Thomas Waller
Biographic Data
| ID | 253962 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Waller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Waller |
| SIGNATURE | WALLER T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nottingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3994-3914 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Introduction
Introduction for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'
Labor
Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'
Marxist Modernism
Bifurcated futures
Roberto Schwarz and World Literature
Dead Loss
This article rereads the aporia in Freud's theory of mourning as a problem for representation and aesthetics. Drawing a parallel with Kant's account of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement, I argue that the mourner's stubborn willingness to persist in the reproduction of images of the lost object, in spite of their conscious knowledge of the irreversibility of the loss, wrests a minimal zone of autonomy from the sphere of practical int…
Stably Unusual
This article critically compares two recent approaches to the problem of aesthetic autonomy: Dave Beech’s Art and Value and Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy. By recentering the differences between these critics’ works around Marx’s categories of subsumption, it evaluates the fraught relationship between labor and aesthetics, economy and form, art and the market. Although Beech provides a persuasive account of art’s “economic exceptionalism,” his focus o…
Subjects of Exchange
This essay explores the homology between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy through an engagement with the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the related tradition of the neue Marx-Lekture (New Reading of Marx, or NML). Without claiming an easy compatibility between the Marxian and Lacanian fields, the article establishes a dialogue founded on difference and oversight. While the unconscious figures centrally in Sohn-Rethel'…
Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa
In “Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa”, Thomas Waller offers a comparative reading of literary responses to neoliberalization in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa. Reading the proliferation of spectral effects in the Mozambican literature of the late 1980s alongside dystopian depictions of societal collapse in contemporary Angolan fiction, he suggests that writers in the two states have used distinctive aesthetic idi…
World energy literature
This article proposes a reading of João Paulo Borges Coelho’s novel Campo de Trânsito (2007) as a literary response to the neoliberal financialisation of oil. Exploring the correspondence between dematerialised forms of capital and the abstraction of narrative modes, I argue that materialist motifs of petroleum extraction and workers’ resistance in Borges Coelho’s text register the ‘porosity’ of Mozambique’s extractives sector, which in recent ye…
Spectrality, Marxism, and the Critique of Value
This essay brings Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993) into critical dialogue with the German-language school of Marxist theory known as Wertkritik. Through an engagement with value-critics such as Robert Kurz and Norbert Trenkle, as well as with figures associated with the neue-Marx Lektüre such as Moishe Postone and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, the essay makes four interrelated arguments: (1) that Derrida privileges the ‘exoteric’ over the ‘esoteri…
Apresentando o WReC
Esta entrevista aborda a teoria da literatura-mundial do Warwick Research Collective (WReC), que se define como 'a literatura do sistema-mundo capitalista', por meio duma discussão com três membros do grupo: Neil Lazarus, Sharae Deckard e Michael Niblett. Ao longo da entrevista, abrangemos a conjuntura disciplinar que deu origem à debate crescente da literatura mundial e que estimulou o grupo a juntar-se e a formular a sua teoria; os quadros conc…
The Blue Cultural Fix
Putting Blue Humanities scholarship in critical dialogue with recent research on the ‘cultural fix’ and ‘fixed-labour-power’, this article offers a comparative reading of two Portuguese-language novels in which the figure of the female water-spirit features as an index for two contrasting modes of knowing the ocean. In Jorge Amado’s Mar Morto (1936), the water-spirit is registered as a passive and incomprehensible extra-human entity that looms ov…
Spectres of a petrostate
Critical realism has a long pedigree in Marxist literary criticism. Most fully developed as an aesthetic theory by Georg Lukács, it was conceptually limited by a narrow understanding of realism and the suggestion that only realist art could be critical of social reality. In an attempt to revise the rigidity and dogmatism of Lukács’ theory, Michael Löwy proposed the category of ‘critical irrealism’, which emphasised the fact that there were many n…
Southern California water politics and U.S.‐Mexican relations
Improving the efficiency of irrigation systems has been repeatedly identified by water policy experts as a yet untapped means to alleviate scarcity. Water conservation, it is argued, is cheaper and less environmentally destructive to still unharnessed rivers. Yet even conservation tampers with the hydrologic cycle and can have unintended or undesirable consequences. As a case in point stands a scarcity relieving endeavor being undertaken along th…
Subjects of Exchange
