Moishe Postone and the Essay as Form

Abstract

The essay at hand briefly sketches out the relation of Moishe’s major work Time, Labor and Social Domination to a philosophical development with which, as critical theory, it is inherently allied: the work of Theodor Adorno, as it is paradigmatically given in the “essay as form,” here a phrase apostrophizing Adorno’s way of proceeding altogether, not strictly citing the much studied eponymous essay. Although Moishe’s study means to be and is dialectical reflection, it nevertheless seeks univocality. And in pursuing this tack, in holding the compass straight and repudiating divagation, as a form of categorial analysis, it differentiates itself decisively from the essay as form by rejecting immanent criticism. Yet, even as we recognize the extent of the mutual exclusivity of the essay as form as immanent criticism and a systematic categorial analysis of totality, this antipathy is not to be understood as obligatorily unproductive. Pursued, it might well have implications for the release of all that is bound up as a hybrid in the phrase “traditional Marxism,” extricating the historical experience and even the words Marxism,” extricating the historical experience and even the words lodged within it from scare quotes, without endangering the systematic insight of the mature Marx that Moishe rightly wanted to discern and elucidate.