This essay was written with the support of The Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry

Anthony Adler’s new book Celebricities celebrates theory.  However, the exuberant celebration that constitutes the book’s experimental second half also treats its celebrations as untimely. Indeed, in the penultimate chapter, Adler describes the experience of having been too late:

Two days ago, 17 years too late, I heard Radiohead for the first time as Radiohead. For the first time I understood what should have been, had I been “with it,” the musical accompaniment of my young adulthood. And suddenly I also recalled the heading that I saw in a music magazine many years ago.  “In order to save rock they had to destroy it.” I could even hear a bit of my own soul in them. (174)

If Celebricities recognizes its disjointedness and alienation from the theoretical milieu it nonetheless wants to address, then Radiohead figures the lateness that suffuses the text. Adler’s delay in the recognizing Radiohead “as” Radiohead suggests that in order for the band to appear as itself – that is, in its disjointedness – it always had to arrive too late. Adler’s belated recognition suddenly triggers another piece of the past: a music magazine headline: “In order to save rock they had to destroy it.”  Imagine a Rolling Stone cover from the late 90s when O.K. Computer catapulted the band and the frenetic Alt-Rock genre into the mainstream. Adler does not identify that album, and yet, its title touches upon the stakes of Celebricities and, indeed, its lateness. The recognition that Radiohead saved rock and roll by “destroying” it is bound up in the band’s self-conscious use of technology, synthesizers, voice distortion, and computers on the level of both sound and figure. Young adulthood returns to Adler as that “bit of my own soul” struck out in crunchy guitar riffs, drum kit breaks, and electronic interferences that tear to pieces the symphonic orchestrations that underlie the otherwise riven, frantic melodies.  Part of what Adler hears, then, in the lateness of Radiohead “as” Radiohead is the way in which their music collects and recollects the fracturing and dissociating effects of technology. This is also the lateness of Adler’s text.  He saves theory by attending to the proliferation of technological prostheses that seem to have “destroyed,” fractured, and redoubled its phenomenological interventions. To put it another way, he resurrects theory by mourning its untimely passing. Just as Adler only hears Radiohead “as” Radiohead 17 years after the fact, Celebricities negotiates the difficult terrain of reading theory “as” theory; that is, reading it even as it appears fractured, late, and, already past.

In this way, Celebricities mourns for theory by calling attention to the ways television and gadgets have disrupted and ruptured its phenomenological insights. Like television, the theoretical gestures of continental philosophy appear in the text, but recede from grasp in ways that redouble their allure.  Adler, a self-professed “late-born theorist,” a theorist who arrived “after theory” (perhaps even 17 years too late), hears in the theoretical tradition associated with continental philosophy a mode of thinking that he simultaneously longs for and remains removed from (214). Indeed, Celebricities, like Radiohead, tries to make sense of the “lost gestures of those that came before,” by mourning these gestures in order to “come of age trying to recover from this loss” (174).  Although Adler is referring here to Radiohead’s relationship with rock and roll, his formulation describes precisely the ways in which his own text comes of age through a concerted effort to recover from the loss of a theory as theory.

If Radiohead arrives late in the text, then so too does Adler’s most explicit work of mourning.  In the last section, Adler refers obliquely to Jacques Derrida whose appearance in the final pages of the book, as an unnamed and perhaps unnamable progenitor. Derrida’s theoretical gestures seem impossible to recover from and also impossible to mourn: “The critique of the critique of critique… is left with only one leg to stand on.  Still kritizierbar is this alone – the myth of heroic beginnings, of grand gestures, of new vistas, new worlds of thought, that might appear (ah… Baltimore… 1966) in a conference paper, written in a mere 10 days. Master thinkers, and their disciples. A playfulness that was serious.  Now our seriousness is stillborn in its seriousness” (213). The critique of the critique of critique is another name for Celebricities – the critique of deconstruction that in its very critique wants nothing more than to mourn for it and give voice to the lateness that now infuses deconstruction’s theoretical gestures. “To save deconstruction by destroying it.”  The nostalgia for Derrida is not nostalgia for the late theorist himself, but for the gestures and the celebrity he brought to theory.  It is nostalgia for the “myth of heroic beginnings,” writing “Structure, Sign, and Play” in 10 days, and, indeed, for “playfulness that was serious.” In this sense, Adler mourns playfulness, the theoretical gesture most closely associated with Derrida and bemoans his own “stillborn seriousness” that, unlike Derrida’s, is dead on arrival: a seriousness that is always already too late.

Still, Adler admits in the last paragraph of the book, “I was born then, in 1966” and he asks “Am I nothing simply because I was not there to watch my birth?” (214). “Structure, Sign, and Play” even ends with a birth announcement: “the as yet unnamable” theoretical insight proclaims itself “as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity” (Derrida 293). Adler produces his own theoretical gestures through Derrida’s unnamable scary baby. Derrida is the progenitor (among others, perhaps especially Heidegger, but also Marx) of celebricity as a concept.  One hears these affiliations in its definitions: “Celebricity is this phenomenality that, at the very moment it appears as it is, can no longer take the form of phenomenology, of a sober gathering of appearance” (42).  Celebricity refers to “the play of truth” and the ways in which the screens and devices with which we touch, change, and stare produce a phenomenal play that is, Adler suggests, “the play of values” that in turn begets “the value of values” (130). Derrida predicts these celebricities, writing them into the future as a terrifying “monstrosity” that is unrecognizable in 1966 and only grows into its perceptibility by arriving late – that is, by arriving after theory, after Derrida.

So, the baby only ever arrives “stillborn” in Adler’s words, and conspicuously motherless.  For all the reproduction at work in Adler’s text, sexual reproduction struggles against a sterility that is paradoxically fecund. Adler mentions reproductive femininity once in an allusion to Rosemary’s Baby. The mother appears, then, only in a passing reference to a monstrous, Satanic, and ultimately destructive birth.  What would it mean to save motherhood by destroying it? Adler’s Alt-Rock elegy to deconstruction, continental philosophy, and Derrida, not only imagines itself in a struggle with and against fathers who will never “get” our music, but cannot conceive of a mother, of sex, of femininity otherwise than a play of highly eroticized and ever-retreating appearances.  While the appearance of the feminine as the play of concealing and revealing is not new to philosophy, Celebricities unpacks the allegorical significance of the feminine without necessarily acknowledging that the reproductive “mother” of celebricity is not merely any celebrity, but the untouchable, dream-like, young girl.

Kim Yuna comes to me, and I awaken to the memory of a pleasure that bore possibility as if in its womb. Yet it was not another body’s desires… or the abstract, pure, possession-less pleasures of dream-sex, but something more intoxicating, unsettling, voluptuous. She showed nothing intimate; we did not touch. She needed me, but only to watch and celebrate her – from amidst the multitude. (154)

Kim Yuna is Celebricities. The South Korean figure skater began her Olympic career at 20 and her significance is written into the phrase “figure skater.”  She is first and foremost a figure. Adler reads the Young-Girl elsewhere through the work of the Tiqqun collective as an allegorical figure for “the human subjectivity that first reveals itself as the interiorization of commodities” (128).  The Young-Girl figures the gadget commodity only insofar as she also figures the ways in which these gadgets, like television, produce “scattered members and organs” that leave only “grotesque relics of sexual difference.” This is not to say that Kim Yuna is a caricature, but that the dream fragment speaks to celebricity’s reconfiguration of sexual difference.  

