Introduction

Abstract

Within the past seven years, we have witnessed what looked briefly like the implosion of the global financial system followed by a wave of protest movements challenging the neoliberal consensus, but business as usual has returned, indeed with a renewed sense of inexorability.Capitalism is both broken and all-pervasive, and while it has produced the technological conditions for a world of universal welfare and minimal work, it is at the same time the agent of ever more extreme inequality and immiseration, especially among the populations of the Global South.The global financial system to which we are all beholden has never been more opaque in its operations, or more transparent in its effects.And although the language of capitalism and class has resurfaced in public discourse -from Occupy's "we are the 99%!" to Thomas Piketty's unlikely best seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century -nothing seems to impede the totalizing reach of the profit motive.Capitalism has wholly saturated our world; it now threatens to extinguish it.Meanwhile, where is theory in the American humanities?The latest violent reminders of capitalism's global dominance have coincided with various "turns": toward a "neutral" practice of description (from structure to surface); toward the empirical as opposed to the interpretive; toward an "ethics," as opposed to a politics, of reading; and toward the souls of objects, as an explicit rejection of questions of subjectivity and subjectivization.Where the stakes are higher, it is in new forms of metaphysics, revitalized vitalisms, cybernetic fantasies, or attempts by the (digital) humanities to incorporate the new "technologized scientism," as Alain Badiou has called it, 1 into its methods: to keep up with the world as it is and not be left behind.Theory today, where it still exists, often pre-

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