Jason Read
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Jason Read
@jasonread.bsky.social
7.5K followers 3.6K following 4.2K posts
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine, Author of The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work from Verso Books:
https://www.versobooks.com/products/2920-the-double-shift
More here:
http://www.unemployednegativity.com
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My buddy is airbud
Bento (dog) chasing soccer ball Bento (dog) chasing soccer ball
November 14, 2025 at 10:17 PM
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New book by Pierre Macherey coming out this month. 350 pages on Spinoza.
BDS Études Spinoziens Pierre Macherey BdS, ces trois lettres apparaissent, en guise de nom d’auteur, sur la couverture des Opera Posthuma publiées en 1677, un an après la mort de Spinoza ; il s’agissait d’un recueil d’écrits alors inédits au nombre desquels figure l’Éthique, dans laquelle Spinoza avait consigné et mis en forme démonstrative l’essentiel de sa démarche philosophique. Cette signature énigmatique représentait une sorte de compromis entre la grande formule « Benedictus De Spinoza (amstelodensis) » et le complet anonymat sous lequel avait paru, en 1670, le Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Elle résonne à présent comme une sorte de signal et traduit l’extrême singularité d’une démarche philosophique qui, depuis 350 ans, n’a pas encore livré tous ses secrets. Cet ouvrage revient sur certaines des difficultés que soulève aujourd’hui encore la compréhension d’une pensée déroutante entre toutes. Se confronter à ces résistances fait mesurer à quel point la philosophie de Spinoza reste vivante et agissante, à la fois active et d’une grande actualité.
November 14, 2025 at 3:27 PM
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November 13, 2025 at 6:52 PM
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Bento and me
Bento (dog) and me
November 13, 2025 at 2:25 PM
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Reread the following passage in André Tosel's Études sur Marx (et Engels) and it seemed to be the perfect encapsulation of the moment. As he argues, citing Losurdo we are living through a period of de-emanicapton "De-emancipation that takes shape in the recolonization of the Third World (with the support of the national bourgeoisies who have for horizon insertion in world market to their profit); in the rehabilitation of colonialism in practice and in theory, the dismantling of social and economic rights (conquered in the previous period by the workers' movement under the impetus or the protection of the revolution of 1917), in the reduction of representative democracy to political market that produces the political disappropriation of citizens as a condition of the economic and social disappropriation of producers in the liquidation of active citizenship and the constitution of a plebiscite of the excluded deprived of any prospect of work of society." Apologies for the quick translation.
November 13, 2025 at 12:00 PM
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Paolo Virno has been an almost constant reference through all of my writing from The Micro-Politics of Capital to The Politics of Transindividuality, but one of my favorite uses of his work is when I cited his concept of opportunism to discuss Better Call Saul
The antithesis to the ideal of self-mastery appears in the form of Better Call Saul. If the former show dealt with the fantasy— the ideal that if you are good at something, even if that thing is cooking meth, then you can ultimately dictate the terms of your existence— the latter is, in some sense, about how skill is not enough. Of all of the backstory and revelations of the latter show, perhaps the most surprising is that Saul, or at the time Jimmy McGill, was at one point a good lawyer. Jimmy McGill finds himself practicing elder law early in his career. While he does skirt the ethical norms of the profession with the way he produces his commercials and solicits his clients, he is, at least in the beginning, a conscientious lawyer who makes his client’s needs paramount. Indeed, it is through his very attentiveness to them that he stumbles upon the major class action suit mentioned above. In some sense, this could be a career-making case, but in Jimmy’s situation, it ultimately unmakes him, turning him from Jimmy McGill to Saul Goodman. The story of Jimmy is that of one who is perpetually undone by his career, despite his talent and ability. It is less a narrative about breaking bad than one about the difficulty of walking the straight line. Jimmy’s difficulty is less an inability to change— to cease being a con man, as his brother claims— than his ability to see every social relation as an opportunity. This stems, in 98 “Kafkaesque,” Breaking Bad, written by Peter Gould and George Mastras, dir. part, from the particular kind of labor that Jimmy is involved in: one that foregrounds relations with others, persuasion, and appearance. There is no accident that “It’s showtime” is Jimmy’s mantra before entering the courtroom: he is a showman. Sometimes this entails dressing as Matlock, the television character beloved by retirees, before showing up at a retirement community to canvas for clients, and sometimes this means fabricating exculpatory evidence for a client. One of these is legal, albeit in poor taste, while the other