Restricted Economy Research Articles

Excess and Donation: From the Restricted Economy of Being to the An-Economy of the Gift (Or, the intriguing story of six pesos)

In the context of the recent publication of Donner le tempts II, we question the status of the gift, its singularity, its relationship, beyond the intentional structure of decision and consciousness, with the general problematic of democracy and the archive, of Khora as an enigma that haunts the same Onto-Theo-Cosmological conjugation of metaphysics and logocentrism, to show that the question about the gift is also the question about history and about the very possibility of democracy, beyond the capitalist logic of accumulation and valuation. We end up referring to the strange case of the ‘six pesos’ thematized in Miguel Angel Asturias's novel, Hombres de maiz, as a case of the incalculable. Far from an instrumental account, but also from a providential version of the gift, we try to show it as an event always already inscribed in the abyss of our exchange relations, a possibility contained in its own impossibility.

Perjury and Pardon, Volume 1 by Jacques Derrida

Reviewed by: Perjury and Pardon, Volume 1 by Jacques Derrida Ralph Shain DERRIDA, Jacques. Perjury and Pardon, Volume 1. Translated by David Wills. Edited by Ginette Michaud and Nicholas Cotton. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. 368 pp. Cloth, $45.00 This is the translation of a volume in the posthumously published series of Derrida's lecture courses. The most important of these are the early Heidegger: The Question of Being and History (1964–65) and Theory and Practice (1975–76), no parts of which were published by Derrida. Substantial portions of the first volume of the lectures on Perjury and Pardon were published as separate essays, so the main question concerning this book is what it adds to the published portions. For those readers who are familiar with Derrida's most famous work and are curious about his deconstructive ethics ("ethics beyond ethics") and have not read any of the essays drawn from this book (such as "To Forgive: the Unforgiveable and the Imprescriptible," "Literature in Secret," and "Typewriter Ribbon"), this is a good place to approach the topic. One will find here many of Derrida's classic moves, such as the deconstruction of texts, concepts, and traditions. One will find conditions of possibility that are also conditions of impossibility, concepts that are contaminated from within by their opposites, and appeals to the experience of the impossible and to the distinction between a general and restricted economy. One will also find here those points that seem to be Derrida's weakest, such as the insistence on the privacy of the mental, a rather wobbly treatment of the separation between intending and causality, and the [End Page 545] claim, important for Derrida's "poetico-performative" theory of truth, that all constatives depend on a prior performative—a promise to tell the truth, always already contaminated by failure and hence a "perjury." (The first and third of these are also found in Derrida's published work.) The topics in this book are helpful in situating Derrida vis-à-vis other thinkers, especially those in the Frankfurt School. Derrida's concept of an impossible, paradoxical pardon might be compared with Adorno's concept of utopian moments. The promise of truth implicit in every constative might be compared with Habermas's quasi-transcendental ideal speech situation. Even if one has read one or more of the published portions, if one is unsure how they fit together, these lectures will allow one to see how they cohere. In the third session Derrida provides an outline of the project, which he qualifies with the comment that "I am aware of the grossly schematic character of this outline." Grossly schematic, yes, but grossly schematic outlines are very helpful. Here's the gist of the outline: "stubbornly tracking down in the Biblio-Koranic tradition a logic of economy, an economy, a sublime ruse which . . . comes to contradict and undermine a demand for finite-infinite forgiveness, forgiveness without condition, the aneconomic forgiveness that is nevertheless at the heart of this same thinking . . . showing that on the supposed Greek side, the aneconomic notion of forgiveness comes to organize the aneconomic logic and 'syngnomic' rationality of a so-called Greek culture." In short, the concept of forgiveness that is derived from the monotheistic traditions of forgiveness claims not to be pragmatic or goal oriented, but Derrida shows that it is, whereas the Greek concept that is the closest equivalent, and is supposed to be entirely pragmatic, has moments that exceed any limited economy. (If this still sounds opaque, see Derrida's essay on Bataille and general economy in Writing and Difference.) Even those who are well versed in deconstructive ethics and have read the published parts of this book may still find it quite interesting. Derrida's verbal elucidations of the typescript are transcribed from recordings and placed in footnotes. There are quite a few of these, and some of them are interesting. The editorial apparatus will allow one to confirm that one has indeed read all of the published parts, which one should not take for granted since a couple of them are in relatively obscure venues. The readings of texts are of variable interest, but even in the...

