing that there is still room for innovation in a system that wants us to think it is all-encompassing. On the contrary, the creators of Bitcoin found a loophole, and the way they have cracked it open could shift how we think about capital forever. Bitcoin in this sense is another example of expropriators being expropriated but rather than individual property, it is capital itself that is being seized from financial gatekeepers. There is still room for the negation of negation yet but philosophy and politics in their capture continue to lag behind such non-philosophical innovations.