is illegal. However, in the eyes of Jimmy, those differences do not matter as much as the opportunities themselves. Philosopher Paolo Virno has described “opportunism” as less a moral character, or lack thereof, than a product of particular historical situation defined by the labor situation. The precarity and flexibility of contemporary labor demand that workers shift from different rules and norms. The end result is that every set of rules seems arbitrary and negotiable. As Virno writes, The neutral core of the contemporary emotional situation, susceptible to opposing manifestations, consists of a familiarity with the possible, in so far as it is possible, and of an extreme proximity to the conventional rules which give structure to the differing contexts of action.99 For Jimmy, the rules of the game, the norms of propriety that define the ideal of the lawyer, as well as the stricter codes of the bar association, are just limitations on what is possible or effective in the pursuit of clients and winning cases. Jimmy draws his sense of possibility not just from his sketchy past as a con artist but from the entire range of the cultural industry: he plays a lawyer by imitating the images of law, and lawyers, that his clients have seen on TV. In his hands, the “cultural industry” becomes a means of production, a way to shape and transform people’s expectations and ideas. authority. It is because there is no objective or quantitative standard of what constitutes a good lawyer that one is increasingly subject to idiosyncratic and personal forms of evaluation. As Virno describes the problem with evaluation of work that is primarily subjective and relational, “How can one evaluate a priest, a journalist, a public relations person? How can calculate the amount of faith, of purchasing desire, of likeability that these people have managed to muster up?”101 Jimmy’s trajectory as a lawyer, like many forms of work that vanishes in the act of producing, such as service work, is punctuated not only by uncertain opportunities and events but by the immense sway that singular individuals have over the conditions of employment. This is the corollary of the power of singular events and cases to make one’s career— if one big case can make a career, a singular encounter or instance can also unmake it. The increased power of the event or situation also entails the increased importance of specific individuals and relations. As Virno writes, “In other words, virtuosic activity shows itself as universal servile work.”102 In the case of Jimmy, this means that his brother, Chuck, as a senior partner of Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, has incredible sway over his career. When it is first revealed that Jimmy has put himself through law school at night and passed the bar, it is Chuck who prevents him from being hired. Chuck later prevents the firm from hiring him a second time, even when he brings his impressive class action suit to the firm. The fact that Jimmy’s trajectory is thwarted by his brother would seem to shift the show’s narrative away from work toward a family drama. However, his brother is just a particular instance of the servile and oddly personal nature of service work. Marx understood the transition from feudalism to capitalism to be, in some sense, the displacement of personal relations of dom broadly characterized as services, including practicing law, entails a return to personal forms of domination because of the specific and subjective nature of the service performed. This is not a reversal, a return to a feudal past, but, in some sense, a negation of a negation, as the impersonal domination of the market, of the need to find a job, is mediated through the particular tastes and opinions of the people whose job it is to evaluate and enforce its rules. In the work of a lawyer, just as a server or performer, “the product is not separable from the act of producing”; it ends when the case is closed, the meal is finished, or the show is over. Its only lasting effect is in the memory of the client, customer, or boss, and these impressions define one’s fate.104 As a worker engaging in such works, one is dependent both upon the general structure of employment and the specific power of the boss: as work becomes more subjective, concerning talents and abilities, the power of a specific boss increases; all it takes is one bad recommendation to ruin a career. At first glance, the fates of Walter White and Jimmy McGill could not be more opposed. Walter’s transformation into Heisenberg is a self-transformation framed through a mastery of work. Walter becomes the man he dreams of— a worker and provider— vanquishing his boss, his rivals, and anyone who stands against him. He may die in the end, but not before making sure his children get his money and a better place in society, living a version of the American dream. This is what made Heisenberg a figure of identification and fantasy for fans of the show. In contrast to this, Jimmy McGill’s transformation into Saul Goodman occurs through his acceptance of defeat, his recognition that there is no way to escape the deadweight of expectations, and of one’s background...
November 11, 2025 at 5:36 PM
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Night games
Bento (dog) in yard with soccer ball at night
November 11, 2025 at 3:14 PM
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Which way, western man?