Measuring the effectiveness of ASEAN-5 initiatives from emerging market portfolio’s perspective

ASEAN nations started ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) initiatives, with the goal of improving the economic movement in ASEAN. The initiative is expected to lead to higher integration in the regions. The objective of this research was to study the integration of equity markets in the ASEAN-5 nations (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines), particularly those involving the Indonesian stock market (Indonesia’s economy is the largest in the region), and to analyze the diversification opportunities among ASEAN equity exchanges. Theoretically, capital markets in these nations should be more integrated following the introduction of AEC due to the integration of their economy and removal of several investment restrictions, including foreign ownership limitation. The data used was weekly data was used from January 2000 to June 2019, which was divided into four periods: pre-crisis, crisis, post-crisis and AEC. The methods used were DCC-GARCH, AG-DCC, volatility spillovers, Granger causality and diversification ratio from the mean-variance framework. The results showed robust evidence that there were still less integrated equity markets in ASEAN-5. The volatility spillover declined during the post-crisis period and was relatively stable during the AEC period. This result implies that ASEAN-5 initiatives have an impact on the capital markets. However, the implementation of the AEC is still far from successful since the equity exchanges have become less integrated than in the post-crisis period. Investors in Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines are encouraged to avoid investing heavily in Indonesia and Thailand equities during market turmoil since both are net contributors to volatility.

The Grocery Trolley Race in Times of Covid-19: Evidence from Italy

We study the effects of the containment measures imposed by the Italian Government during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic on sales of the retail trade sector, focusing on different types of grocery chain stores. We document a sustained growth in revenues for storable products, beginning right before restrictions on mobility were introduced, and lasting throughout the whole lockdown period. The surge has been driven by the dynamics of smaller outlets, located in urban areas and closer to the city centre, while hypermarkets experienced a drop, probably relating to their more peripheral position. Thanks to the remarkable granularity of the Nielsen scanner data and the staggered implementation of restrictions across regions, we causally identify the short-term effects of mobility constraints on outlets’ sales. According to our estimates, large grocery stores in areas subject to lockdown measures earned revenues around 10% lower than their control group did. In view of the protraction of the pandemic and the need for the Government to continue managing the containment of infections, our study helps quantifying the costs for the economy of mobility restrictions, also highlighting possible distortions arising among different categories of outlets.

Apologies of Violence in the 20th Century: The Human and Non-Human

The article presents a comparative philosophical-anthropological analysis of the conceptions of emancipatory violence suggested in the 20 th century by such authors as Georges Sorel, Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, and Georges Bataille. It claims that the reason for this comparison is a dialectical structure of double negation, shared by these conceptions, according to which there exist two types of violence. The violence of the first type is committed by those who are in power, e.g. the police, war or state violence, the violence of the strong over the weak, adult over children, men over women, human beings over other animals etc. Such violence is often not recognized as violence, but can be regarded as norm or governmental measures. As a reaction on it, the violence of the second type emerges, i.e. the violence of the oppressed and the excluded, which philosophers describe as a necessary, just, perfect, pure, etc. What is at stake here is not only political antagonisms, but also more general categories, such as nature and reason. A general strike in Sorel, a divine violence in Benjamin, a struggle for liberation in colonies in Fanon, and a sacred violence in Bataille are taken as anthropological models of the violence of a second type (emancipatory). Bataille’s violence, however, falls out of the line: originality of Bataille’s negative anthropological conception is that it focuses on the violence of the non-human, which corresponds to what Bataille calls “general economy” and opposes to restricted economy that leads to wars. Finally, general economy as the violence of the non-human is discussed in relation to Anthropocene and contemporary ecological problems.

