Book Review: Other Areas: Capital and Affects: The Politics of the Language Economy
| Date | 01 May 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1478-9302.12016_18 |
| Published date | 01 May 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
In the first half of the book, Kramer explores and
rejects the most state-of-the-art versions of the four
most prominent philosophical defences of capital pun-
ishment: deterrence, retribution, incapacitation and
denunciation. He finds that each of them lacks the
necessary moral justification to support capital punish-
ment, based, at least in part, on the Minimal Invasion
Principle. This pr inciple claims that any exertion of
legal-governmental power should be done by means of
the least invasive and restrictive method available.
According to Kramer, all four of the standard defences
fail to show that the death penalty is the least invasive
way to meet their stated ends.
The final two chapters of the book develop the
argument for the purgative justification. In some
empirically plausible cases (Kramer uses the case of the
Night Stalker,Richard Ramirez), a criminal’s acts do so
much damage to the moral standing of the community
at large that there is a moral duty to kill the miscreant
to restore moral order and standing. It is a clever move,
and one that might aid Arendt’s condemnation of
Eichmann, but it faces lingering problems. The most
glaring is the fact that the purgative (despite careful
arguments for placing it only in liberal democracies
where procedural fairness is the rule) seems open to
worries about failures of justice and fairness, and there
seems to be a tremendous amount of ‘looseness’even in
Kramer’s careful discussion of the types of evil that
justify purgation. It would seem quite plausible, for
instance, that strongly pro-life anti-abortion activists
can develop plausible arguments about the evils abetted
by abortion providers, claiming (as some already do)
that there is a moral duty to kill those individuals to
restore the moral dignity of our society. But despite
these worries, Kramer’s book is a well-argued and
inventive work that will generate new avenues of dis-
cussion in legal and moral philosophy.
Eric M. Rovie
(Georgia Perimeter College, Atlanta)
Capital and Affects:The Politics of the Language
Economy by Christian Marazzi. Los Angeles
CA: MIT Press, 2011. 159pp., £10.95, ISBN
9781584351030
The ongoing current economic crisis increasingly
reveals itself as the worst in capitalism’s history. In
Britain, the slump was initially so stark and rapid, the
recovery so painfully slow, that even comparisons with
the 1930s look increasingly acquiescent and docile.Yet
those economic commentators who dominate the
mainstream British media consistently neglect historical
contextualisation, and remain trapped within a neo-
liberal logic.
This situation symbolises not only the failure of
economic practice but, more importantly, the travesty
of its theoretical orthodoxy.The translation and publi-
cation of Capital and Affects by Semiotext(e) in 2011 is,
consequently, long overdue. This text was or iginally
published in Switzerland in 1994, and was written in
the aftermath of the recessions in the United States and
Europe during the early years of that decade.
Its concerns could not be further removed from
economic orthodoxy’s fascination with rational choice
theory,econometrics, game theory,and so on. Marazzi’s
concern, in contrast, is to bring sharply into focus the
overlap between language and affects and their impact
on economic developments, particularly in the last few
decades of the twentieth century.These issues are in
line with the approach developed by Italian autonomist
and post-autonomist thought, but Marazzi’s analysis is
more directly applied to the field of economics.
The book is very much alive in the way it grapples
with and develops a number of concepts and key terms
that have subsequently become more widespread: lean
production, just-in-time, post-Fordism,Toyotism, cog-
nitive and immaterial labour, communicative mode of
production. Alongside these theoretical developments,
Marazzi identifies and explores a number of historical
developments since the 1970s, and considers their
impact on the economy.These include females’ increas-
ing inclusion into remuneration, the weakening of the
class structure of Fordism and industrialism, transfor-
mations in employment, the comparative decline in
wages for the majority in Western economies and the
concomitant rise in credit.
In short, Capital and Affects provides a welcome
range of theoretical analyses to conceive of economics
and its wider relations. Its key weakness springs from
its innovatory approach, dwelling insufficiently on
themes here, combining multiple theories unsatisfac-
torily there, and a general lack of signposting. These
are easily forgiven because, despite the immediacy of
many of the concerns and the theoretical exuberance,
the analyses developed by Marazzi have a lasting value,
casting light not only on the recessions of the 1990s
BOOK REVIEWS 237
© 2013 TheAuthors. Political Studies Review © 2013 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2013, 11(2)
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