The eccentric center of celebricity as a concept, then, is the experience of the dream-like withdrawal of the Young-Girl-Commodity who, in her elusiveness, enhances the pleasure of the plays of truth and appearance to which she also gives birth.  Indeed, the memory of pleasure –pleasure gone by or late pleasure – bears “possibility as if in its womb.”  The phrase “its womb” ambiguously refers to the commingling of pleasure and possibility. The displacement of female reproductive organs from Kim Yuna (the Young-Girl) onto the pleasure that is the after-effect of her appearance in a dream, reconceives reproduction not as the province of fertile female body, but as the work of deferred, unfulfilled, and ultimately unfulfilling pleasures.  This is not even bad sex, nor is it a wet dream.  It is the retreat of any possibility of sexual contact, reproductive or otherwise, that in its very retreat, yields potentially endless possibilities.

Celebriticity is more intoxicating, unsettling, and voluptuous for the ways it promiscuously retreats, retraces, replays, and withdraws the eroticism of appearance. Moreover, this is how celebricity reproduces: “She needed me, but only to watch and celebrate her – from amidst the multitude.”  If the eroticism of celebricity results from the ways in which these appearances withdraw, reproducing itself through such withdrawals (pun intended), reproduction (in Celebricities) is reproductive only insofar as it is sexless. Moreover, the plays and fractures of appearance in the age of all our televisual and networked appearance machines, are exacerbated by the deconstructive insistence on the ethereal withdrawal of things in themselves, of the copula, “is,” and, indeed, copulation.  The copula is not only under erasure (is); it is forestalled by the unsettling and voluptuous withdrawal of that thing called reality.

Yet the sexless reproduction of feminine withdrawal written into the text is not only the celebricity of Celebricities, it also, like a symptom, marks Adlers’ struggle to mourn the theoretical tradition and the monstrous birth from which he emerged. That is, the retreat of femininity relates to Alder’s inability to say not only how his father (Derrida) met his mother, but who his mother possibly could have been. If Alt-rock theory emerges from the melancholic recollection and destruction of the moment of birth, the mother, according to its own precepts, cannot be said to exist. Rather, she withdraws and conceals herself, in the eroticized plays of appearance and the fracturing of experience that Adler’s text struggles to figure. She, like Radiohead, is late, but perhaps not only to the scene of birth from which she has been banished.  She is late in the sense that reproductive femininity only arrives as such insofar as reproductive sex, motherhood, and birth are simultaneously saved and destroyed – ripped out of the textual system by all the Young-Girls and preserved as the very engine through which Celebricities stakes its claim to a theoretical tradition. Hearing Radiohead as Radiohead 17-years too late, then, does not just involve lateness or the capacity of lateness to deliver the fractures of experience and history.  It involves the play of femininity and the withdrawal of appearances that allows “the memory of pleasure” that Radiohead triggers for Adler to bear “the possibility” of Celebricities as if in its Alt-rock “womb.”

Celebricities is the book of one untimely born, of one who was “seduced by deconstruction just as its star had begun to fade.” One of the many questions this text poses is what becomes of theory in a post-theory era. Is indulging in high theory truly any better than watching television, which the Adler who put his childish televisionary ways behind him characterized as “a kind of experience that, for all its obvious seductions, is unworthy of being experienced; cannot even be called experience” (3)?

The answer, if Adler ultimately offers any, is yes and no. On the one hand, it seems that television is indeed “a nonexperience and nonlife in the very heart of life” (3), but it is a nonexperience and a nonlife with profound theoretical implications. If we embrace a distinction between philosophy and theory, as Adler clearly does, then the nonexperience of television fulfills one key goal of deconstructive “high theory”: demonstrating the inherent impossibility of the philosophical enterprise. Yet this high vocation of television does not answer the question so much as redouble it: what good is it to study Heidegger if the lowliest couch potato is effectively achieving his goal of a deconstruction of Western metaphysics?

The very form of Adler’s text stages an implicit debate about how a work of theory (or post-theory, or televisionary non-experience) should present itself. The book itself is more or less split in two, between a more recognizably “theoretical” first half and an aphoristic and fragmentary second half. The first half is itself divided, as the torso of a “gruesome synthesis” (60) of Marx and Heidegger is bracketed by reflections on the phenomenology of television.

Though the first half is presented in the form of a traditional philosophical treatise, the “boring” theoretical part never quite connects up to the discussion of the televisionary that at once motivates the discussion of Heidegger and Marx and renders both thinkers somehow inadequate or already passé. The advent of television—which was in the process of occurring just as Heidegger set to work on Being and Time—means that Heidegger is working within a paradigm of lived experience that has already died, if it ever existed at all. The very distinction between Being and beings, so central to every phase of Heidegger’s work, breaks down in the televisionary, which irretrievably flattens out the ontological horizon, which Adler expresses using the admittedly unattractive coinage “being(s).”

Strangely, though, the televisionary drops out of sight for dozens of pages at a time in the first part, which center around reaching a rapprochement between Heidegger and Marx (by way of Althusser) on the concept of the commodity. Neither, as it turns out, is fully adequate to the task, though a complex movement “with Heidegger against Heidegger for Marx” and “with Marx against Marx for Heidegger” will, by “bringing both to a point of undecidability,” enable a quasi-theorization of the commodity that is at the same time an enactment of the non-experience of the commodity itself—in other words, of television.

Yet even television, it seems, is already passé, in the process of being surpassed by the “gadget”—which is Adler’s (strangely antiquated) term for the smartphone. Though the gadget makes it into the subtitle, it is discussed only briefly, whereas television—above all the kind of television that was prominent during Adler’s childhood and adolescence—commands both author and reader’s attention. As a child of roughly the same era as Adler, I found his account of the quasi-liturgical cycle of the televisionary day, from morning show through soap opera to the news and then prime time, compelling and nostalgic. I suspect that he and I spent our summer vacations in much the same way growing up.

Like Adler, I went through an extended period of more or less renouncing television while I fashioned myself into an intellectual. I found that whenever I came back to it, I was an easy target. I could not look away from TVs in public places, even and especially when they were showing nothing of particular interest to me (sports, commercials, talking heads with no sound). Ultimately I immersed myself in the “so-called quality television” that Adler dismisses as not yet or no longer television (30)—pseudo-television that embarks on a quest for the authenticity that television “proper” (if this is the right word) radically forecloses. (Apparently the marketing team was more right than it knew when it came up with the famous slogan: “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.”)

My journey through the classics of prestige television—The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Mad Men, Breaking Bad—was part of a broader mobilization of my Protestant work ethic that turned the Netflix DVD service into a powerful tool of self-education in film (which my particular form of Protestant upbringing had largely denied me). These shows were the spoonful of sugar to make the Netflix queue go down: not as demanding as an art film, more approachable due to their shorter run-time (though I was quite happy to sit through binge sessions longer than almost any film), yet not quite the time-wasting, purely idle television that I had sworn off in favor of great literature and philosophy.

