If Marx's opus "Capital "provided the foundational account of the forces of prod
uction in all of their objective, machine formats, what happens when the concept
s of political economy are applied not to dead labor, but to its living counterp
art, the human subject? The result is Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt's "History
and Obstinacy," a groundbreaking archaeology of the labor power that has been cu
ltivated in the human body over the last two thousand years. Supplementing class
ical political economy with the insights of fields ranging from psychoanalysis a
nd phenomenology to evolutionary anthropology and systems theory, "History and O
bstinacy" reaches down into the deepest strata of unconscious thought, genetic m
emory, and cellular life to examine the complex ecology of expropriation and res
istance.
First published in German 1981, and never before translated into Engli
sh, this epochal collaboration between Kluge and Negt has now been edited, expan
ded, and updated by the authors in response to global developments of the last d
ecade to create an entirely new analysis of "the capitalism within us."
