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Abstract
The article addresses how Immanuel Kant, Theodor Adorno, and Alain Badiou can come surprisingly close, provided we invoke Marx's value form at the centre of commodity exchange. We will argue for a complementary elaboration to the ‘capitalist schematisation' (Christian Lotz via Alfred Sohn-Rethel), while at the same time probing into the material basis of Badiou's transcendental organization—investigating whether the transcendental regime of appearing is always already a product of a determinate mode of production. We will be guided by two premises: (1) The pure conceptual unfolding understood as an inner-logical consequently produces the non-conceptual, an external result, immanent to such unfolding, hence real abstraction, which retroactively imposes itself on understanding as a conceptual abstraction. (2) The inversion of objective/subjective into objective-subjective synthesis, which is both real and social. Overall, the article seeks to scrutinize an alternative social synthesis through a Badiou-inspired reconstruction of Marx’s value form and posed as a potential category of social synthesis that entails the real abstraction, namely money with commodities, alongside the object labour in a single, unified structure.
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Notes
1 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Geistige Und Körperliche Arbeit: Zur Epistemologie Der Abendländischen Geschichte (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1989), pp. 221–226.
2 Theodor Adorno, ‘Theodor W. Adorno on “Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory”', transl. Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson and Chris O’Kane, Historical Materialism, 26:1 (2018), pp. 154–164.
3 We rely here on an assessment of Marx's value form brought forward by Rado Riha, ‘Badiou, Marx, and an Analysis of the Value-Form', Filozofski Vestnik, 38:1 (2017), pp. 153–169.
4 Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p. 5.
5 Hegel expounds on the concept of the supersensible in his Phenomenology of Spirit where he writes: ‘The supersensible is the sensuous and the perceived posited as they are in truth. However, the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearance. The supersensible is therefore appearance as appearance. – However much it is thought that the supersensible is therefore the sensuous world, or the world as it is for immediate sensuous-certainty and perception, still this is an inverted understanding of the supersensible, for appearance is instead not the world of sensuous knowing and perceiving as an existing world. It is rather that world posited as sublated, or posited in truth as the inner. It is commonly said that the supersensible is not appearance; but “appearance” there is not understood to be appearance but rather to be the sensuous world as being itself real actuality.' For more on supersensible see Georg W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018 [1807]), p. 88.
6 See also Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings, transl. Zawar Hanfi (London: Verso, 2014), p. 210.
7 On Badiou's theory of object see Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, Being and Event Volume II, transl. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 193–295.
8 Hans-Georg Backhaus, ‘On the Dialectics of the Value-Form', Thesis Eleven, 1:1 (1980), p. 109.
9 Recent works on real abstraction include: Werner Bonefeld, ‘Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Economic Objectivity', History of the Human Sciences, 29:2 (2016), pp. 60–76; Christian Lotz, The Capitalist Schema : Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction (London: Lexington books, 2014); Mauro Ponzi, Karl Marx e La Crisi (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2017); Antonio Oliva et al., Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory the Philosophy of Real Abstraction, 1st ed, edited by Antonio Oliva, Ángel Oliva, and Iván Novara (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020).
10 Anselm Jappe, ‘Sohn-Rethel and the Origin of ‘Real Abstraction’: A Critique of Production or a Critique of Circulation?' Historical Materialism, 21:1 (2013), p. 14.
11 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Warenform und Denkform (Frankfurt: Europäische Veragsanstalt, 1971), p. 121.
12 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, transl. Martin Sohn-Rethel (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 17.
13 Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, op. cit., p. 28.
14 Ibid., p. 61.
15 Ibid., p. 57.
16 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), p. 12.
17 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Concept of “Critique” and the “Critique of Political Economy”', in: Ali Rattansi (ed), Ideology, Method and Marx: Essays from Economy And Society (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 113.
18 Ibid, p. 114.
19 Ibid, p. 123.
20 Rancière’s referring to the structure with an absent cause is a concept borrowed from J. Lacan and J.A. Miller’s metonymic causation and a concept also used by L. Althusser, reconceptualised in structural causality. For more see Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Action of the Structure’, transl. Christian Kerslake, revised by Peter Hallward, in: Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (eds), Concept and Form, Volume 1: Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (London: Verso, 2012).
21 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie : zur Einleitung, Volume 2 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1973).
22 Christian Lotz, ‘Capitalist Schematization. Political Economy, Exchange, and Objecthood in Adorno', Zeitschrift Für Kritische Theorie, 36/37 (2013), pp. 116–117.
23 Hans-Georg Backhaus, Dialektik der Wertform: Untersuchungen zur Marxschen Ökonomiekritik. 2. Auflage, (Freiburg i. Br. : Ca ira, 2011), p. 436.
24 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 178.
25 Ibid., pp. 354–355.
26 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 [1968]), p. 32.
27 Sohn-Rethel, Geistige Und Körperliche Arbeit, op. cit., p. 21, our translation.
28 Ibid., pp. 42–43.
29 Ibid., p. 68.
30 We will retain all mathematical formulae in notes, except where explicitly needed. For a complete reconstruction of Marx's value form in a Badiouian framework, see Uros Kranjc, ‘Logic(s) of the Value Form - Marx With Badiou', Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 14:3 (2018), pp. 72–102.
31 In mathematics, this is called isomorphism: a structure preserving mapping, or conversely, retaining all identities and differences between the two objects, in our case, between commodities as indifferent objects.
32 The arrow ↪ denoting an inclusion mapping of one object (commodity) to a many-counted-as-one object (the universe of commodities) B – the existence of many subobjects.
33 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, transl. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990 [1867]), p. 128.
34 Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital, transl. Alexander Locascio (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), p. 50.
35 Badiou relies on category theory diagrams and algebra to set theoretical grounds for his phenomenological project. For more see Alain Badiou, Mathematics of the Transcendental, ed. and transl. A. J. Bartlett and Alex Ling (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).
36 In mathematics (category theory) this object is known as subobject classifier or a truth-value object.
37 This object can obey various algebras, from minimal Boolean (0,1) to Heyting algebras and beyond, which Badiou fruitfully deploys for his ontological and phenomenological variants.
38 With the notable exceptions of K. Karatani and L. Colletti.
39 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy', in: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 29, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010 [1859]), p. 263.
40 Alberto Toscano, ‘From the State to the World? Badiou and Anti-Capitalism', Communication & Cognition, 37:3–4 (2004), pp. 99–223. Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), pp. 108–128.
41 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op.cit., p. 240.
42 Ibid., p. 241.
43 Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, op. cit., p. xiii. See also p. 7.
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Uroš Kranjc
Uroš Kranjc is Research Associate at the Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU (Slovenia) and a former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of York. His research has been recently published in Critical Horizons, Cosmos and History, Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review. Email: [email protected]