Anti-Crisis

Janet Roitman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa.

Acknowledgments xi Introduction. What Is at Stake? 1 1. Crisis Demands 15 Judgment Day The Moral Demand The Test 2. Crisis Narratives 41 Bubbles Houses Finance Subjects 3. Crisis: Refrain! 71 Noncrisis Narrations The Crisis that does not Obtain Conclusion: Dreams 91 Notes 97 References 133 Index 153

"Anti-Crisis incisively illuminates a core blind spot of modern understandings of history: the coupling of critique & crisis. Janet Roitman sunders this couple revealing the ties that have bound us and thereby opens up welcome new horizons for thought and action. Once the complacency of the self-importance of living in a crisis epoch is gone, then prophecy, denunciation and the speaker's benefit can be bundled with other toxic waste and pawned off on those looking for assurance at bargain rates." - Paul Rabinow, coauthor of Demands of the Day: On the Logic of Anthropological Inquiry "Anti-Crisis will become an instant classic. It is that good. Seeking to understand why crisis has become an 'omnipresent sign in almost all forms of narrative today,' Janet Roitman analyzes the constitution of 'crisis' as a privileged object of knowledge, a ground to 'critical theory' and the human sciences more broadly, and an instigation to various modes of action in the world. Along the way, she makes crucial interventions in debates about what is critical about critical theory, what the critical human sciences are for, and how they ought to be sustained, or not, in the wake of the restructuring of U.S. higher education. This is a stunning, paradigm-shifting achievement." - Bill Maurer, author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason "For Roitman, "crisis" is not simply a cliched label for - among other things - recent economic developments, but a fraught and dubious concept. The word itself has roots in an ancient Greek medical term referring to the phase of an illness which will either kill the patient or end in recovery." - Scott Mcleme, Inside Higher Ed "On Thursday 18 September 2008, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, warned: 'We may not have an economy on Monday.' [...] Roitman responds by asking philosophical questions. What does it mean 'not to have an economy'? What is signified by the 'collapse of the world economy'? Critical to an extreme, Roitman has no faith in such terms. Her complaint is that anti-capitalist activists - involved in campaigns such as Occupy Wall Street - take crisis at face value. Instead of stepping back to 'consider what is at stake with crisis in-and-of-itself', they unconsciously accept the grammar of crisis narratives, viewing the world in binary-digital terms - capital versus labour, use value versus surplus value, politics versus morality and so forth. Internalising such antinomies, they end up by simply taking sides - allocating blame, for example, or insisting on a redistribution of wealth and power. Roitman soars above all that. In her view, 'the point is to observe crisis as a blind spot, and hence to apprehend the ways in which it regulates narrative constructions'." - Chris Knight, Times Higher Education