Capitalist Death Drives and Coin Test China High-Speed Rail Videos

Publication series Das Neue Alphabet (The New Alphabet), Volume 15
Text and images: Ho Rui An
Editor: Anselm Franke
Publisher: Spector Books, Leipzig
84 pages, German and English edition
color illustrations, paperback with folded dust cover
ISBN DE: 978-3-95905-590-1
ISBN EN: 978-3-95905-591-8
Price: 10 €

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What does it mean to claim crisis in a time when capitalism has entered its late, self-destructive phase? The volume Capitalist Death Drives and Coin Test China High-Speed Rail Videos discusses how claims to crisis produce figures whose contingent appearances upon the scene make observable the discontents of capitalism while foreclosing the ways the system’s abstract violence can be approached. Situating its inquiry against the contemporary contexts of global finance and China’s economic rise, the essay pays special attention to the figuration of the Chinese foreign investor as a racialized embodiment of the volatile abstractions specific to money capital, or what is imagined as “actually” alienating capital. Yet, as demonstrated by the narrative that begins with a devastating collision as captured by a dashboard camera in Singapore and ends with a view as seen from China’s high-speed rail system, crisis also creates conditions for refiguring the Chinese state as capitalism's stabilizing force, not least one that appears to emerge at history’s very end.