This essay explores the homology between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy through an engagement with the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the related tradition of the neue Marx-Lekture (New Reading of Marx, or NML). Without claiming an easy compatibility between the Marxian and Lacanian fields, the article establishes a dialogue founded on difference and oversight. While the unconscious figures centrally in Sohn-Rethel'…
Southern California water politics and U.S.‐Mexican relations
Improving the efficiency of irrigation systems has been repeatedly identified by water policy experts as a yet untapped means to alleviate scarcity. Water conservation, it is argued, is cheaper and less environmentally destructive to still unharnessed rivers. Yet even conservation tampers with the hydrologic cycle and can have unintended or undesirable consequences. As a case in point stands a scarcity relieving endeavor being undertaken along th…
The Blue Cultural Fix
Putting Blue Humanities scholarship in critical dialogue with recent research on the ‘cultural fix’ and ‘fixed-labour-power’, this article offers a comparative reading of two Portuguese-language novels in which the figure of the female water-spirit features as an index for two contrasting modes of knowing the ocean. In Jorge Amado’s Mar Morto (1936), the water-spirit is registered as a passive and incomprehensible extra-human entity that looms ov…
Spectres of a petrostate
Critical realism has a long pedigree in Marxist literary criticism. Most fully developed as an aesthetic theory by Georg Lukács, it was conceptually limited by a narrow understanding of realism and the suggestion that only realist art could be critical of social reality. In an attempt to revise the rigidity and dogmatism of Lukács’ theory, Michael Löwy proposed the category of ‘critical irrealism’, which emphasised the fact that there were many n…
World energy literature
This article proposes a reading of João Paulo Borges Coelho’s novel Campo de Trânsito (2007) as a literary response to the neoliberal financialisation of oil. Exploring the correspondence between dematerialised forms of capital and the abstraction of narrative modes, I argue that materialist motifs of petroleum extraction and workers’ resistance in Borges Coelho’s text register the ‘porosity’ of Mozambique’s extractives sector, which in recent ye…
Spectrality, Marxism, and the Critique of Value
This essay brings Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993) into critical dialogue with the German-language school of Marxist theory known as Wertkritik. Through an engagement with value-critics such as Robert Kurz and Norbert Trenkle, as well as with figures associated with the neue-Marx Lektüre such as Moishe Postone and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, the essay makes four interrelated arguments: (1) that Derrida privileges the ‘exoteric’ over the ‘esoteri…
Apresentando o WReC
Esta entrevista aborda a teoria da literatura-mundial do Warwick Research Collective (WReC), que se define como 'a literatura do sistema-mundo capitalista', por meio duma discussão com três membros do grupo: Neil Lazarus, Sharae Deckard e Michael Niblett. Ao longo da entrevista, abrangemos a conjuntura disciplinar que deu origem à debate crescente da literatura mundial e que estimulou o grupo a juntar-se e a formular a sua teoria; os quadros conc…
Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa
In “Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa”, Thomas Waller offers a comparative reading of literary responses to neoliberalization in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa. Reading the proliferation of spectral effects in the Mozambican literature of the late 1980s alongside dystopian depictions of societal collapse in contemporary Angolan fiction, he suggests that writers in the two states have used distinctive aesthetic idi…
Stably Unusual
This article critically compares two recent approaches to the problem of aesthetic autonomy: Dave Beech’s Art and Value and Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy. By recentering the differences between these critics’ works around Marx’s categories of subsumption, it evaluates the fraught relationship between labor and aesthetics, economy and form, art and the market. Although Beech provides a persuasive account of art’s “economic exceptionalism,” his focus o…
Subjects of Exchange
This essay explores the homology between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy through an engagement with the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the related tradition of the neue Marx-Lekture (New Reading of Marx, or NML). Without claiming an easy compatibility between the Marxian and Lacanian fields, the article establishes a dialogue founded on difference and oversight. While the unconscious figures centrally in Sohn-Rethel'…
Roberto Schwarz and World Literature
Dead Loss
This article rereads the aporia in Freud's theory of mourning as a problem for representation and aesthetics. Drawing a parallel with Kant's account of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement, I argue that the mourner's stubborn willingness to persist in the reproduction of images of the lost object, in spite of their conscious knowledge of the irreversibility of the loss, wrests a minimal zone of autonomy from the sphere of practical int…
Marxist Modernism
Bifurcated futures
Introduction
Introduction for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'
Labor
Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'
Sociology (7 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Law (4 works)