And that same work ethic drove me to “redeem” my TV time through writing—in my case, a trilogy of short books analyzing TV through the lens of negative character traits (Awkwardness, Why We Love Sociopaths, and Creepiness), with small helpings of “theory” (primarily Heidegger and Freud) to guide me. No longer properly academic (I don’t even use footnotes), but not truly popular (I spend ten pages on Heidegger at one point), one could view them, from the perspective of Adler’s investigation, as one attempt to carry out theory in a post-theory world.

My books are part of a series (Zero Books) that gathered together a whole range of such interventions, a task the editorial team is now continuing with a new series (Repeater Books). The majority are by academics at relatively marginal institutions or the ever-increasing number of para-academics—graduate-educated writers unable to find suitable employment, seeking some way of combining intellectual life with making a living. Many, including myself, Mark Fisher, and Nina Power, first came to prominence in the world of “theory blogging” that had its first major flowering in the middle of the awkwardly unnamed decade that opened our young century.

Since that time, blogging has become more institutionalized—both on the grassroots level of self-proclaimed blog-based philosophical movements (Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Accelerationism) and in the proliferation of blogs attached to journals and academic departments, as well as quasi-institutionalized outlets like Syndicate itself. Meanwhile, many academic and para-academic discussions have moved to Facebook and Twitter. Blogging (including commenting on blog posts) now seems to be too much work, a trend that the increasing institutionalization of blogging likely reinforces. Now a blog builds your brand, provides publicity and exposure, even grants CV lines—a process that I now hypocritically scorn, as someone who has benefited greatly from the good luck of getting in on academic blogging from the ground floor.

As I read the fragmentary second half of Adler’s book, it struck me that this style of reflection would not have been out of place during the heroic era of academic blogging. Each grouping could be a post or series of posts, and the whole would hit that balance between low culture, classic literature, and theory that was such a hallmark of many blogs that I remember fondly. It might even fit in well today. The long numbered list (pp. 146–51) reminds me of a Speculative Realist or OOO blog, happily laying out an axiomatic system in a series of posts, or indeed of the Accelerationist Manifesto. And many sections reminded me of the style of Sam Kriss’s posts, where references to high theory seem almost parodic—not of the theorists themselves (who are presented with painstaking accuracy), but of the very gesture of deploying high theory for pop cultural or political analysis.

More interesting to me are the passages that seem inspired by the style of an unnamed theorist—particularly Agamben and Žižek. The fact that such passages fit seamlessly into the blog-like whole highlights how blog-like both were from the very beginning. Žižek has always worked via the concatenation of passages rather than the systematic construction of books, and many of those passages have been routinely published in blog-like venues before being compiled into his books. Agamben, though he is more elegant and hermetic in his style, also proceeds by way of evocative fragments and often struggles to develop a suitable architectonic structure for his longer works. One might even say that a work like The Idea of Prose—which Ted Jennings once characterized as a book of “devotional readings for atheists”—amounts to a blog avant la lettre.

Adler brings up Agamben’s status as an exemplary contemporary theorist in the section entitled “Listening to Radiohead for the First Time, 17 Years Too Late,” where he pairs him not with Žižek, but with Žižek’s close comrade Alain Badiou. Citing a critic who claims that “to save rock [Radiohead] had to destroy it,” Adler claims that the same is true of Agamben and Badiou for theory. He describes their dubious achievement in a sentence that, like the concluding sentence of the book as a whole, is syntactically a question but lacks a question mark: “And what has been saved, in the end, but the posture of the theorist: a posture of a gesture that is no longer possible as gesture” (174).

This is not only posturing in the derogatory sense, because it has been productive: “They inspired us, no doubt—and they impregnated us with ideas. And we will remain forever their followers, epigones, with small tasks and smaller prospects” (175). Yet it seems that it is also posturing in the derogatory sense: “But we needed them above all because we were afraid that, without them, we would not appear as anything” (175)—which is to say, we need their pose to support our own pose as intellectuals, a pose that is increasingly exposing itself as empty.

In the wake of the Last Theorists, Adler proposes “an occasional, nameless, unidentifiable thinking” (175). Does his own book exemplify this style of thinking? It is occasional, but the majority of occasions are far from contemporary. Many were quite resonant to me as a child of the ’80s and ’90s, but that just highlights how dated they are. Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Madonna—are these really the most pertinent points of reference today?

It is nameless in the sense of not relying on any “big names” for legitimation, at least in the second half, but can such a nostalgic, almost memoiristic work really count as “unidentifiable”? I hesitate here, because there is so little that is truly particular to Adler in this work. The concrete memories that he mentions are always moments where he is somehow relating to television—either watching it (at a particular place and time that immediately fades away in favor of the television itself) or else dismissing and rejecting it (through his posturing as a theorist). Surely few would draw the same conclusions as Adler, but the realm of non-experience he is drawing on is broadly shared by anyone who grew up between the late ’70s and mid-’90s. It is a strange thing that drawing on his own personal experience can lead to a work that is so impersonal—and yet it proves his point as well, if this is an appropriate way to speak about a work that explicitly disclaims the status of an argument.

Is this what the afterlife of theory looks like? If so, then it looks a whole lot like a parody of “continental theory” itself—a mélange of bold declarations about the impossibility of philosophy, a painstakingly close reading of selected figures with unclear stakes, and a slew of gnomic pronouncements of varying degrees of plausibility. Is the parody self-conscious? Sometimes it seems difficult to avoid that conclusion, as when we are treated to a meditation on the fact that Kermit the Frog’s skin is green, “the color of photosynthesis” which “only appears on the surface of the world, where dark, solid matter and the light of the sun converge” (199), or when we learn that the possible offspring of “a teddy bear and a Barbie doll” gives us “a faint premonition of the cliffs on which speculative philosophy will come to grief” (197). And at times we get a glimpse of why this procedure may appear necessary, as in this remarkable reflection found in the section entitled “Things”:

Since almost everything nowadays is created almost exclusively for the sake of novelty, its life is from the beginning an afterlife. The moment the thing exists, it has outlived the only purpose it could have had, which was to be new. (173)

By refusing to be new—by aping the most characteristic gestures of the very “theory” that you proclaim to be over, by being self-consciously out-of-date with nearly every cultural reference—is Adler’s work enacting a refusal to be commodified, a way of bringing the vicious cycle of production to a halt? I suspect that we may be in a better position to answer that question if Adler had published the second half as blog posts and devoted a full book to the “gruesome synthesis” of Marx and Heidegger. But then, I may just be old-fashioned.

