Dirk Braunstein
Biographical Note
Readership
This book is immediately relevant to philosophers, critical theorists, intellectual historians and other scholars (and students) who research Adorno or draw on his work in other ways.
Table of Contents
Translator’s Note ix
Acknowledgements x
1 Attempting a Critique of Political Economy 1
part 1
2 The Most Important Marxist Publication on Hegel 9
1 The Universal Category of Society as a Whole 9
2 The Reflexive Form of False Objectivity 14
3 My Ramshackle Luxury Hotel 19
3 Objection to the Intérieur and the Sociology of Interiority 30
1 A World that Comes into Focus as a Mere Commodity 30
2 The Historical Figure of the Commodity 35
3 To Speed Up the Completion 42
4 Masochism 51
5 Arcades Orthodoxy 57
6 So’n-Rätsel (Such-a-Riddle) 61
4 Familiarity with Its First Chapter 71
1 A Music That Has Become Incomprehensible 71
2 Torn Away from All Functions 78
3 Pure Use-Value 93
4 Blank Spaces in the Mediation 97
part 2
5 The Theoretically Useless Concept of State Capitalism 109
1 The Present State of Affairs in Our Soviet Republic 109
2 Mere Problems of Administration 115
3 The Last Stage Offered by Bourgeois Society 122
4 An Inversion of Kafka 127
6 Hatched a National-Economic (!!) Theory 138
1 What Has Become of the Proletariat? 138
2 Now They Are United 144
3 Handout 148
4 As in Myth 150
7 Humanity Had to Inflict Terrible Injuries on Itself 158
1 A Provisional Close 158
2 The Magic Schema of Rational Exchange 162
3 Ruled by Equivalence 168
4 No Shepherd 177
5 The Authors Have Not Mastered This Dilemma 190
8 Garbage 194
1 Not a Single Missing Link 194
2 No Happiness without Fetishism 202
3 What Is Deceptive about Dialogue 210
9 The Curse of Writing Today 220
1 Everything Is Quite Simple 220
2 That Quite Interesting Critique by H. and A. 223
3 A Strictly Leninist Manifesto 231
part 3
10 ?? Did He Read Marx? 239
1 Priority of Economy or Society 239
2 ultima philosophia 250
11 Eating and Being Eaten 257
1 The Moment 257
2 A Being for the Other 265
3 The Usefulness of a Thing 272
4 Metabolism 277
5 Total Mediation 287
12 Point of Indifference 293
1 A Gap 293
2 The Truth of the Expansion 299
3 Surplus-Value Continues to Be Appropriated 302
4 The Service of Abstraction 312
13 Something’s Missing 319
1 Actually This Has Always Been Possible 319
2 Paradise with Its Bloody Hands 326
3 Moved to Different Places 332
4 Realisation Alone Would Transcend Exchange 336
5 This Core 347
14 Raison d’être 350
Bibliography 355
Afterword to the Second Edition 399
Index 401