We are excited to reissue Jaleh Mansoor’s “Notes on Militant Folds,” which has been previously available in print and has appeared in a slightly different form under the title “Triode to Resistor: Notes on Militant Folds” on the now defunct magazine platform Cladius App. “Notes” is a critique of the Tiqqun essay “Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl” as well as biting criticism of Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern’s review “Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Man-Child.”
If you would excuse the anachronism of the example, we feel that Mansoor treats Jeune-Fille precisely as the “The Woman Question” was treated over a century ago. As such, the question of the young-girl demands to be understood as a problem. Mansoor is not willing to fall for the deceptively alluring feminism of equivalence, which eagerly embraces the fetishized object of the Jeune-Fille in a vain attempt to restore symmetry. Correspondingly, she refuses certain abolitionist’s call for the young-girl’s sacrifice at the altar of a greater cause, a demand put forth by only those who blame the feminized subject rather that the situation that entraps her. We anticipate our readers appreciating the updates made by the author to clarify and extend the trans-feminist critique of biological determinism as it impacts the theories of social reproduction essential to Marxism. In the end, Mansoor presents a new set of militant folds based on turning the mechanism of self-estrangement that produce the young-girl against themselves.
Endlessly exposed, isolated, objectified, punished, fetishized, the Jeune Fille stands for the universal prostitution of the human in the interest of objectified profit. She is the fold where “crisis” opens onto everything capitalism withheld and withholds still, which ostensibly would include intimacy, proximity, community. The fold is inclusive of the negative remainder that capitalism has not fully penetrated and replicated in its own logic: filiation, the last traces of that mysterious thing Marx called “species being,” creaturely warmth mixed with “emotional” suffering, that irreducible nexus of potential- within-attachment that gets called love.