Autorentext

Samir Gandesha is an Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He is co-editor with Lars Rensmann of Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford, 2012) and has published articles in several collected volumes, as well as in journals such as New German Critique, Thesis Eleven, Political Theory, The European Legacy, and the European Journal of Social Theory.
Johan Hartle is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), leader of the Research cluster Globalization and Aesthetics at the Amsterdam Centre for Globalization Studies (ACGS) and Adjunct Professor for Aesthetics at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China. He was visiting research fellow at Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre for German Jewish Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem and Humboldt Research Fellow at the Universitá Roma Tre.

Klappentext

This book explores the tradition, impact, and contemporary relevance of two key ideas from Western Marxism: Georg Lukács's concept of reification, in which social aspects of humanity are viewed in objectified terms, and Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle, where the world is packaged and presented to consumers in uniquely mediated ways. Bringing the original, yet now often forgotten, theoretical contexts for these terms back to the fore, Johan Hartle and Samir Gandesha offer a new look at the importance of Western Marxism from its early days to the present moment-and reveal why Marxist cultural critique must continue to play a vital role in any serious sociological analysis of contemporary society.

Inhalt

Introduction: Reification and Spectacle: The Timeliness of Western Marxism, 1. Reification as Structural Depoliticization: The Political Ontology of Lukács and Debord, 2. 'Reification' Between Autonomy and Authenticity: Adorno On Musical Experience, 3. 'All reification is a forgetting' - Benjamin, Adorno, and the Dialectic of Reification, 4. Utopian Interiors: The Art of Situationist Urbanism from Reification to Play, 5. 'The Brilliance of Invisibility': Tracking the Body in the Society of the Spectacle, 6. Art Criticism in the Society of the Spectacle: The Case of October, 7. Spectacle and Politics: Is There a Political Reality in the Spectacle of Society?, 8. Reification, Sexual Objectification, and Feminist Activism, 9. Reified Life: Vitalism, Environmentalism, and Reification in Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle and A Sick Planet, 10. Images of Capital: An Interview with Zachary Formwalt