The Eternal Return of Crisis

Peter Osborne's article 'A Sudden Topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the Politics of Crisis', in the new Radical Philosophy 160 is a provocative and fascinating read. Not least because it makes a connection I was interested in by using Benjamin's reading of the eternal recurrence as the temporality of capital (someone should also read this against the temporalities proposed in 'On the Concept of History'). Summarising violently Osborne, suggests the functionality of crisis, its detachment from politicisation, and what I've taken to calling the capitalist real subsumption of the new. In a way, and I'd tend to agree, crisis does not guarantee politicisation, and Osborne explores this through a deeper conceptualisation of the effect of crisis on the very concept of change - something I'm also interested in and I'll need to read over more carefully.

This and his related work on negation, which has yet to my knowledge appear in print, makes Osborne's work a rather uncanny shadow to what I've been trying to develop (or vice versa).