Defense Date

7-12-2017

Graduation Date

Summer 1-1-2017

Availability

One-year Embargo

Submission Type

dissertation

Degree Name

PhD

Department

Philosophy

School

McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Committee Chair

Fred Evans

Committee Member

Jay Lampert

Committee Member

Daniel Selcer

Committee Member

Leonard Lawlor

Committee Member

Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

Keywords

Debt; Financial Capitalism; Gilles Deleuze; Melancholic subjectivity; Passive synthesis of time; Subjectification

Abstract

This dissertation looks at time as a socially or psychologically imposed ‘structure’ that determines the ways in which past, present and future are weaved together in the subject. This inquiry presents (1) a critical role of temporality in the formation of the subject, (2) a specific temporality characteristic of contemporary financial capitalism, and (3) the pathologies of time found in the subjects of capitalism. The first two chapters provide an extensive analysis of Deleuze’s passive syntheses of time given in Difference and Repetition, which reveals the subject’s passive relation to time as a structure of ‘becoming.’ The following chapters examine how this ontological structure of time interacts with socio-economic temporalities in its production of the subject. I particularly focus on the temporal structure of debt, which has become a general condition of the subjects in the current economic system. I claim that the debt-based economy produces ‘melancholic subjectivity,’ characterized by a dominance of the past and the inhibition of becoming.

Format

PDF

Language

English

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