Benjamin Noys
I am Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester. My research is focused in contemporary Continental theory, cultural politics, literature, and avant-garde and popular culture.
I am a member of the Editorial boards of Film-Philosophy, S, and Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, a corresponding editor of Historical Materialism, and a contributing editor of Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. I lead the Theory Research Group at the University of Chichester.
I am interested in supervising postgraduate work in the following areas: critical theory, particularly contemporary European thought (Agamben, Badiou, Negri, Zizek, Derrida, etc); Lacanian psychoanalysis; contemporary avant-garde and modernist fiction; anti-capitalist and anarchist politics, cinema; horror fiction; and the cultural politics of the image.
Phone: 01243 816405
Address: Department of English,
University of Chichester,
Bishop Otter Campus,
College Lane,
Chichester,
PO19 6PE,
UK
I am a member of the Editorial boards of Film-Philosophy, S, and Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, a corresponding editor of Historical Materialism, and a contributing editor of Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. I lead the Theory Research Group at the University of Chichester.
I am interested in supervising postgraduate work in the following areas: critical theory, particularly contemporary European thought (Agamben, Badiou, Negri, Zizek, Derrida, etc); Lacanian psychoanalysis; contemporary avant-garde and modernist fiction; anti-capitalist and anarchist politics, cinema; horror fiction; and the cultural politics of the image.
Phone: 01243 816405
Address: Department of English,
University of Chichester,
Bishop Otter Campus,
College Lane,
Chichester,
PO19 6PE,
UK
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Books by Benjamin Noys
‘Communization’ is the spectre of the immediate struggle to abolish capitalism and the state, which haunts Europe, Northern California and wherever the real abstractions of value that shape our lives are contested. Evolving on the terrain of capitalism new practices of the ‘human strike’, autonomous communes, occupation and insurrection have attacked the alienations of our times. These signs of resistance are scattered and have yet to coalesce, and their future is deliberately precarious and insecure.
Bringing together voices from inside and outside of these currents Communization and Its Discontents treats communization as a problem to be explored rather than a solution. Taking in the new theorizations of communization proposed by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, Théorie Communiste, post-autonomists, and others, it offers critical reflections on the possibilities and the limits of these contemporary forms, strategies, and tactics of struggle.
Jasper Bernes, John Cunningham, Endnotes, Alexander R. Galloway, Maya Andrea Gonzalez, Anthony Iles, Leon de Mattis, Nicole Pepperell, Théorie Communiste, Alberto Toscano, Marina Vishmidt, and Evan Calder Williams.
While positioning the emergence of affirmative theory as a political response to the corrosive effects of contemporary capitalism, Noys argues that, all too often, affirmation is left re-affirming the conditions of the present rather than providing the means to disrupt and resist them.
Refusing to endorse an anti-theory position that would read theory as the symptom of political defeat, The Persistence of the Negative traverses these leading thinkers in a series of lucid readings to reveal the disavowed effects of negativity operating within their work.
Overturning the limits of recent debates on the politics of theory, The Persistence of the Negative vigorously defends the return of theory to its political calling.
Western culture has always been obsessed with death, but now death has taken on a new, anonymous form. The 20th Century saw the mass production of corpses through war and the triumph of technology over the human body. The new millennium has opened with global terrorism and the suspension of all human rights in far-flung prison camps. We live in an age of panic, when the fear of death at any time and in any place is present. And we live in an age of apathy towards both science and institutional politics, an age which has sanctioned the rise of techno-medical and political powers which can deny our control over our own bodies and lives and the lives of others. The Culture of Death explores this moment to analyse our exposure to death in modern culture.
Treating Bataille’s work as a whole rather than focusing, as other studies have done, on aspects of his work (i.e. as social theory or philosophy), Noys’ study is intended to be sensitive to the needs of students new to Bataille’s work while at the same time drawing on the latest research on Bataille to offer new interpretations of Bataille’s oeuvre for more experienced readers. This is the first clear, introductory reading of Bataille in English - challenging current reductive readings, and stressing the range of disciplines affected by Bataille’s work, at a time when interest in Bataille is growing.
Articles by Benjamin Noys
This interview brings together one of the leading critics of accelerationism, Benjamin Noys, who coined the concept as an object of criticism and has just published his critique Malign Velocities (Zero, 2014), with Alexander R. Galloway, an author and programmer working on media theory and contemporary French philosophy. In the discussion they explore the battles over the definition of accelerationism, the role of the negative, questions of abstraction, and the appeal and perils of fantasies of acceleration. The interview was conducted by email and in person between 23 October 2014 and 3 November 2014.
politics. However, these images of dynamism are now forced to confront capitalism in a state of inertia and deceleration, and in so doing, they reveal their dependence on replicating or displacing the supposed ‘productive forces’ of capitalism to
their own projects. Models of ‘anti-production’, such as those derived from Georges Bataille, also tend to converge on models of vital powers, although cast in forms of consumption and excess. Criticising this convergence on a mythical vitalism, this essay suggests a deflationary critique of capitalism’s ‘productivism’, and explores the potential for an anti-vitalist analysis that might better grasp the ‘mythological displacement’ of experience that operates within the frame of capitalist social relations.
