W.'s train was full of obese children, he says. – 'When did everyone get so fat?' The children ran up and down the carriages, unhindered by their girth. But W. got down to some reading despite their bellowing. He underlined passages and wrote in his notebook. The children on my train were wiry and lean, I tell him. They sat still with their pitbulls, full of spent hatred. – 'And what did you read?', W. asks. And when I tell him, he nods and murmurs. – 'Flusser again, oh yes … Mazzarri, oh you'll never understand him …'
W.'s been reading so much Tronti he's not sure which of his thoughts are his own, and which the Italian philosopher's. The development of capitalism is the truth of capitalism, he quoted in an email to me. The more that capital develops, the more it reveals the secret of capitalism.
And then, in another email: As soon a capitalism has conquered everything externally, the force of domination must become internal – capitalism has to be internalised, capitalism is now a matter of subjectivity. Brilliant!, I wrote back.
It is only by seeing ourselves as part of capital, immanent to capital, that we can possibly struggle against it, W. wrote. Exactly!, I wrote back.
He's reading Tronti's Twilight of Politics now, W. says. It's very despairing. Basically, there is no political subjectivity so there's no more politics. The workers' struggle is over … The credits are rolling … Tronti says we need to read Kierkegaard now, not Marx, if we want to understand the effects of capitalism.
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