Ethical Repetitions: Rhetorical Imitation and/as Algorithmic Judgment

ABSTRACT In order to explore the possibilities of affirmative ethics and algorithmic judgment, this article puts machinic rhetoric in conversation with classical imitation pedagogy. Taking a machine-learning chatbot as my example, I examine how imitation and repetition in a restrictive economy of rhetorical models produces a limited affirmative ethics through dialectical relations. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's concept of representative thinking to theorize a procedure for algorithmic judgment, I argue that rhetorical training requires the affirmation of a plurality of models if it is to generate not only versatility but also ethical repetitions.

Victimhood in Bataille‘s Reading of Sade and in Popular Sovereignty

This article reveals three aspects of victimhood in Bataille’s reading of Sade (of the other, of the self, and Sade’s language) and relates them to some of Bataille’s metaphysical and political notions: the impossible, the general and the restricted economy, sovereignty, and transgression. Doing so shows a progressive simplification of possibilities for transgression from the pre-Christian world to that of popular sovereignty, i.e., the sovereignty of the crowd, the latter leaving open one avenue for transgression: Sadean victimhood. The article then applies these aspects to the pamphlet in Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir, “Frenchmen, Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Republicans,” in relation to a contemporaneous document of popular sovereignty, the preamble to the Constitution of the Year III, titled “Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and Citizen.” Attending to the aspects of Sadean victimhood in “Effort” shows that its system’s very impossibility makes it the Declaration’s logical completion. Finally, that impossibility is revealed as the sovereignty of the masses, distinct from that of the crowd.

Model Rehna-Meidnera i jego rola w polityce gospodarczej Szwecji

This paper aims to describe the Swedish Rehn-Meidner model, the cause of its creation, its features and the reasons for changes in the Swedish economic policy over several decades. The model was developed by two Swedish economists in 1951 and it impacted the economic policy over the following decades. It was intended to facilitate achieving the goals of full employment, price stability, economic growth and equality in a redistribution of income through the policies of solidarity wage, restrictive economy, active labour market and marginal employment. The model was designed as a solution to the "overheating" of the Swedish economy in the 1950s. The implementation of the model initially proved to be successful. However, in the 1970s the economic policy began to be more influenced by trade unions, acting mainly in their own interest. Due to the growing globalisation other external factors, such as oil crises and negative demand shocks, started to have an increasing impact on Sweden. It was when economic decisions started to shift away from the recommendations of the model, and the "golden age" of the 1950s and 1960s came to an end. The following analysis intends to explain what was the model characterisation, how it influenced Sweden's development, and why the country economic policy has changed over time. It also states that despite changes in the economy, certain elements of the model have remained valid until today.

Forecast in detail

The adverse effect on the economy of continued restrictions on activity and extension of government Covid support schemes for households and firms mean projections for the fiscal deficit in 2020–21 have continued to climb. But the deficit should fall later back this year as activity recovers, while gilt purchases by the BoE should keep a lid on government borrowing costs.

Solar Goop

Would we know solarity if we encountered it? And where do we look for the potential openings that such a new energy system could enable? Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share has emerged as a key text in the theorization of energy because of his distinction between the restricted economy of capitalism versus a general economy most clearly figured by the energetic exuberance and abundance of the sun. This article makes use of Bataille’s deliberately unsettling and destabilizing fictions, such as “The Solar Anus” and Story of the Eye, to analyze and assess a set of practices that appear to be unlikely candidates for the utopian visions now predictably connected with the solar. When read in relation to Luce Irigaray’s account of female subjectivity, practices of entrepreneurial feminized self-care, exemplified here by Gwyneth Paltrow’s much-criticized Goop Lab, open up a distinct and unexplored sense of the social relations that could shape the concatenation of solar and solidarity called solarity. This article traces this potential through an enquiry into feminist popular culture and other modes of relationality, such as Sivanandha Radha’s yogic invocation of Light. The overall aim of the essay is to provide another way of mapping solarity—not through the materiality of solar panels and promise of free energy, but through the complex practices of feminized bodies, solace, and solidarity.

