Power and Capital
FROM THE ARTICLE: I have always operated as if, since the originary hypothesis founds a new form of thinking that is essentially indigestible by the existing disciplines, and therefore necessarily at odds with those disciplines, it should be aligned with other marginal indigestibles in the field of knowledge. Hence, my attraction to thinkers like Wierzbicka who, if respected within the field of linguistics, does not seem to me to have had much impact on it; or Marcel Jousse, who takes the notion of mimesis too literally and thoroughly even for the mimetic theorists. Clearly, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, of whose Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder I was previously aware, but which I actually sat down to read at the urging of Joel Davis, fits into this category. So, this post will "welcome" Nitzan and Bichler (perhaps without their consent, were they to be asked) into the anthropomorphics "fold," and I would expect them to be a regular feature from here on in. Like Wierzbicka and Jousse and, of course, the originary hypothesis itself, Nitzan and Bichler have a very simple hypothesis with ramifications that cut down forests of disciplinary obfuscation. I don't remember when or how I first came across their work, because I'm pretty sure it wasn't from any website or publication, whether on the left or right, since as far as I can tell Capital as Power has had almost no impact on any discussions anywhere. If I were to try and prove myself wrong on this point, I would look to the kind of anarchist spaces where one might find discussions of the work of the recently and far too soon departed David Graeber, with whose work (and, I suspect, with whose politics) Nitzan's and Bichler's has affinities.