(2002). Theorizing the 'Third Sphere': A Critique of the Persistence of the 'Economistic Fallacy' Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 1045-1078.

This essay offers a critical review of the 51st Venice Biennial (12 June–6 November 2005), situating it in the context of the recent history of the Venice Biennial. The review identifies a dual institutional structure (national pavilions and international survey shows) in the Venice Biennial, and argues that this constitutes a “transitional conjuncture” overdetermined by the radicalization and pluralization of art practices (performances, site-specific installations, etc.), the privatization of art funding in the form of corporate sponsorship, and the global proliferation and consolidation of the institutional form of the biennial—biannual survey exhibitions of transnational art practices. The review argues that, while a number of artists and curators have succeeded in the past and in this year's edition in producing self-reflective and acutely critical art works in relation to the older structure of the Venice Biennial where art was displayed and appropriated in national pavilions, the two survey exhibitions of the 2005 edition (curated by Rosa Martínez and María de Corral) have failed to reflect critically upon the new, corporate-sponsored institutional form of the biennial that the Venice Biennial is moving toward.

In recent years a growing literature on biopolitical governmentality, prompted by the work of Michel Foucault, presents subjectivity as the decisive locus of both the rule of neoliberal capitalism and the production of the common. While sharing its central focus of subjectivity, we are concerned with what this literature leaves out (due to what we discern to be certain implicit tendencies of behaviorism): the constitutive role that subjective investments and “enjoyment” (jouissance) play in the crisis-ridden formations of capitalism and in the constructive turns to communism. We proceed from the premise that there is no balanced relation to jouissance and that class antagonism is irreducible. From this perspective, we propose to approach capitalist and communist subjectivities in terms of two different “forms of the commune”: that is, as two distinct subjective orientations toward enjoying the impossibility of instituting the common once and for all.