Cold Sun • Hot Planet

This article considers how Georges Bataille’s account of solarity informs a planetary perspective. Bataille is credited with formulating a critical analysis of “solar societies” whose economies are shaped by the exchange of solar energy. However, a sometimes understated facet of Bataille’s reading of solarity is the way he positions living beings at the axis of the sun and the earth, and in the midst of elemental forces such as cold, heat, light, and darkness. Bataille deploys these elemental forces in his writing in order to disfigure the restricted economy of capitalism and its bourgeois subjects. Rather than considering it as a social or subjective predilection, this article emphasizes solarity as a critical form and disorganizing force. This article addresses Bataille’s elemental aesthetics and his positioning of the subject as both a capitalist predator that accumulates solar energy, and a speculative subject, a being who is preyed upon by its own accumulation of energy and that is ultimately disfigured and expended by it. I argue that solarity arises in Bataille’s writing as an aesthetic operation per se. He invokes a mythological language to dismantle the scientific and philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment. Solarity is therefore the antithesis of Enlightenment thinking and values: it entails the invocation of mythic force in order to dramatize earthly elements and their anarchical energy exchange. I connect Bataille’s mythic language to recent theorizations of planetarity and political ecology, from Gayatri Spivak, to Isabel Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Donna Haraway. I emphasize how his aesthetic maneuvers disfigure the restricted economy of concepts that accompanies the resourcing of the earth.

On Solarity: Six Principles for Energy and Society After Oil

This essay critically interrogates the hopes, fears, and fantasies that accompany the future social and political projections of a transition to solar energy. It does so through the elaboration of six principles for understanding solar energy, with the aim of adding context and complexity to the principle energy narrative already emerging around this source of energy. Solar contains a double promise: energy without fuel and infinite energy. But despite the radical possibilities that might emerge from this fundamental redefinition of our relation to energy, solar also contains all manner of limitations—the weight of the materials necessary to create solar power; the blunt reality of existing forms of economics and politics that work to contain the changes solar might bring into existence; and the mechanisms of power that are likely to contain solar within (in Bataille’s term) a restrictive economy. Against the techno-determinist tendency to imagine that the introduction of solar energy will produce radical social change on its own, I argue for the need to articulate and struggle for “solarity,” a politics appropriate to the coming challenges of the solar era.

Bataille in the South: James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Erskine Caldwell’s Depression Fiction

This article tries to show how James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and Erskine Caldwell in his fiction from the Depression years–especially the little-known novella, The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1930)–used a discourse of the sacred to represent the strange otherness of the Depression South. They particularly drew on the “left hand sacred” (of taboo, repulsiveness and sacrifice) as distinct from the “right hand sacred” found in institutional religion. The article argues that a theoretical understanding of Agee and Caldwell’s use of the sacred may be provided by Georges Bataille. It seems particularly appropriate to invoke Bataille since he was concerned with the political elements of the sacred and sought to mobilize these elements during the 1930s when liberal democracy was thought by many leftist writers on both sides of the Atlantic to have failed. Bataille provides a productive analogue to the two southerners, who shared this perception of liberal democracy, because he tried to articulate a radical path in this decade that was not Marxist. Agee and Caldwell, although notionally Communist, were dissatisfied with Marxism because they saw it as another version of a utilitarian or restricted economy. They looked instead to the sacred as a discourse of transgression–a discourse that was rooted in what Bataille called a general economy or the deeper organization of collective life around ecology and the gift.

