Marx’s fateful term, subsumption. Subsumption means turning heterogeneities into homogeneities, subsuming them under abstractions (which are by definition idealisms), standardizing the multiplicity of the world and making it into that terrible thing that was to have been avoided at all costs, namely the One as such.

think of postmodern futurities as compensations for a present time paralysed in its protentions and retentions (to use Husserl’s language)

The world financial market is mirrored in the world art market, thrown open by the end of modernism and its Eurocentric canon of masterworks, along with the implicit or explicit teleology that informed it.

inasmuch as these constitute the doxa or the widespread opinions of the current moment, I am certainly not immune to their influence and attraction

We are in other words so completely submerged in the human world, in what Heidegger called the ontic, that we have little time any longer for what he liked to call the question of Being.

For the question of universals, which is also the question not of particulars but of singularities, was at the heart of the old medieval controversy around nominalism: and the latter asserted that universals were little more than words and verbal abstractions, flatus vocis, which had no relevance to the world of truly individual things and items, a world of singularities

The end of the bourgeois subject has traditionally been framed in terms of the growth of the monopolies, the end of classical free enterprise, and the proliferation of what was once known as ‘organization man’.

underdeveloped or weak or subaltern cultures,

How can culture and subjectivity not be transformed, when opened to the vicissitudes of this vaster landscape and population which is globalization itself?

they functioned as vanishing mediators—destructive operations which, by some Hegelian ruse of history, clear the terrain for new and unexpected developments