How do contemporary media, with their plurality of screens, celebrities, nobodies and gadgets, affect and condition what it is to be? In Celebricities: Media Culture and the Phenomenology of Gadget Commodity Life, Anthony Curtis Adler attends to the limits and possibilities that contemporary media cultures oppose to experience. Reaching back from Heidegger to Rousseau to Plato, phenomenological understandings of being have engaged with the idea of a human life that, able to stand and discern a horizon, has the capacity to foresee the death that conditions its singularity. The real of who I am resides in the fact that no one else can die my death. My death-horizon conditions the Being (Dasein) that is there to be experienced, to be lived. For Adler, the phenomenology that the televisual commodity-form presents to my being, my singularity, is televisual para-existence—or, rather para-existences. The latter amount not to another existence but to a plurality, a system, a conglomeration, a massification of lives that have taken up the human-form within its form. The “system of rhythms” (25) that we watch while living distracts us from our singular being (our authentic relation to our own death) but also captures us and, in doing so, divides us from ourselves.

It is not, writes Adler, that televisual life—and the life of the commodity-gadget—will lead us to the cessation of human existence. Rather, the risk is that our lives will be given up to the commodity that “appropriates Dasein as its own, turning our own Dasein, the very being that we are, against us as the life that is not ours to live” (127). In Celebricities’ “The Gadget” chapter, Adler reads a form of Dasein commodity life into the form of “subjectification” that the Tiqqun collective present in their Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (127). For Tiqqun (a name that derives from the Hebrew Tikkun olam, meaning reparation or restoration), the Young-Girl emerges at a time when the modes of a condition of production have taken hold of human subjectivity and human subjectivity has revealed itself to have interiorised those commodities. Adler notes the possibility of further understanding the Young-Girl—and what she might tell us about the “alethic” modalities of contemporary media cultures—via “Madonna’s Material Girl” and briefly speculates that the music-videos of South Korean girl groups might reveal the “hidden schema” of an abstract feminine sexuality that simultaneously turns its “gaze back against itself and into its own truth” (129).

Through these and other readings, Celebricities invites us to go amidst television’s non-appropriable distractions, captures and divisions, its life that is “not ours to live.” “Who is this we, this us? Are you with me still?” (134), the book asks its potentially attentive reader(s), as it calls us to think more deeply about the modalities organising televisual life. The response that follows here attends to one aspect of Celebricities’ argument: its reading of “quality television” as “stylised pseudorealism” (30–31) and its reading of the Carousel scene in AMC’s Mad Men (2008–2015) as exemplary of the workings of this form. Through a close reading of another Mad Men scene, I extend Adler’s argument about how quality television co-opts and re-advertises pre-existing forms. Discerning a version of the Young-Girl in Mad Men, my reading then departs somewhat from Adler’s argument that quality television portrays and reproduces nostalgically inflected commodity-fetishism, in order to gesture toward another horizon. This is one that, like the temporal, rhythmic structure of the long-form television series, illuminates uncannily seasonal processes of sexual reproduction that, I suggest, also condition the workings of the commodity-form.

Incorporating and reselling a previous generation of television, quality television is for Adler “stylised pseudorealism” in that it attempts to restore or revive an era of television that is no longer relevant (30–31). Quality television reproduces the televisual commodification that it simultaneously sells and does so not simply through the production of a melancholy longing for the previous era that it fetishises. Quality television, Adler argues, produces a “nostalgia for nostalgia and for the novelty that is its counterpart” (36). Its animation of a dream-time of childhood memories and/or formative years transforms our melancholy for a previous time into the “joy of taking pleasure in the fleeting sense of loss” (36). But this enjoyment derives from television’s alchemy of dream-memories that are, however, “not ours to live.” Television’s dream-memories are, moreover, phantasmatic memories that, mediated by commodity-images, the quality television series restores, captures and reanimates in the service of its own reproduction and self-advertisement. It is Mad Men’s now famous Carousel slide-projector scene that epitomises, for Adler, quality television’s “nostalgia for nostalgia” punctuated by novelty products and gadgets. Like the adman Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) pitch for the Carousel slide-projector that can take us to a “place that we ache to go again” (Don’s words), we now advertise our own phantasmatic memories through social media feeds, as if we are able to restore our earlier selves to ourselves. As Adler writes, however, all that is shown through social media’s hypercommoditisation of our dream-memories is that that earlier place has nothing to reveal (48).

Mad Men’s finale (2015) refers obliquely to the “nothing” that the contemporary adman / quality television series sells. Moving from Adler’s discussion of the Carousel scene, my focus here is on the scenes leading up to, and including, the finale conclusion. The adman Don has, at this stage of the series, fled to the Big Sur yoga meditation retreat, having escaped McCann Erickson, the globally-networked advertising agency that has now subsumed the smaller agency that Don had part-owned and led. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Don calls Peggy Olsen (Elisabeth Moss) who, on hearing his distress, urges him to “come home.” Don responds that he can’t leave “here” because he has taken another man’s name and “done nothing with it.” Following these words, the long-running television series concludes with a scene that appears to repair and restore the adman to himself, echoing the terms in which quality television attempts to restore and revive a previous era.

The finale’s very final scene opens with an image of Don standing on a grassy plateau overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It is sunrise on the morning of 1 November 1970 (All Saints’ Day, the day after All Hallows Day), signifying the day of restoration that the finale thematises. Despite his multiple falls, including the near breakdown just mentioned, and despite the repeated, multiply-replayed image of his cartoon avatar falling from a skyscraper in Mad Men’s credit sequence, Don here stands still as he gazes out at the ocean horizon. Moments later, the sound of a man’s voice is heard, speaking a prayer: “Mother Sun we greet you and are grateful for the sweetness of the earth.” The camera then pans across a small group, including the prayer-speaker, sitting on the same, grassy plateau. The prayer continues to praise the “new day [that] brings new hope. . . . A new day, new ideas, a new you.” There is a cut to a long shot, revealing the one reciting the prayer is sitting facing the small group, which now includes Don. Dressed in peasant tops that emblematise late ’60s counterculture, the group sits in lotus-position with their backs turned toward the sea, rocks and horizon beyond.

The camera then moves to a close-up of Don’s face, his eyes closed as he sounds a long “om” in unison with the others. While the shot continues, a slow smile spreads across his face, then a female voice is heard singing, “I’d like to build the world a home and furnish it with love. . . .” From the close-up of Don, and while the voice continues, there is a cut to another scene altogether. We now see in close-up the face of the singer whose melody had accompanied the final image of Don. The camera pulls back and, as if somewhat in mimicry of the previous sequence, pans to reveal a congregation of singers also dressed in peasant tops but standing on another hillside in another time. Holding bottles of Coca-Cola, the “hillside singers” sing of how they’d “like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.”

Mad Men began its first season with a scene in which Don pitches an ad for the cigarette brand Lucky Strike. With its incorporation of the iconic 1971 Coca-Cola advertisement, the spin-off song from which became the pop hit “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony),” Mad Men concludes by implicitly merging Don Draper’s fictional character with his real-life counterpart Bill Backer (the McCann Erickson creative director who came up with the idea for the 1971 commercial). As I argue elsewhere in relation to season 5, Mad Men is not only a show about advertising but is also itself one long advertisement.1 In the context of Adler’s argument about how quality TV combines “nostalgia for nostalgia” with novelty, we can now see how Mad Men has integrated within its long-form quality “advertisement” a commodity-chorus that, singing of “the real thing” that can keep us “company,” seems to offer the “world” a kind of restoration or repair.

