Abstract

The current political climate of uncompromising neoliberalism means that the need to study the logic of our culture that is, the logic of the capitalist system is compelling. Providing a rich philosophical analysis of democracy from a negative, non-identity, dialectical perspective, Vasilis Grollios encourages the reader not to think of democracy as a call for a more effective domination of the people or as a demand for the replacement of the elite that currently holds power. In doing so, he aspires to fill in a gap in the literature by offering an out of the mainstream overview of the key concepts of totality, negativity, fetishization, contradiction, identity thinking, dialectics and corporeal materialism as they have been employed by the major thinkers of the critical theory tradition Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Bloch and Holloway. The concepts of the spell and all its implications, contradiction and of fetishism as a process played in them a common defining role. The author makes an innovative attempt to bring these concepts to light in terms of their practical relevance for contemporary democratic theory.