Public Talk by Eric-John Russell:
There Is No Outside
August 25, 16-18, Jutland Art Academy, Kalkværksvej 30, 8000, Aarhus C.
Room: SpLab, ground floor
In the lead-up to May 1968, the Situationist International (SI) gave to the concept of recuperation a certain
strategic bite as part of their critical theory of society. Here, within postwar abundance, the SI named their
adversary as ‘the society of the spectacle,’ and recuperation appeared as one of its broad mechanisms through which the negativity of revolt and revolution became neutralized and collapsed into the pervasive social integration commanded by the commodity economy under the capitalist mode of production.
For the SI, recuperation was a category that helped map a terrain of opposition, a way of naming the
maneuverings which sought to extinguish the revolutionary critique of the society of the spectacle, that
peculiar form of domination capitalist society had assumed during the twentieth century in which human
beings came to identify with the appearances and images of social life. My paper will explore how the concept of recuperation relates to the society which carries it out, namely, the society of the spectacle, and evaluate the prospects of critique within such a social landscape.
In a certain sense, the category of recuperation remains mired within an antinomy of critique. More or less
synonymous with corruption, recuperation is a dichotomous notion that always presupposes the
absolutization of exteriority and idealization of opposition. It is a military simile through which critique
attempts to elude capture. Here it could be said that such a concept poses a problem for a critique insofar as it understands itself as outside that which it attempts to critique. Instead, my paper will return to the question of immanent critique as part of the very practices of the SI (détournement as the use of society’s cultural language in order to unravel it from within), and assess how to situate the concept of recuperation within a critique that grounds itself on nothing external, concedes that there is no outside, and that the only way out of this world is through the false, not through its evasion.
Organized in collaboration between CRAPCC, the research network “Histories and Futures of French Travelling Concept”
Bio:
Eric-John Russell holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University in London. He was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at Universität Potsdam. His first book, Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord: Why Everything is as it Seems, was published in 2021 by Bloomsbury, with a preface by Étienne Balibar. He has also published articles in Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie, Critical Sociology, Hegel Bulletin, Theory Culture & Society, Science & Society, Jahrbuch der Internationalen Georg-Lukács-Gesellschaft, and Radical Philosophy, as well as in numerous edited volumes. He has also translated Jamie Semprun’s Précis de récupération into English for MIT Press and sections of Foucault’s 1954-1955 lectures on anthropology for CRMEP Books. He is currently under contract with University of Chicago Press to translate a selection of writings by Theodor W. Adorno. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Marx & Philosophy Review of Books and founding editor of the critical theory journal Cured Quail. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UCLouvain in Brussels under the ERC project “BildungLearning,” with focus on a critical theory of opinion.