Previous to its rebroadcasting of the ad, the finale merges the first melodic bars of “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” with its final image of Don. It is the last we see of him, sitting with his back turned to the horizon with eyes closed, as if listening, impossibly, to the melody. On the terms defined by Adler, the adman is here a figure for a contemporary subjectivity that is captured within the commodity-form. Is this, too, how we should understand the presence of the girl whose face follows after that final image of Don? The face is that of a young girl—or Young-Girl, to use Tiqqun’s hyphenated and capitalised name for the human commodity caught within the commodity-form. The Coca-Cola ad’s Young-Girl(s) are captured within the 1971 advertisement-frame that is itself captured within the television series. Adler writes that advertising is at its most authentic when it presents commodities in their most narcotising dimension. We smoke while watching on television those who smoke and who discretely invite rather than demand us to join them in their sensual-seeming activity (19–20). Like the Lucky Strike cigarette, Coca-Cola is a semi-addictive product, a caffeinated sugar-drink. The quality TV series’ incorporation of the Coca-Cola commercial intensifies the narcotic effect. Tempting us with the retro-appeal of their song, Mad Men’s repurposed Coca-Cola commodity-sirens lure us to a “home” that, though promised as a renovated “world,” is a phantasmagoria of dream-memory images and sounds. Like Odysseus tied to his mast, we may sensually respond but we cannot touch the real of the figures that are caught behind our screens. Significantly, the song lyric addresses not a first-person singular “you” but the “world”—the multiple “they” of television’s lifeworld who have turned Being into undifferentiated being(s), or Heidegger’s das Man, the one (40–41). Promising the pleasure of a total merge, a total connection, the Young-Girl(s) of Mad Men’s finale impossibly offer the possibility of merging with the life that is “not ours to live.”

Arguably, a Young-Girl can be found not just within the finale’s Coca-Cola commercial but within one of Mad Men’s central storylines. As already noted, Don Draper had told Peggy Olsen during his telephone call to her that he had taken the name of a dead man and had “done nothing with it.” Previously in the same season finale, on the morning after Neil Armstrong’s world-historic moon landing, Peggy had introduced her pitch to the fast-food restaurant chain Burger King’s clients by claiming that she could not tell a better story than the televising of the moon landing that they had all watched the night before. She had then delivered a sales spiel about how the pleasure taken from watching the event had revealed how we are all “starving” for connection.

Mad Men’s incorporation and reanimation of advertisements exemplifies Adler’s argument about how quality TV both depends on and reproduces nostalgia for commodity forms. Mad Men is also, however, a costume melodrama about the long 1960s and, viewed another way, its beginning and end refer us not only to preexisting commercials and novelty products but also to what can now—retroactively—be understood as two momentous technological events. At the far end of Mad Men (season 7) the televised moon landing is re-televised for a plot in which, while Peggy delivers the sales pitch referred to above, the advertising agency Sterling Cooper Draper Price’s founding patriarch Bert Cooper dies while watching the landing. Bert may insist—in the posthumous song and dance routine he performs at the end of this episode—that “the moon belongs to everyone,” but the moon, like advertising, like the Young-Girl, does not always show itself. It conceals as much as reveals itself as it waxes and wanes through its twenty-eight-day cycle.

Not unrelated to the lunar event—and the advancements in space-technology that made it possible—is the series’ brief portrayal of another event tacitly referred to at the beginning of season 1. The pilot episode, set in March 1960, includes a storyline about how Peggy, sexually active for the first time, obtains a doctor’s prescription for oral contraceptives. The Pill, with its hormonal regulation of the twenty-eight-day cycle, first became widely available in 1959. Its invention enabled women’s biomedical control of their own bodily rhythms and reproductive futures, paving the way for a decade in which sexual freedom would be enjoyed alongside its co-option and commodification. It is not until toward the end of season 1 that we learn that, shortly after obtaining the Pill, Peggy has become pregnant. Nine months later, at the end of the first season (November 1960), she belatedly discovers she is pregnant with a child she does not want and, with counsel and assistance from another orphan—her boss Don Draper—she gives birth and then gives the baby up for adoption.

Mad Men’s repurposed advertisements exemplify what Adler calls a dream-memory phantasmagoria. At the same time, and through a series that begins with the invention of the Pill and ends with the moon landing, Mad Men touches on another “real,” another horizon, that points us to uncanny temporal forces and bodily rhythms caught within, but also existing beyond, the frames of its commodity-drama.

[1]

Celebricities opens by reminding us just how remarkable it is that we are able to walk. As “we shift our weight from one foot to another, falling away from stable ground with each step,” we are, with a dexterity and poise we can scarcely recognize, forever “falling into the abyss, almost beyond the point of no return; and yet somehow hindered, impeded, held back” (1). In directing our attention to the deceptive simplicity of our ambulatory rhythms and to the complex gymnastics that keep us upright, the dynamics of the walk bring us to the dynamics of thinking: “Thinking also has its stride and its gait, its grace and elegance and flow, and its faults and faltering and clumsiness” (1). Having recognized the potential precariousness of our mental and physical flânerie, the next step in these reflections on the step is to disrupt the pace and tread of reflection itself in order to make it possible to explicitly conceptualize the near-abyssal fall and recovery that thought undergoes with each move.

The goal is not to further buttress ourselves against taking a spill. Rather, we have to ask what it would mean for thinking to stumble without vigorously—instinctively—seeking to right itself. What if our modes of inquiry were not first and foremost organized to correct or outright avoid any and every misstep? What if staying on track were no longer the goal of goals? Having raised these questions, Celebricities tries not to subordinate its demonstrations to the methodological and argumentative conventions designed to ensure that any impending bumps in the road have always already been anticipated. Importantly, this cannot simply mean forging a new path for others to follow, nor wandering on stray paths in an effort to get somewhere by getting nowhere. In both these cases, the integrity of the walk and one’s ability to walk the walk would remain uninterrogated.

On this basis, we might suppose that the goal of this book will be to reveal that the correct step is always a misstep, but the figure of the faux pas implicitly confirms the authority of a rule or standard on the basis of which each step’s potential aberrance is evaluated. More than a mere faux pas, each move—backward or forward—must be un pas au-delà. At once a step beyond steps and a step beyond the logic of the beyond, this para-logic will remain at best quasi-transcendental insofar as it will be forever compromised by the specter of the proverbial ne . . . pas, a laggard half-negation that will plague our proposed conceptual gait without giving us the benefit of a fixed determination to affirm or reject.

Having begun to grapple with the vicissitudes of these complex promenades, it is only a few more steps into the book until the advent of the Walkman is designated as a key moment in the process by which the commodity-gadget starts to appropriate the temporality, moods, and (in)authenticities of our world, putting the ownness of our Dasein into play as its own (128). Does this mean that the gadget has a characteristic stride or pace, or does it merely toy with ours? In what follows, I want to suggest that if we are to have any hope of interrupting the imminent hegemony of the gadget’s affectless auto-affectivity, we must look for glimpses of this commodity-life not just at the moment of its emergence, but at the moment that it acquires its distinctive walk.

