Reification, Mourning, and the Aesthetic in Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale

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.