Searching for Traces: From Adorno to Zizek

According to Zhang Yibing, the tradition of Western Marxism ended as early as 1968 after the publication of Adorno's Negative Dialectic. Thus the theoretical foundations of authentic Marxism and a substantial criticism of capitalism were abandoned in favor of an increasingly idealistic cultural criticism. Beginning in 1968 this new theoretical current split into three different lines: post-Marxian thought current, postmodern Marxism and late Marxism. All three currents are united by the departure from basic Marxist theses and basic concepts. Whether Adorno with Negative Dialectic, Debord with Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels,Derrida with Marx's Ghosts or Žižek with The Sublime Object of Ideology - they all have in common an instrumentalization of Marxist terminology in the sense of an ultimately idealistic theory of postmodernism. In the present volume, Zhang analyzes the main works of these currents and shows that they have nothing to do with Marxism, but much to do with theoretical relapse.