Feminist Pornocracy? Femen and The Politics of Resistant Nudity

Feminist Pornocracy?Femen and The Politics of Resistant Nudity Dina Al-Kassim (bio) A scene at the April 2013 Hanover trade fair illustrates the peculiar symbiosis of pornocratic rule and struggle for celebrity enjoined by a global economy of sovereign subjectivity. Homogenizing market logics expressed as private sentiment and empowered agency feed the pornocratic economy by inflating and innovating the disciplinary imaginaries some mistake for liberty and sovereign intimacy. It was, recalls Shevchenko, a 24-year-old business studies graduate from … western Ukraine, "a very intimate moment." … "Suddenly there I was, looking into Putin's eyes, he into mine, just a metre between us before one of his men lunged to shield him from me and in those seconds I was just thinking to myself: "What a funny botox face—because of all the snips and tucks it's endured, it can't properly express what he's feeling." Alexandra Shevchenko (cited in Connolly) Femen activist Alexandra Shevchenko here gazes at the mirror image of a potential future self, one reflecting every surgical stay of mortality and of our being in common. As a major player among the "shock troops" of sextremism known as Femen, Shevchenko and the pornocrat share a moment of recognition in the public eye as she launches herself topless upon the Russian president in full view of the assembled media throng and to the contagious surprise of Europe's most powerful woman and national leader, German chancellor Angela Merkel. Cementing the public disclosure of their relation, the eye lock can be read as an index of a postsoviet identity in crisis, where personality and celebrity are sought as the other side of real poverty and an ossified gender system, conduit of trafficking and sex tourism without end by Femen's account. Cut off from its own expressive lexicon, the pornocrat's face beams back only images of bloated obscenity and grotesque invitation as Putin [End Page 111] "seems to push his chest out, raise his eyebrows and purse his lips, producing a double chinned smirk, while Merkel puffs out her cheeks and frowns as bodyguards pounce on Shevchenko and her four fellow Femen members, tackling them to the floor" (cited in Connolly). If Femen nudity primly stops at toplessness, their public materializations unleash the farcical element only ever loosely held in check by public figureheads who contend with the rigorous body discipline of public appearance. The Femen intervention exposes this fact before the cameras: "I had observed from a distance a group of suited men. The closer I got to them, I recognised the really small one amongst them was Putin. He was so puny, not like the macho pictures you see of him riding a horse bareback, or fishing barechested," she said. "And that was when I realised: now is the moment and started to charge. … I jumped over the fence, pumping my elbows out at my sides and undressing as I ran towards him, screaming: 'Fuck the dictator'" (cited in Connolly). Alternately tumescent and shrinking, fearsome yet fading, Putin appears less formidable when measured against the beauty system's exacting standards, and this fragilized masculinity, by turns ridiculous and obscenely leering, invigorates the Femen-ist who, seizing the opportunity to launch the insult, claims equality although only in the terms of erotic bondage. As one Femen-ist puts it, "We use women's sexuality as women's weapon" (Hutsol and Svyatski). Logics of saturnalian reversal or Bakhtinian carnivalesque fail to capture the restricted economy of Femen's pornocratic intimacy with heteropatriarchal power and the figures of sovereignty who front for it; for this we must reach into Achille Mbembe's notion of "commandment," a cycling entanglement of desire for glory wedded to a demand for absolute power, wherein the dominated "clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology … [while] power, in its own violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence" (133). Femen-ist nudity mirrors pornocratic vulgarity and machismo by borrowing its cheap lineaments to reproduce its logic of spectacular individuality, absolute agency, and freedom understood as the media capture of subjective singularity. Yet a Femen-ist is no libertine. "We were invited to Germany...

‘Strangled the Chicken’: The Spectacle of Gay Male Sex and the Incitement of its Discourse in Rope

In this paper, I explore discourses of gay male sex and homosexuality in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) as it situates within the highly-restrictive moral landscape of the Motion Picture Production code era. Although the restrictive economy surrounding these regulations had supposedly expurgated all discourses of sex and sexuality from the public sphere, I will draw on Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1984) to argue that this was not the case. Instead, I shed light on the paradox of censorship, by which the shrewd restriction of sexuality has transformed gay male sex into a topic of discussion. I then offer a critique of Hitchcock’s spectacularization of gay male sex, urging us to question how discourses of gay male sex are being constructed and who is constructing these discourses.

