Celebricities: Media Culture and the Phenomenology of Gadget Commodity Life

What becomes of life, experience, and truth in the hyperconsumeristic culture of the twenty-first century? What happens to the phenomenological call to go “back to the things themselves” when these things, to an ever greater degree, involve a televised life that is not ours to live, celebrities who are utterly like us yet infinitely untouchable, and uncannily pluripotent electronic gadgets? Combining sustained philosophical inquiry with fragmentary and experimental theoretical interventions, Anthony Curtis Adler rethinks Marxist materialism and the Heideggerian project in terms of the singular experiences of late capitalism. In doing so, he reveals how the disarticulation of life via the commodity fetish demands at once a new notion of phenomenological method and an ontology oriented toward the radical contingency of being itself as transcendental ground.