Abstract
Theodor Adorno once famously opined that philosophy continues to exist because the moment for its abolition was missed.1 In an ironic parallel, the same might be said of Marxist literary and cultural theory. It continues because the moment for its abolition was missed, when the old mole of history decided to assert itself instead of subsiding into the hibernation predicted in the famous post-1989 edict of Francis Fukuyama: the end of history.2 Instead of the steady-state, stable capitalist societies envisioned by Fukuyama, we have witnessed the near-collapse of the global capitalist financial infrastructure with resulting social and political turmoil, including the revival of anti-immigrant and anti-Keynesian forces, and the imposition of austerity and no-end-in-sight high unemployment in both Europe and the United States. This is on top of a slightly older resistance to capitalist globalization manifested in the various religious fundamentalisms and other political movements of our time. And even more recently and unexpectedly, something like both 1848 and 1989 seems to have occurred again in the Middle East.
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Notes
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1983), p. 3.
Francis Fukuyama, The End ofHistory and the Last Man (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992).
Schmitt’s linking of the aesthetic and Enlightenment liberalism—using, it should be noted, a somewhat truncated notion of the aesthetic—occurs at several points in Schmitt’s writings, but is centrally discussed within a 1929 essay, Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” trans. Matthias Konzett and John P. McCormick, Telos, 96 (1993): 130–42. In perhaps covert form, it is an issue in his recently translated 1956 discussion of Hamlet; Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time into the Play, trans. David Pan and Jennifer Fust (New York: Telos Press, 2009). For an excellent, clarifying analysis of how this notion fits into Schmitt’s right-wing critique of nineteenth-century liberalism—and one that is also critical of Schmitt’s chronology of the aesthetic—see Victoria Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision,” Representations, 83 (Summer 2003): 76–96. For a related argument along these lines in addition to Kahn, see Christopher Pye, “Against Schmitt: Law, Aesthetics, and Absolutism in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 108.1 (2009): 197–217.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International, 1967), p. 830; a translation that, however, does not use the term “reification” in its rendering of the German Verdinglichung, but the phrase “the conversion of social relations into things.” On Marx’s usage and the subsequent usage in the later Marxist tradition, see “reification,” A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1967). For a cogent analysis of Kott’s borrowings from Lukács on reification, see Madalina Nicolaescu, “Kott in the East,” in Great Shakespeareans: Volume 13: Empson, Wilson Knight, Barber, and Kott, ed. Hugh Grady (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 131–53.
I developed the connection of Foucault to Lukács’ notion of reification and related theories in Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 47–51.
Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from “Richard II” to “Hamlet” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Hugh Grady, “The End of Shakespeare’s Machiavellian Moment: Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s Historiography, and Dramatic Form,” in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories: Anglo-Italian Transactions, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 119–36.
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edn., ed. Steven Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2008), 2.7, pp. 70–77. All subsequent quotations from Shakespeare are from the same edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
G. Wilson Knight, Thelmperial Theme: Furtherinterpretations ofShakespeare’s Tragedies (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1931), pp. 199–262.
Philippe Aries, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 56–8.
Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 193–224.
Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” in Richard Ellman and Robert O’Clair, eds., Modern Poems: A Norton Introduction, 2nd edn. (New York: Norton: 1989), pp. 150–53; V: 3–13.
Hanna Segal, “A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics,” in her The Work of Hanna Segal: A Kleinian Approach to Clinical Practice (New York: Jason Aronson, 1981), pp. 185–206.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); for a summary of these themes, see Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, pp. 22–35.
Ernst Bloch, “Happy End, Seen Through & Yet Still Defended,” in his The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 441–7. My thanks to Kiernan Ryan for his help in locating this citation.
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Grady, H. (2013). Reification, Mourning, and the Aesthetic in Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale . In: DiPietro, C., Grady, H. (eds) Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137017314_9
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