Painting of Rene Descartes in a red convertible driving through the countryside titled "Rene Descartes and a Moving Matter" by Alexander Anatolevich Roitburd Painting of Spinoza riding a zebra titled Spinoza in Tuscany by Alexander Anatolevich Roitburd
November 11, 2025 at 2:42 PM
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The Motion of Light in Water
Bento (dog) swimming against dark water with rain and leaves
November 10, 2025 at 3:56 PM
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November 10, 2025 at 3:35 AM
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Two big Spinoza books arrived this week
Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy by Katja Diefenbach and Sovereignty Disrupted by Gilah Kletenik
November 9, 2025 at 9:30 PM
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On the river
Bento (dog) and me on concrete pier in river
November 9, 2025 at 3:33 PM
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Review of The Double Shift in the Bulletin de Bibliographie Spinoziste
Review of The Double Shift in French Review of The Double Shift in French Review of The Double Shift in French
November 9, 2025 at 12:09 PM
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Bento and his Octo-pal
Bento (dog) on rug with toy octopus
November 8, 2025 at 11:57 PM
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Paolo Virno 1952-2025
Pile of books by Paolo Virno
November 8, 2025 at 1:41 PM
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My reflection
Bento (dog) on rock in river with reflection below and bare trees above
November 7, 2025 at 7:41 PM
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My father sent me this picture of The Double Shift at City Lights Books in San Francisco
picture of bookshelf at store with copy of The Double Shift
November 7, 2025 at 4:24 PM
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Ready for some football
Bento (dog) in yard with football in mouth
November 6, 2025 at 2:43 PM
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This is my favorite part of my preface to Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop's Althusser and Spinoza
edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-althuss...
Of course, the most striking combination in Althusser’s writing is not Machiavelli and Spinoza but Spinoza and Marx. Sánchez Estop unearths a surprising assertion regarding the relationship between Spinoza and Marx. In an interview Althusser stated that the Theologico-Political Treatise is ‘Spinoza’s Capital’ and that ‘Spinoza is the only philosophical ancestor of Marx’.4 What is surprising in this formulation is the reference to the Theologico-Political Treatise and not the Ethics, which Althusser referred to more commonly throughout his published works, drawing from its theory of causality to understand the capitalist mode of production, and from its theory of imagination to articulate a theory of ideology. However, Althusser’s assertion offers a basis to reinterpret one of the more cryptic references to Spinoza in Reading Capital. In that text Althusser writes, ‘The first man ever to have posed the problem of reading, and in consequence, of writing, was Spinoza, and he was also the first man in the world to have proposed both a theory of history and a philosophy of the opacity of the immediate.’5 Reading this statement through the Theologico-Political Treatise makes it possible to see the connection of reading and history. The Treatise begins from the desires, hopes and fears of the people, those things that subject us to superstition, and from there begins to read the texts of Scripture, the words of the prophets and the story of Moses; its criticism is entirely immanent to its method. As Pierre Macherey argues, method does not appear prior to the arrival of knowledge, but is developed entirely within and from it.6 It is only after and while reading Scripture that Spinoza arrives at an explicit formulation of the method that had guided his inquiry: ‘knowledge must be sought from Scripture alone, just as knowledge of nature must be sought from nature itself’.7 This particular strategy of the sive, of Scripture as nature, is also a fundamental reversal. As Sánchez Estop puts it, ‘It is no longer a question of seeing the world as a book but instead of seeing the book as a world’ (p. 69). The book, Scripture, has to be understood as itself a world, as a world without an author or creator. It is a world created and sustained by the multiple desires, affects and strivings that make it. As Spinoza asserts again and again in his reading of Scripture, the meaning of the cryptic and contradictory things said in the Bible can only be understood by engaging with the specific context and situation of each of its authors. The statements of Moses or the prophets which attribute human qualities such as anger and spite to God can only be understood in terms of the world of the imagination and the desires of the audience. Marx’s Capital is also a book about reading, about what Althusser calls symptomatic reading. It is after all a critique of political economy, but the critique is not one that passes through corrections of errors or limitations. Marx reads political economy, Smith, Mill, Ricardo, in order to reveal not what they do not say, what is omitted, but what is concealed by the very act of saying it. In each case the reading in question seeks to articulate not what is not said, a hidden meaning, but what is not said in the act of saying it.8 Spinoza’s and Marx’s readings converge on the question of power, capacity and actuality. This is abundantly clear in Marx. Classical political economy, Smith and Ricardo, answered the question of the source of value by tracing it back to labour. This discovery came with a hidden limitation, an inability to understand the difference between a power, a capacity, and a commodity, an actuality. As Marx argues, what the worker sells, and what is the source of value, is not labour, but labour power, the capacity to work.9 This capacity must be actualised, must be put to work, by the capitalist who turns potential into actuality. In a similar manner, prophecy as it is understood by Spinoza is predicated on a confusion about power, about capacities. As Spinoza argues, 6 Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, trans. Susan M. Ruddick (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 43. 