Response to Paul Apostolidis’s review of The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism

We are pleased that the limitations that Paul Apostolidis finds in The Politics of Operations work at the level of metaphors rather than concepts. As Emile Benveniste (Problems in General Linguistics, 1971, p. 25) writes, metaphors are “a powerful factor in the enriching of concepts.” We intend the metaphor of “capital hitting the ground” as a means of enriching our concept of “operations of capital” or, at least, as a way of dramatizing one of its important moments—capital’s grappling with and enmeshment in “dense constellations of flesh and earth” (p. 3).