Reification: Or The Anxiety of Late CapitalismOf all the concepts which have emerged to describe the effects of capitalism on the human world, none is more graphic or easily grasped than “reification”—the process by which men and women are turned into objects, things. Arising out of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, the concept of reification offers an unrivalled tool with which to explain the real consequences of the power of capital on consciousness itself. Symptoms of reification are proliferating around us—from the branding of goods and services to racial and sexual stereotypes, all forms of religious faith, the growth of nationalism, and recent concepts like “spin” and “globalization.” At such a time, the term ought to enjoy greater critical currency than ever. Recent thinkers, however, have expressed deep reservations about the concept, and the term has become marginalized in the humanities and social societies. Eschewing this trend, Timothy Bewes opens up a new formulation of the concept, claiming that, in the highly reflective age of “late capitalism,” reification is best understood as a form of social and cultural anxiety: further, that such an understanding returns the concept to its origins in the work of Georg Lukács. Drawing upon writers including Kierkegaard, Herman Melville, Proust and Flannery O’Connor, he outlines a theory of reification which promises to unite politics with truth, art with experience, and philosophy with real life. |
Contents
PART | 1 |
From Adorno to Jameson | 20 |
The Translation of God into | 41 |
Marxism and the Hidden | 48 |
Poststructuralism and the Absent | 57 |
Reification and Decolonization | 69 |
Reading Fanon | 81 |
PART | 90 |
The Desire for Transcendence | 143 |
Comment on Proust | 148 |
Hierarchy of Mediation and Immediacy | 153 |
The Virtue of Obsolescence | 166 |
PART THREE Redemption | 179 |
The Pleasure Tendency | 181 |
Reification as Cultural Anxiety | 191 |
On Reversibility | 201 |
Inversion | 91 |
The Reflexive Character of Reification | 93 |
The Triumph of Capital | 99 |
The Aesthetic Structure of Reification | 107 |
Anxiety Reified as Différance | 111 |
Anxiety Reified as Risk | 118 |
The Aesthetics of Incomprehensibility | 124 |
Ambiguity and Utopia | 130 |
Analogy of Religious and Commodity Fetishism | 134 |
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Common terms and phrases
absolute abstraction Adorno alienation anxiety towards reification appears artwork Baudrillard Beck become bourgeois capitalist Christianity Class Consciousness commodity Concept of Anxiety concept of reification critical culture deconstruction dialectical thought essay ethical existence Fanon fetishism Flannery O'Connor Frantz Fanon Fredric Jameson Georg Lukács Gillian Rose Goldmann Harmondsworth Hegel Hidden History and Class human Ibid idea ideological immediacy implication Jacques Derrida Jameson Kafka late capitalism liberation logic London Lucien Goldmann Marx Marxist meaning mediation metaphysical non-reified opposition paradoxical Penguin philosophy Pleasure Tendency Political Unconscious possibility post-structuralism presupposes production proletariat Proust radical Rayber reality redemption reflexive modernization reified consciousness relation religion religious reversibility revolutionary says secular Simmel Slavoj Žižek social society Søren Kierkegaard spirit Spivak structure subject and object Tarwater Theodor Theodor W theory of reification thing tion total reification trans transcendence truth University Press Utopia Verso violence Violent Bear worldly writes Žižek