On Creatively Destructing

What is it about?

Capitalism—as Marx has shown and Schumpeter has reminded us—has always promoted creative destruction practices. What in fact helps capitalism survive is the constant renewal of its products, modes of production, and needs through its own self-destructiveness. Capitalism’s destructiveness gains its “literal meaning” in real space—interestingly involving biological metaphors into its analysis. At the antipode of capitalist creative destructions stands again a destructive practice, vandalism.

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Why is it important?

To understand and identify the different conceptions of destruction and the relatively recent concept of “creative destruction”—and to describe the ways in which the latter shrugs off destructions that are not considered to be linked with creation—has acquired increasing urgency (economic crises like ours, which are themselves states of urgency, have always been characterized by an excess of destructiveness).