Sandro Mezzadra Research Articles

Response to "Postcool"

Sandro Mezzadra responds to "Postcool" by Francesco Salvini, reflecting on the "method" of militant research the use of Chakrabarty's concepts in Salvini's understanding of "postcolonial capitalism."

Response: History, Historiography, and Communal Subjectivity

Sandro Mezzadra's “The Topicality of Prehistory: A New Reading of Marx's Analysis of ‘So-called Primitive Accumulation’” foregrounds the problematic of political subjectivity at the heart of discussions of capitalism's relation to its origins. His essay resituates the problematic of primitive accumulation within the context of the constitution of capitalist wage labor. In this context, Mezzadra warns against romanticizing subaltern agency. This reflection takes his insights further, and suggests that we can deploy his interventions on the relationship between translation and abstraction to rethink the possibilities of subaltern agency in the face of ongoing expropriation of commons.