Reconstructing the Marxian inspirations means entering into
the ghostly history of concepts which – as a force that has become a state, a
spirit that has become technique, and as all intertwining money – are sucking
at the life of individuals more than ever before. Without a doubt, Marx’s future theoretical
fame will be linked to his achievements as the conjurer of dead labor. The core
of his critique of political economy is necromancy: as the hero who descends to
the realm of the dead to contend with the shadows of values, Marx remains
uncannily relevant also for the present.
The undead – which walks among humans as the value of money
and which, as a laughing communicator, strips the living of time and souls –rules
advanced societies today almost without pretext. Work, communication, art, and love
belong now here entirely to the endgame of money. These form the substance of
contemporary media and experiential time. And because money requires time for
its utilization, so-called great history is also continuing in some eerie way;
it is a game that is always played for extra time. Yet such history is no
longer the conversation of the living with the dead about the goodness of the
world, but the ever more thorough pervasion of the living by the the specter of
the Economy.
The money soul peers ever more undisguised out of the human
subjectivity of our time: a society of bought buyers and of prostituted
prostitutes is making an ever wider and comprehensive place for itself across
the globe. Classic liberal laissez-faire is becoming explicit as the postmodern
sucking and letting oneself be sucked. Telecommunications is increasingly
difficult to distinguished from tele-vampirism. Tele-viewers and tele-suckers
draw from a liquefied world which hardly knows what a resistant or autonomous
life might be.
Is it not possible that a time is coming when those who do
not wish to speak of vampirism should also be silent about philosophy? If that is
the case, it would most definitely be the time of Marx’s second chance.
From Philosophical
Temperaments; From Plato to Foucault.;
Columbia University Press, 2013
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