Abstract

If for Sartre communism was ‘the untranscendeable horizon of our time’ the capitalist restoration and counter-revolution of the last thirty years imposed capitalism, or the ‘market’, as our only horizon. The current global capitalist crisis fractures and refigures this ‘horizon’, revealing this period as one of capitalist drift and deceleration masked by financialised ‘bubbles’ and ideological inflation. And yet the crisis incarnates a catastrophe that appears as the ruination of any alternative social order: barbarism without socialism. Rather than the appeal to the utopian, mired as it is in the problem of abstract will, instead I trace the stubborn difficulty in theorising the encryption of an alternative social order within the present ‘horizon’. The disconnect between the rational and the real has licensed theoretical irrationalisms – whether catastrophist, vitalist, voluntarist, or quietist – that attest to the demand for the concrete in the form of the abstract. Instead, without the necessary promise of a ‘post-capitalist’ order, the delimitation and analysis of the real abstractions that dominate the present, attenuated and hollowed by crisis, tracks an alternative negation of the capitalist horizon.