Bringing together Marx and Spinoza, Kiarina Kordela (Prof of German and Director of Critical Theory, Macalester College) theorizes labor-power as an individual's aggregate of affective capacities-the capacities of affecting, and being affected by, other individuals-within the transindividual constitution of the individual and the world. Related to Lacan's psychoanalytic notion of unconscious enjoyment (jouissance), this insight leads to a reconceptualization of the capitalist appropriation of labor-power as an inextricably economico-affective appropriation, in which the degree of the development of individual affective capacities-intellectual, organizational, emotional, etc.-coincides with the degree of their appropriation by capital. This economico-affective appropriation, further, finds its culmination in contemporary informatized capitalism through an exploitation of surplus (i.e., unpaid) labor, accompanied by the techno-utopian fantasy that our activities are not labor but a creative play toward the maximization of our capacities.

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