From: John Holloway (johnholloway@prodigy.net.mx)
Date: Mon Nov 04 2002 - 12:31:49 EST
Rakesh,
I'm not sure about process metahysics. Surely the point about Marx's
work is that it is a critique ad hominem (to borrow the expression that
Werner Bonefeld uses a lot). In other words, the aim is to understand the
world in terms of humans, but humans understood as doers, as active
subjects. To put doing (or human activity, or praxis) in the centre means to
understand everything as being in process, doesn't it?
John
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From: Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@stanford.edu>
To: ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu
Subject: [OPE-L:7881] Re: John Holloway on time
Date: Thu, Oct 31, 2002, 3:38 PM
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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