Jason Read: The Politics of Transindividuality

Excerpt

If, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously argued, philosophy involves the creation of concepts, then Jason Read’s new book is a superb illustration of philosophical practice. Although Read did not himself create the concept of transindividuality, he has probably done more than any other contemporary philosopher to develop this concept by exploring its history and emphasizing its applications—especially as an instantiation of what, following Louis Althusser, we could call a concept for Marxism. Indeed, Read’s book is a venture into Transmarxism, that is, both a way of opening up Marxism in order to communicate with other philosophical and political traditions and also of summoning non-Marxist traditions to encounter the conceptual richness of Marxism at its critical best. Given the wide scope of Read’s book, in a brief review it is probably wise to restrict our attention to the following: see how Read understands the concept of transindividuality, provide a sense of how he uses it to engage in close textual readings, and offer a critical assessment of how well he makes a case for its value. …