The Chemical Theory of Phlogiston in the Cultural Economy of Fire: From the Enlightenment to Contemporary Times
Keywords:
Phlogiston, fire, economics, surplus value, pyropolitics, geophilosophy, PyroGaia
Abstract
The article focuses on how the chemical concept of phlogiston functions in the so-called economy of fire from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, in view of a shift in “pyropolitics” (politics of fire) in their relation to the economic paradigms (cameralism, industrial capitalism, postindustrial digital economy), and theories of chemical flame processes (phlogistics, oxygen theory,theory of detonation and deflagration). The phlogiston concept is explored as the key substantial notion of the phlogictic chemical theory of the Enlightenment (regarded also as a natural “cameralistic science” in terms of metallurgy), the epistemological metaphor of ignorance in nineteenth-century Marxist discourse. Phlogiston circulates in the economics of fire discourse as a signifier for surplus value (and some other Marxist terms). “Fire as equivalent to money” becomes, in petropolitical studies, a means for turning petropolitics into pyropolitics with the radical metaphor of “PyroGaia” (Nigel Clark) in the Anthropocene period.
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Bachelard, Gaston (1987). Psychoanalysis of Fire. Boston: Beacon Press.
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Becher, Johann (1661). Natur-Kündigung der Metallen. Frankfurt am Main: Johann Wilhelm Ammon und Wilhelm Serlin.
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Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (2004). The Idiot. London: Penguin Books.
Engels, Friedrich (1907). “Preface.” In Capital, vol II, by Karl Marx. Chicago: C. H. Kerr. Engels, Friedrich (1973). “Zur Wohnungsfrage.” In Werke, vol. 18.5, by Friedrich Engels
and Karl Marx. Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag.
Engels, Friedrich (1977). Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Etkind, Aleksander (2020). Priroda zla. Syrye i gosudarstvo [The nature of evil. Raw material and state]. Мoscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye.
Etkind, Aleksander, and Mark Lipovetskiy (2008). ). “Vozvrashcheniye tritona: sovets- kaya katastrofa i postsovetskiy roman” [The return of the newt: Soviet catastrophe and the post-Soviet novel]. Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye [New literary review]. https://magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2008/6/mark-lipoveczkij-8212-aleksandr-etkind-vozvrashhenie-tritona-sovetskaya-katastrofa-i-postsovetskij-roman.html
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Haraway, Donna (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Heckscher, Eli (1931). Mercantilismen. Stockholm: Norstedt.
Heraclitus (2001). Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus. New York: Penguin Group.
Justi, Johann (1760). Die Natur und das Wesen der Staaten. Berlin: Verlag Johann Heinrich Rüdigers.
Justi, Johann (1761). Chymische Schriften, vol. 2. Berlin: Verlag des Buchladens der Real-Schule.
Justi, Johann (1965). Die Grundfeste zu Macht und Glückseligkeit der Staaten. 2 Vol. Aalen: Scienzia-Verlag.
Kuhn, Thomas (2017). Posle “Struktury nauchnykh revolutsiy” [After “The structure of scientific revolutions”]. Moscow: AST—Neoclassic.
Lacan, Jacques (2007). The Seminar, Book XVII. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Lamarck, Jean (1799). ). “Mémoire sur la matiere du feu, considere comme un instrument chimique dans les analyses.” Journal de Physique 5: 345–61.
Lavoisier, Antoine (1783). Réflexions sur le phlogistique, pour servir de développement à la théorie de la combustion & de la calcination. Paris: Académie des sciences.
Lavoisier, Antoine (1789). Traité élémentaire de chimie. Paris: Académie des sciences. Lavoisier, Antoine (1804). “Lyubopytnaya vypiska iz khimii g-na Lavuazye: o svoystvakh tvyordykh, zhidkikh i gazoobraznykh veshchestv” [A curious exceprt from M. Lavoisier’s Chemistry: On the properties of solid, liquid and gaseous substances]. Vestnik Evropy 21.18: 41–55.
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Magun, Artemy (2008). Otritsatel’naya revolyutsiya: k dekonsruktsii politicheskogo su- byekta [Negative revolution: Toward a deconstruction of the political subject]. St Petersburg: European University of St Petersburg.
Marder, Michael (2015). Pyropolitics: When the World is Ablaze. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.
Marx, Karl (1887). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. London: Swan Sonnenschein.
Moore, Jason (2016). Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. New York: Verso.
Nadtochiy, Eduard (2010). “Sovetskiy kameralizm” [Soviet cameralism]. Livejournal. https://farma_sohn.livejournal.com/518438.html.
Raskov, Danila (2020). “Kameralizm knig: perevody Yusti v Rossii XVIII veka” [The cameralism of books: Justi’s translations in XVIII-century Russia]. In: Ekonomi- cheskiye teorii v prostranstve i vremeni [Economic Theories in Space and Time]. Ed. V. Avtonomov, A. Rubinshteyn. St Petersburg: Aletheia.
Rogachevskaya, Maya (2014). ).“Kameralizm knig: perevody Yusti v Rossii XVIII veka” The economic views of M. V. Lomonosov, successor to the ideas of I. T. Pososhkov]. Istoriko-ekonomicheskiye issledovaniya [Historical and economic research] 1.15: 82–100.
Shatalkin, Anatoliy (2009). “Filosofiya zoologii” Zhana Batista Lamarka: vzglyad iz XXI veka [Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Philosophy of Zoology: A look from the XXI cen- tury]. Мoscow: Tovarishchestvo nauchnykh izdaniy KMK.
Small, Albion (1909). The Cameralists: The Pioneers of German Social Polity. Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books.
Stahl, Georg (1707). Theoria medica vera. Physiologiam & Pathologiam, tanquam doc- trinae medicae partes. Halae: Literis Orphanotrophei.
Timofeeva, Oxana (2019). “Dobyvayushchaya ontologiya i abstraktnaya promyshlen- nost: tri mashiny voyny” [Exracting ontology and abstract industry: Three war machines]. Neprikosnovennyy zapas [Emergency ration] 126: 280–93.
Timofeeva, Oxana (2020). “From the Quarantine to the General Strike: On Bataille’s Political Economy.” Stasis 9.1: 144–65.
Trotsky, Lev (1927). “D. I. Mendeleev i Marksizm. (Doklad Chetvertomu Mendeleevs- komu s’ezdu po chistoy i prikladnoy khimii 17 sentyabrya 1925 goda)” [D. I. Mendeleev and Marxism. (A talk given to the fourth Mendeleev Congress on Pure and Applied Chemistry on September 17, 1925]. In: Sochineniya [Writings], vol. 21. Moscow: Gosizdat.
Vizgin, Viktor. Epistemologiya Gastona Bashlyara i istoriya nauki [The epistemology of Gaston Bachelard and the history of science]. Moscow: IF RAN.
Wakefield, Andre (2009). The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Zeldovich, Yakov.“Teoriya goreniya i detonatsii gazov” [The theory of combustion and detonation of gasses]. In Izbrannyy trudy [Selected works], book I. Moscow: Nauka.
Žižek, Slavoj (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso Books.
Published
2021-07-29
How to Cite
Kirillova, O. (2021). The Chemical Theory of Phlogiston in the Cultural Economy of Fire: From the Enlightenment to Contemporary Times. Stasis, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-21-11-1-75-111
Section
Thematic Articles
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