To help us understand the imminent hegemony of the commodity, Adler directs us to music videos in which what seem to be run-of-the-mill exploitations of hypersexualized female bodies instead betray the co-option of the male gaze by the very fantasy object it ostensibly produced. This inversion is exemplified by Madonna’s Material Girl, who “joyfully materialized through her desire for materiality, taking ownership of her desire as commodity-desire” (129). Going a step further, Adler locates a fuller expression of these tendencies in the girl groups of contemporary South Korean K-Pop. Meticulously groomed epitomes of teeny-bopper allure with identical haircuts, skimpy outfits, and plastic surgery faces, these young women are part of the performance in which the commodity acts out its own self-commodification and self-consumption, articulating a pop ontology uniquely its own.

If today commodity being is indeed the way to be, or well on its way to becoming so, the question is whether the commodity-gadget’s own gait is as stumble-proof as might sometimes appear to be the case. In September 2015, the popular South Korean girl band GFriend achieved new heights of domestic as well as international fame when a four-minute video of them performing their hit song “Me Gustas Tu” went viral on YouTube. Archetypes of their genre, the band’s musical routines are exercises in extreme standardization. Each young lady is a cookie-cutter clone of the next, and they do not so much dance as slickly position and reposition themselves in various configurations. If they are lip-synching the lyrics, they are equally foot-synching the choreography. In the particular performance immortalized on video, however, the imperatives of mechanization and routinization were temporarily suspended as one of the six members of the group repeatedly fell, in a couple of cases crashing to the stage with such force that the wincing viewer could not help but wonder whether she would be able to continue. As it turned out, she did get up after each fall and ultimately saw the performance through to its meticulously scripted close.

Who was this band member who refused to content herself with the normal rhythms of the commodity spectacle and instead set out to confront the abyssal crashes that the show itself cannot afford to think? Several accounts of the ill-fated routine observed that the girl in question can easily be identified in the video because she alone has a protective bandage on her knee. It would appear that the de-individuation of the members of GFriend has been taken so far that falling every forty-five seconds does not suffice to make one stand out, a conclusion confirmed by an article in the Daily Mail that described the six girls falling “one by one.” Under the reign of the commodity-gadget, the bond between subject and predicate, actor and act, is broken, and the falls circulate freely, to be linked up indifferently with any or all of the performers. This conclusion is reinforced by the curious non-role that cause and effect play in the stories about this event. A number of English-language reports mentioned that rain had dampened the stage, which could certainly explain why an ordinarily sure-footed performer would repeatedly fall. It would not, however, explain why one girl in particular would do all the falling, yet strangely none of the journalists who covered the story took the obvious step of suggesting that perhaps her knee wrap was evidence of a lingering injury that had made her especially vulnerable to losing her balance. In other words, no matter how many times she fell, the falls were never conclusively attributed to her or identified as evidence of something unique to her on that particular day.

Perhaps in response to this unsettling of the traditional tropes of agency and responsibility, several entertainment writers went to some lengths to cast the unfortunate member of GFriend as a heroine who taught us, as Time magazine put it, that “no matter how many times life knocks you down, [you should] just get back up and carry on.” On YouTube, the ultimate arena of the commodity gadget, all endeavors are reduced to the same banal parable about courage and resolve, be it a rat dragging a piece of pizza five times its size or the epic feats of firemen rescuing babies from burning buildings. Indeed, in this medium the imperative to allegorize is so intense that it proves curiously difficult for anyone to watch any given video with any care, even when it is only four minutes long. Despite the existence of a crystal clear document of the event that could never have been more than a few taps away on their phones, the journalists reporting on the exploits of GFriend could not agree on exactly how many falls took place during the performance. While the Daily Mail referred to five, Time magazine described one performer falling eight times and another member of the band falling once, figures echoed by a report in Cosmopolitan.

By my count, one girl fell five times and another fell once. We could watch and count again, but this only highlights the fact that where such a video is concerned, what really counts—arguably the only thing that counts—is the number of times it has been viewed. In South Korean K-Pop, this truth was graphically illustrated by the triumph of megastar Psy, who became world famous when his “Gangnam Style” video literally broke the YouTube counter by exceeding the maximum number of views (2,147,483,647) that could be logged thanks to the company’s decision to store the view count for each video as a 32-bit integer.

Naturally the number of views of a video does not exist in a one-to-one relationship with the number of human beings who have actually watched it any more than the number of falls in the GFriend dance performance aligns perfectly with the number of performers in the group. Left undisturbed, a web browser that starts playing YouTube will proceed from one offering to the next indefinitely, irrespective of whether anyone is around to see or hear. Like crashing to the stage during a K-Pop performance, “watching” a YouTube video is a purely abstract, self-externalizing activity, to the point that spectatorship itself can start to seem like an antiquated concept, grounded in decidedly inoperative notions of subject and object, experience and event.

Among other things, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video is known for its peculiar “horse trot” dance. Like a philosopher searching for a special walk that will allow him to think the unthought, Psy maintains that he stayed up late exploring different choreographic options for thirty consecutive nights, precisely ten less than required to count as a biblical reference. (Rejected options included “panda” and “kangaroo” moves.) That Psy’s search for a gait would take him into the animal kingdom paradoxically bespeaks a last gasp of humanism, as if patterning our movements on those of other mammals were the only way that our dancing (and falling) could be something other than cannon fodder for the commodity in its own playful acts of self-determination. In this respect, we might say that the YouTube view counter is the pedometer of the commodity-gadget’s being-in-the-world. (How many steps did I take today, how many thoughts did I have, and how many times was I seen doing all of this?) Of course, in contrast to the recording of GFriend’s live performance, Psy’s video is impossibly slick, almost comically so. Even as his ontological pedometer has reached 2.6 billion and beyond, he has never fallen, not even once.

One might suppose that the very fact that there is so much interest in seeing a South Korean girl band botch its routine is evidence that the gadget-commodity is not all-powerful, at least not yet. Perhaps our concern for the unlucky tumbler(s) suggests a reassertion of our gaze as we exude paternalistic sympathy for the pretty girls in distress. Is there not in fact a “we” fantasizing that it could have been there to help them up when they fell?

At the same time, the real provocation of the GFriend video may be that it shows us what Dance like nobody’s watching really means. The argument of Celebricities is that a truly radical contingency creates its own a priori conditions of possibility after the fact, retroactively undoing its status as contingent. The gadget is ontologically “potent” insofar as it effects such a “transcendental shock,” as Adler terms it, redrawing the very modalities of truth (52). It is in this sense that he argues that the commodity comes to exist for itself and not for an other, for instance, us. What this argument potentially leaves unchallenged is the assumption that alethic production is an intrinsically self-referential, self-legitimating act. It may be that the truth that the gadget impossibly brings into being is neither its own nor ours. In hijacking our concern with our own being, the gadget undercuts the authority of both self-concern and—perhaps most crucially—ownership, breaking the implicit connection between being and having. In its being-beyond-concern and being-beyond-owning-it, the pop event would alter the ontological order, but not in a way that would retroactively make its own existence comprehensible. The contingent would thus remain genuinely random, in both the old paradigm and the new. Impossibly—but what isn’t here?—ontological claims and truth claims would no longer be one and the same, and instead of transcendental shock, we would have transcendental schlock. Or to put this slightly differently, if being-toward-death is the ownmost possibility of Dasein precisely insofar as it is the condition of Dasein’s impossibility to be, then the sequel to Being and Time currently being authored by K-Pop bands is undoubtedly titled Dead Can Dance.

