From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@stanford.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 31 2002 - 16:38:40 EST
>Rakesh, > > Many thanks for your comments. > > I haven't read Bergson, but have been aware that I ought to. I hope I >can get around to it soon. > > In relation to value, it does seem to me that the labour theory of value >is above all a critique of the object's negation of the subject which >created it. (If the recently much discussed VFT - value form theory - does >not mean this, then surely it ought to.) This surely also means a critique >of the notion that an object has a durable existence independent of the >labour which creates and re-creates it (through use), a critique, therefore >of duration. I suspect the critique of value can be extended to a critique >of nouns in general, since nouns deny the verbs which constitute them. This >would make communism the movement of verbs against nouns - a >self-determining society, in other words. > > John Dear John, I am wondering whether this critique of nouns and of perduring things derives in any way from the process philosophy represented by thinkers from Heraclitus to Bergson: the sun is not a thing but a flaming fire, a river is not an object but an everchanging flow. I have not myself read Nicholas Rescher's book on process metaphysics, though it was cited in the mss I was reading. Having read Hardt and Negri's Empire, I was struck by its underlying process metaphysics which seems to have been derived from the idiosyncratic Bergsonian Gilles Deleuze. If I can find the time, I would like to think through whether and how you and Hardt and Negri have worked through the tradition of process metaphysics in your respective ways. Yours, Rakesh
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