The Commodity Screams: Adorno, Moten, and Marx

Today we’re joined by returning champion Will to discuss the links between the work of Theodor Adorno and Fred Moten on questions of value theory, negative dialectics, and domination. In particular, we’re going to be focusing on the violent domination at the heart of the commodity, a violence exemplified in confronting and re-historicizing Marx’s notion of the commodity that speaks—a commodity which in the introductory essay to his book In the Break, Moten explores through the enslaved person. Moten not only draws upon a negative dialectic of value and non-value but also from Saussure, Glissant, Hartman, Douglass, and Derrida to conceptualize a commodity which not only speaks, but one which screams—rupturing the erasure of its inherent dignity and value in everyday exchange, and allowing both suffering and resistance to appear in its sonic performance. 

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