Laughter bursts out. And yet, in privileged moments that are less moments than always sketched out movements of experience, rare, discreet, light, without triumphant inanity, far from the public square, quite near to that at which laughter laughs: to anxiety, first of all, which must not even be called the negative of laughter at the risk of being snatched once more by Hegel’s discourse.

—Jacques Derrida1

From the many wonderful passages in Anthony Adler’s Celebricities: Media Culture and the Phenomenology of Gadget Commodity Life (Fordham UP, 2016), I want to begin by singling out one moment in which what is at stake is laughter—a laughter that, I would argue, bears an affinity with that explosive, though oblique, laughter that Jacques Derrida saw as singularly emblematic of Georges Bataille’s “exit strategy” from Hegelianism in particular and philosophical discourse in general. For one of the major merits of Celebricities to my eyes lies in its relentless, if implicit, argument for the “experience” of a certain laughter as a crucial site from which the question of what thinking ought to be after Marx and Heidegger is to be taken up once more.

The moment of Adler’s book that focuses on the laughter of Beavis and Butt-Head.2 In a remarkable reading of one episode (“True Crime”) of the series, Adler shows why this particular laughter of Beavis and Butt-Head is one of his privileged “phenomena:” In this episode, Beavis and Butt-Head, after using Michael Jordan’s ATM card to withdraw cash, find themselves on the couch, laughing, as the TV shows that somebody is being arrested, without knowing that they themselves are the butt of their own joke. For Adler, it is because their laughter in this episode corrodes the structure of self-referentiality that would enable the who of laughter to identify itself with the what of laughter. This separation between “self” and “itself” short-circuits not only the specular circle of ipseity but even the hermeneutic circle of Dasein and exceeds the orbit of theatrical notions of irony that presuppose a unity behind such a doubling. And yet, this laughter is still indexed to a singularity that, in its laughter, shows itself, but without being able to show itself as itself. Beavis and Butt-Head’s laughter exceeds the purview of an understanding of life that is each time “my own,” whether it is lived in authenticity or in inauthenticity.

If, through their laughter, Beavis and Butt-Head become more emblematic for Adler of what he calls “televisionary life” than The Wire or Madmen, it is because this scene discloses that “TV is the phenomenology of an everyday life that can never be turned around from inauthenticity to authenticity; an everyday life that never calls us, that never names us, that lacks even the prospect of a mineness that is continually evaded” (27). This moment alone is enough to justify Adler’s own characterization of his book as a “parody” of Being and Time (4). For, on the one hand, the “phenomenology” of “TV” presents an “everyday life” in which the viewer remains incapable of moving from inauthenticity to authenticity. And, on the other hand, the ontological elaboration of TV as phenomenology is not impaired by the nonexistence of an authentic “televisionary life”—something that cannot be said for Being and Time.3 The TV viewer that, for Adler, we all are, is neither Dasein nor a Mitdasein, since it lives in the suspension of any proper, authentic, life—beginning with its own.

Before I continue this line of thought, I want to raise a couple of questions around what I take to be Adler’s unstated or, to put it better, unexamined assumption regarding the fact that “we all” live in an epoch that has not only rendered the phenomenology and the ontology of Dasein obsolete and that also couldn’t even be said to be the epoch of “televisionary life,” but rather of its transformation into “gadget commodity life.” Although at the very end of the first section, Adler seems to trouble his own unrestrained use of the plural personal pronoun “we” throughout the book (132), it remains the case that nowhere in Celebricities do we find a serious attempt from Adler’s part to dwell with what, for lack of a better term, we could provisionally call the “factic” or “ontic” differences in the penetration and distribution of “gadget commodity life,” which may or may not complicate Adler’s account of this epochal, ontologico-historical transformation. The fact that he moves swiftly from a geographical landscape that, while rooted in Hollywood (coincidentally, where I am writing these lines), brings the Franco-German borders of the Rhein, and parts of East Asia (mostly Korea and Japan) within the world of celebricity, proves that Adler is by no means beholden to a monolithic or Eurocentric understanding of what counts as the world. And yet, he seems rather comfortable in his capacity to carry out his analysis as if this question regarding the possibility of a plurality of worlds that would display a difference vis-à-vis the increasing transformation of everyday life as televisionary, gadget, commodity life had already been settled, or, at least, as if the possibility of this difference did not matter for his own questioning and the insights that it has to offer. This possibility of a discrepancy or of a difference within what Adler nonetheless argues convincingly is a fundamental and under-examined transformation of life and the world would not pose any problem if Adler were simply doing a fundamental ontology of the gadget that retained the faith in the power of transcendental phenomenology to illuminate all entities solely on the basis of their conditions of possibility. But since Adler insists that the “new being” itself that appears first as televisionary life and more intensely as the gadget, is a being that is “no longer a being, anticipating an unprecedented horizon, but it is both a being and being, being(s), having taken upon itself the alethic, phenomenological reproduction of production itself as coming into appearance, as the play of truth” (131), since, for Adler, “being(s)” makes it impossible to circumscribe the “essencing of truth” to the withdrawal of Being to the extent that it is being(s) themselves that are “now” both withdrawn and revealed, then the question of what otherwise could only be considered to be ontic—such as whether gadget commodity appears here or there in the way that, according to Adler, characterizes our epoch—should not be so easily ignored.

From this excursus it should be clear that, when Adler characterizes the first part of his book as a parody of Being and Time, he must have written that out of modesty since his book offers not only a parody and a probing examination of Heidegger’s masterpiece but also of his thinking at least until the mid-’50s, well beyond the so-called “turn” (“Kehre”). The fact that Adler’s Celebricities tells a history, as it were, of TV-time’s becoming absolute, separated from the ebbs and flows of a life whose everydayness was, until recently, still organized around more or less fixed demarcations separating work-time, family-time, rest-time, and play-time; the fact that Adler’s text brings us to the historical threshold that obtains when the gadget has begun to transform “our” everydayness to such an extent that it is no longer even “ours” not to live, that is, not anymore “ours” as a life that can only be lived in its irremediable inauthenticity; the fact that the time of our lives, even the very Da– of our television-hooked, resolutely improper Dasein, has become for Adler nothing more than the site in which the gadget “plays us” (128)—all of this can be read as a thoughtful, parodic, and intensely historical repetition of Heidegger’s thinking of Gestell. Most strongly elaborated in his 1954 Bremen Lectures, Heidegger turns to the word “Gestell,” often translated as “positionality” or “enframing,” in order to name the non-technological essence of modern technology as the leveling down of all ontic-ontological differences and the transformation of all beings into “standing reserve” that are in principle always available, equatable, presentable, replaceable, and are so in order to fulfill any technological aims whatsoever.