7 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Hackett, 1998), 87. 8 Pierre Macherey, ‘Reading Althusser’, trans. Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser, in Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production, ed. Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser (Northwestern University Press, 2022), 174. 9 Ibid., 175. one of the tendencies of the ancient Hebrews was to attribute all things to the power of God. In this sense, everything, including human laws and actions, can be understood as following the dictates of God’s laws. Human social relations are the product of the capabilities and limitations of human beings, which are themselves effects of the laws of nature, which in turn relate back to God’s (or nature’s) infinite power. But, as Spinoza argues, ‘We ought to define and explain things through their proximate causes.’10 Prophecy, the imaginative faculty, is in some sense an act of God, an effect of the infinite power of nature, but it is better understood, better grasped, through the human relations, the human history that defines its context and articulation. Thus, it is possible to see in both Spinoza and Marx a connection between reading and power. It is in and through reading, a practice of reading, that one can find the powers and capacities that are reified and obscured in the commodity and in the idea of God. Marx and Spinoza’s symptomatic readings do not simply criticise political economy or scripture, pointing out its limitations and failures, but show that what is overlooked is capacity, power: the power of philosophy and of practice.
November 6, 2025 at 2:35 PM
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How much to you want to bet that he also had a column titled "Why Mamdani's Defeat is a Decisive Repudiation of the Left Wing of Democratic Party" ready to go if Mamdani lost?
Opinion from the New York Times. Headline "Mamdani's Victory is Less Significant Than You Think." by Ross Douthat
November 5, 2025 at 9:04 PM
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A lovely morning in the woods
Bento (dog) on moss covered rock in woods with fallen leaves on the ground
November 5, 2025 at 4:46 PM
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Sundial dog
Bento (dog) in yard with sun rising behind him and shadow
November 4, 2025 at 4:46 PM
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I recently rewatched They Live. Here are a few thoughts posted for its anniversary. First, if you remember anything about the film it is probably three things 1) the almost comically long alley fight between Roddy Piper and Keith David 2) the line about bubblegum and kicking ass 3) and most importantly, the sunglasses that allow one to see the truth beneath the ideologies of daily life. The first thing that struck me in rewatching the film is that it ends up being about seeing long before the first pair of glasses the sunglasses are put on. At the beginning the film asks the audience to see the denizens of a homeless camp as people, as parents, children, friends, and volunteers all just trying to get by in this world. This is radically different from the way such camps are presented in the news. Second, the film also asks that you see the police as a force of domination. While everyone remembers the big gimmick of the glasses, the film reminds us on a more subtle level that seeing is always political.
November 4, 2025 at 3:32 PM
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They Live was released on this day in 1988. We are living in a dark and gritty sequel of it.
Pitch for a sequel to They Live. The "ghouls" (as they are referred to in the script), or aliens, have been unmasked by Nada's (Roddy Piper) destruction of the signal in the first film. Some are hunted down, while it is rumored that others have gone into hiding, finding new ways to disguise their horrifying appearance and devious plans. The destruction of the ghouls does very little to change things, the wealthy still dominate and the poor still suffer. Then one day a ghoul emerges that does not conceal his appearance, or his intentions. He makes it clear that he plans to continue accumulating massive wealth. When people point out that his kind exploited and depleted the planet he freely admits it, pointing out that running a inter-dimensional conglomerate is no small task. It was a huge and impressive endeavor. As much as one might be critical of the ghoul's exploitation of the planet, no one can doubt that they got things done. This ghoul then states that he is running for president. Critics declare that he is a ghoul, but he makes no secret of it. No one can unmask him, for he is already unmasked; attempts to reveal his sinister motives are belied by his willingness to state them clearly. The ghoul eventually wins, and once again the country is under their thrall, only now openly so.
November 4, 2025 at 11:42 AM
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Planet of the Dogs
Bento (dog) on beach against the backdrop of rocks
November 3, 2025 at 7:45 PM