‘Communization’ is the spectre of the immediate struggle to abolish capitalism and the state, which haunts Europe, Northern California and wherever the real abstractions of value that shape our lives are contested. Evolving on the terrain of capitalism new practices of the ‘human strike’, autonomous communes, occupation and insurrection have attacked the alienations of our times. These signs of resistance are scattered and have yet to coalesce, and their future is deliberately precarious and insecure.
Bringing together voices from inside and outside of these currents Communization and Its Discontents treats communization as a problem to be explored rather than a solution. Taking in the new theorizations of communization proposed by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, Théorie Communiste, post-autonomists, and others, it offers critical reflections on the possibilities and the limits of these contemporary forms, strategies, and tactics of struggle.
Jasper Bernes, John Cunningham, Endnotes, Alexander R. Galloway, Maya Andrea Gonzalez, Anthony Iles, Leon de Mattis, Nicole Pepperell, Théorie Communiste, Alberto Toscano, Marina Vishmidt, and Evan Calder Williams.
While positioning the emergence of affirmative theory as a political response to the corrosive effects of contemporary capitalism, Noys argues that, all too often, affirmation is left re-affirming the conditions of the present rather than providing the means to disrupt and resist them.
Refusing to endorse an anti-theory position that would read theory as the symptom of political defeat, The Persistence of the Negative traverses these leading thinkers in a series of lucid readings to reveal the disavowed effects of negativity operating within their work.
Overturning the limits of recent debates on the politics of theory, The Persistence of the Negative vigorously defends the return of theory to its political calling.
Western culture has always been obsessed with death, but now death has taken on a new, anonymous form. The 20th Century saw the mass production of corpses through war and the triumph of technology over the human body. The new millennium has opened with global terrorism and the suspension of all human rights in far-flung prison camps. We live in an age of panic, when the fear of death at any time and in any place is present. And we live in an age of apathy towards both science and institutional politics, an age which has sanctioned the rise of techno-medical and political powers which can deny our control over our own bodies and lives and the lives of others. The Culture of Death explores this moment to analyse our exposure to death in modern culture.
Treating Bataille’s work as a whole rather than focusing, as other studies have done, on aspects of his work (i.e. as social theory or philosophy), Noys’ study is intended to be sensitive to the needs of students new to Bataille’s work while at the same time drawing on the latest research on Bataille to offer new interpretations of Bataille’s oeuvre for more experienced readers. This is the first clear, introductory reading of Bataille in English - challenging current reductive readings, and stressing the range of disciplines affected by Bataille’s work, at a time when interest in Bataille is growing.
This interview brings together one of the leading critics of accelerationism, Benjamin Noys, who coined the concept as an object of criticism and has just published his critique Malign Velocities (Zero, 2014), with Alexander R. Galloway, an author and programmer working on media theory and contemporary French philosophy. In the discussion they explore the battles over the definition of accelerationism, the role of the negative, questions of abstraction, and the appeal and perils of fantasies of acceleration. The interview was conducted by email and in person between 23 October 2014 and 3 November 2014.
politics. However, these images of dynamism are now forced to confront capitalism in a state of inertia and deceleration, and in so doing, they reveal their dependence on replicating or displacing the supposed ‘productive forces’ of capitalism to
their own projects. Models of ‘anti-production’, such as those derived from Georges Bataille, also tend to converge on models of vital powers, although cast in forms of consumption and excess. Criticising this convergence on a mythical vitalism, this essay suggests a deflationary critique of capitalism’s ‘productivism’, and explores the potential for an anti-vitalist analysis that might better grasp the ‘mythological displacement’ of experience that operates within the frame of capitalist social relations.
https://www.valiz.nl/en/publications/the-future-of-the-new.html
history’.
1. Every economy is libidinal
2. Every libido is economic
If both these axioms are accepted then we accept libidinal economy. In fact, as this presentation traces, the tendency is to choose or modify one of other axiom to produce a less distressing form of libidinal economy. In this case, we witness a moralism of libidinal economy, either for or against, rather than a thinking of libidinal economy. This presentation wants to sketch, by working through the permutations, the consequences of a thinking of libidinal economy. Also, this presentation aims to work towards a thinking through of libidinal economy by suggesting we grasp how these axioms might appear in an ethical substance and culture. Instead of the moral or ethical as an external judgement, how might we form the ethical culture of the libidinal?
Using popular forms, such as comics and music, Savoy have created a “weird” universe that excavates the toxic elements of British cultural identity and the counter-currents of avant-garde transgression. I want to assess this “neo-Weird” as a provocative re-activation of the reactionary and racist political themes that often dominated the “old Weird”. Inhabiting a profound political and cultural ambiguity, this “excavation” re-charges the most offensive tropes possible. In this way, I will argue, it questions the general tendency to “de-toxify” the weird and the political claims made around acceptance and celebration of the chaotic and the hybrid. While not endorsing the cultural strategy of Savoy, which I regard as profoundly problematic, it raises key critical questions about the politics of the “weird” and suggests a central ambivalence at the heart of the genre.