FDI in Central and Eastern Europe’s (CEE) Agribusiness

Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) had adopted restricted industrialization policy until 1990. The economic and social transition started after 1990, providing free atmosphere for foreign investments in CEE. Due to such interference, the early eminent countries were replaced by new eminent ones. This article examines the affirmative as well as unimpressed role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in agribusiness in CEE during 1990s–2000s. Like CEE, India was also a restricted economy until 1991. As a part of continuing reforms, India has recently allowed a bulk of FDI in agribusiness sectors which have prompted farmers and local industrialists to raise their voice against such decision. Agriculture, being a livelihood of major population, needs a better farm–firm link through investment. Evidence from the CEE has proved many positive outcome of FDI. However, India cannot ignore some eccentric lessons from CEE.

Rancière and Vallès: Musings on the Time In-Between

It is surprising that despite its impassioned lobbying against the debilitating capital-driven purposefulness of time, Marx's work remains singularly resistant to the concept of pure leisure, to the idea of recreation for its own sake. When leisure does surface in Marx's discussion of alienated labour, it is frequently as a detail in a far grander plan, telling us little about the personal impact it had on its practitioners. Prevailing upon the radical forms and practices of leisure advocated, archived, and theorized by Paul Lafargue and Jacques Rancière, this essay proposes a reading of Jules Vallès's novel L'Enfant (1878) that sees in it a prolegomenon for a politics of idleness that both outstrips the restricted economy this notion takes on in Marx and offers a powerful, indisciplinary indictment of a world without ‘free time’. As with Lafargue and Rancière, Vallès leaves us scrutinizing the root radicality of those intermittent moments where things cease to happen, where idleness becomes, for the eponymous child of the novel's title, a transformative, emancipatory practice of the self in which time, space, and relations to others (and to the self) are reappropriated as sensuous, sociable ends-unto-themselves.

Asset Price Bubbles

This article reviews the theoretical literature on asset price bubbles, with an emphasis on the martingale theory of bubbles. The key questions studied are as follows: First, under what conditions can asset price bubbles exist in an economy? Second, if bubbles exist, what are the implications for the pricing of derivatives on the bubble-laden asset? Third, if bubbles can exist, how can they be empirically determined? Answers are provided for three frictionless and competitive economies with increasingly restrictive structures. The least restrictive economy just assumes no arbitrage. The next satisfies no arbitrage and no dominance. The third assumes the existence of an equilibrium.

Indeterminacy, Incipiency, and Attitudes: Materialist Oscillation in the 2012 Chicago Teachers’ Strike

Teachers unions face a unique set of double-binds when defending their interests as workers and as advocates for students. In this essay, I argue that materialist approaches beginning from a concern for labor position deny potential to those laborers—teachers among them—who occupy an indeterminate relationship to capitalism. To describe these workers’ potential for agency, this essay examines the oscillatory movement that occurs between the conceptions of labor position theorized by Ronald Walter Greene and Dana Cloud. In shifting between these positions, I argue, educators can cultivate an incipient potential that nimbly negotiates double-binds while exacerbating the contradictions of neoliberal reform. I advance this argument through an analysis of three oscillations in the Chicago teachers’ strike of 2012: between conceptions of labor as part of a general or restricted economy; between projects of demystifying and upholding meritocracy; and between competing spatial configurations of the school and society. During these oscillations, I assert, the Chicago Teachers Union's labor action and rhetoric maintained its coherence through the formation of an attitudinal unity experienced in the immanent coalescence of contradictory movements.

AFFECT

Somewhere between use and mere whim there is a place for the expressivity of affect as a concept. This paper raises the question of how the concept of affect might be mobilized without reducing its expressions to the logic of work. We suggest that the very attempt to put affect to work in order to solve pressing problems may be symptomatic of an anxiety to master the events of the world. With this in mind, we make a case for the importance of Georges Bataille's critique of an instrumentalist form of thinking, which reduces events to objects of human sensemaking. Bataille's “general economy” opens onto all that the restricted economy of use negates; namely, that which exceeds our efforts as humans to make sense of, and thus appropriate, events. Ultimately, Bataille's antihumanist thought limits the potential of the gift economy, by rendering it the negative of the social order. We argue that a more posthumanist thought can realize the immanent potential of affect and apprehend its gift to thinking.