It is at this point in Heidegger’s thinking, at the moment of danger in which being persecutes itself with its own disappearance, that Adler turns away from Heidegger to Marx in order to read the former through the latter and the latter through the former in an effort to find other ways of taking up the question of the task of thinking in an epoch in which capitalism’s reduction to general equivalence has become more absolute than even Heidegger’s thinking of Gestell would allow. Since I don’t have time to explore in more detail Adler’s remarkable and suggestive, if at times exceedingly dense, readings of Marx and Althusser about the status of the commodity and the question of ideology, I want to bring my response to a close by bringing the reader’s attention—and Adler’s—to some of his concluding remarks in the penultimate chapter, which deal explicitly with the limits of Heidegger’s thinking as they are disclosed by the life of the “gadget-commodity.”4

For Adler, the “commodity gadget” takes Dasein’s place, indeed we could even say that it becomes Dasein to the extent that it becomes the very Da- of Da-sein, occurring itself properly by appropriating for itself the place in which the play of unconcealment and concealment unfolds as its innermost property, forcing our own “Dasein” to be a simple witness to its “truthless truth.” Although later on Adler adds that “we are not quite there yet” (130), we can see the kind of history that Adler is beginning to intimate here: a history in which “surplus value” would become fully autonomous with regards to both “use value” and “exchange value,” a history of consumption in which the only truth will be the “truthless” truth of the commodity, whose value itself is nothing other than “play” as the value of all values, beyond any use and any exchange (130). It is from the perspective of this dangerous history, which is already here and yet remains to come, that Heidegger’s thinking appears as not quite up to the task: “The more that thinking thinks it has evaded the danger by becoming once again receptive to being, the greater the danger becomes, since it is precisely as a kind of commodity-forgetfulness, and indeed commodity-self-forgetfulness, rather than the forgetfulness of being, that the commodity will seek to take the play of the truth upon itself” (129).

Still, what of truth? And of the “truthless” truth of the commodity? From where can “we” anticipate that what awaits us while already being here is a situation of truthlessness? In spite of all appearances, Adler is not arguing for a return to a humanism, not even of a Heideggerian kind, even if his text operates for the most part within a tone that is certainly closer to the explicit and implicit humanisms of thinkers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, or Adorno, than to the less humanist tones of Derrida or Deleuze. And yet, the identification of thinking with the task of exposing “the life of the thing” to a “third” life that would neither be that of the commodity nor of Dasein seems to me rather unconvincing (130). And for two main reasons, which are interrelated. On the one hand, because the constellation of terms that are brought together to scaffold the articulation of this task are, at best, problematic. For, according to Adler, in order to accomplish this task one must commit oneself to the following: )a) philosophy must be the distinction between truth and non-truth, (b) the philosopher must commit to such an understanding of this task (commit to commitment), (c) only on the basis of such a de-cision will the political become possible, (d) truth is perhaps nothing other than responsibility to the new “being(s),” (e) praxis is political when it tends “toward” truth, rather than, as one is supposed to assume is the case now and will continue to be in the future, “untruth” (131). My question to Adler is this: How will the truth of being(s), which up to this point has been identified exclusively with the truthlessness of a commodity and its celebrity—best “exemplified” in its a-phenomenality by Madonna’s music videos and K-Pop girl groups—how will this truthless truth become the play of truth? Is it a matter of both affirming this truthlessness of commodities and affirming our responsibility for the fact that they have been produced? Or does Adler envision a more profound transformation? Given that a certain untruth belongs to the play of truth if this play is to be a play at all, then what is Adler inviting us to think and, above all, to do when he calls us to philosophy’s political task and understands the latter as the reassertion of truth against untruth, which could well be the inaugural decision that founds both the philosophy and the politics that Adler suggests has already reached its point of exhaustion?

While echoing my earlier excursus, the second reason why I remain dissatisfied with Adler at this point also addresses the status of truth in his thinking. Adler’s analyses of celebricity through the exposition of “things” such as “Michael Jackson,” The Gilmore Girls, Seinfeld, and, my personal favorite, Frasier, are not only incredibly lucid but philosophically stimulating. It is truly a joy to read theoretical writing so beautiful and rigorous. That said, his analyses of Madonna, of K-Pop girl groups, and of any other “being(s)” that bring up the question of sexual difference strike me as indicative of Adler’s willingness to repeat, without at all displacing or troubling, the phallogocentrism that is part and parcel of Western philosophy’s determination of truth as unconcealment. Indeed, at times it is clear that, for Adler, the truthless truth of the commodity is, as in Nietzsche, a “woman,” but one that at first seems to have been produced by an objectifying male gaze but then “banishes every trace of the masculine or reduces it to a position of mere servitude and secondary objectification” (129). Though remarks like these have helped me to understand Benjamin’s remarks about the commodity as a prostitute, I am not entirely sure that I am willing to follow Adler as he repeats this particular tradition of thinking of truth, the commodity, and the truth of the commodity, as a woman. This is not at all to suggest that Adler’s analyses are sexist, but rather to point out that the horizon in which his writing unfolds, with striking confidence and remarkable comfort, seems to rely precisely on a constellation of traditional concepts, names, and metaphors that bring with them “old horizons of understanding” (131), at the moment in which, according to Adler himself, what is needed is to take political responsibility for the new as the truthful event of the play of truth.

This hesitation leads me to one last thought. More than a thought, it is a hunch that persists in the midst of the excitement that I still feel after having finished reading a book as brilliant and as innovative as Celebricities. For I almost feel as if there were a certain necessity to some of Adler’s decisions—even when he explicitly claims to have decided for in-decision, for instance, between “being” and “beings” (75)—and as if this necessity became more patently obvious in those moments in Adler’s text in which he engages—or, to be more precise, dismisses, if not disavows—Derrida’s deconstruction as an ineffectual theoretical exercise that consists in turning the very singularity of the “opening of language” into quasi-ultra-transcendental condition (161), or simply as an ethics of the Other that, in fact, plays into the commodity’s play all the more as it claims to expose itself to the “to come.” Though Adler’s decision against Derrida is understandable and to a certain extent justified—especially if this decision is more a decision against a certain strand in his reception that remains content with identifying the ultra-transcendental conditions of deconstruction as the ur-logic of life as such—I cannot help the thought that the situation is more complicated and that, a more open engagement with Derrida’s writings would have perhaps modified, in a way that Heidegger’s history of beyng couldn’t, the desire for philosophy as the name for the decision of what is truth and nontruth. To no longer write under the drive of this philosophical desire does not necessarily mean to surrender oneself without any form of vigilance or resistance to the commodity, but it may well trouble the very understanding of what Adler calls, in an attempt to best Heidegger at his own game, “the greatest danger.” Perhaps rather than identifying the “highest” or the “greatest” danger, we need to start thinking about “danger(s),” beginning with the “dangerous perhaps.” At any rate, if the thought of the “dangerous perhaps” were something that Adler’s book could not necessarily digest without undergoing a radical alteration, then perhaps we should leave it there. Future readers, myself included, will be grateful enough for the courageous volume that has been given to them.