What becomes of life, experience, and truth in the hyperconsumeristic culture of the twenty-first century? What happens to the phenomenological call to go “back to the things themselves” when these things, to an ever greater degree, involve a televised life that is not ours to live, celebrities who are utterly like us yet infinitely untouchable, and uncannily pluripotent electronic gadgets? Combining sustained philosophical inquiry with fragmentary and experimental theoretical interventions, Anthony Curtis Adler rethinks Marxist materialism and the Heideggerian project in terms of the singular experiences of late capitalism. In doing so, he reveals how the disarticulation of life via the commodity fetish demands at once a new notion of phenomenological method and an ontology oriented toward the radical contingency of being itself as transcendental ground.
- Cover
- Half-Title
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Exordium
- Introduction
- PART I
- 1 The phenomenology of television
- 2 The life not ours to live
- 3 The celebrity and the nobody
- 4 Being(s)
- 5 The life of things
- 6 Ideology and truth
- 7 The truth of the commodity
- 8 Value, publicity, politics
- 9 Reproduction
- 10 The gadget
- 11 To the things themselves
- PART II
- 12 Methods
- Concepts of criticism; Language is the . . . of being
- Satanic laughter
- Techniques of writing
- Vita contemplativa
- The raccoon trap
- 13 Celebrity
- Epic form
- Celebrity and singularity
- Innocence Of celebricity, or: toward a phenomenology of Madonna
- The strange celebrity
- The Uncandy
- Candy Candy
- What percentage of the American population are celebrities?
- Specters of Spector
- Excrement and enterprise
- The dissociating pleasure of things
- Abstract pleasures
- Experiences
- The theory of suffering
- Advertising
- The next top model
- Television and celebrity
- Politics and humor
- The visionary
- Things
- Listening to Radiohead for the first time, 17 years too late
- 14 Television/Gadget
- It’s bicycle repairman . . .
- Dialectica gizmotica
- The Trojan horse
- The personal computer
- Terror-vision
- The Joker
- Gigi
- Nip/Tuck
- The Following
- The Ring
- House
- Disjecta membra Dexteri
- Boogie Nights
- Man or Muppet
- The sweatshops of Hollywood
- Muppetation and mediation
- Demectomy
- Action figures
- Liberal Arts
- Glee
- Bunheads
- Breaking Bad/Elective Affinities
- Epilogue: How I met my mother (French Theory, by François Cusset)
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Videography
- Index
- Acknowledgments
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