Vasilis Grollios is currently an independent postdoctoral researcher and author of the new book, Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory: A study of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis and the Situationists. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Grollios discusses how this book fits in with his larger research project in Marxist critical theory, his reason for including Cornelius Castoriadis in his analysis, and its relevance to our everyday life and ways of relating to one another.
How does your book fit in with your larger research project?
In my view, the tradition of the early Frankfurt school and critical theory follows the analysis of what Marx called an ‘enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world’ (pp. 817). This topsy-turvy world is one in which people are treated as ‘personifications of economic categories’ (pp. 10) and live under the domination of inverted, distorted forms (such as the state, parliamentary representative democracy, and value as money) that express the perverted form that their actions must take in order for money to multiply continually, because that is the core logic of capitalism. The alienation and suffering met in everyday life, while people attempt to adjust themselves to the demands of ‘time is money’, expresses itself as the different social forms like state, the bourgeois form of democracy, capital, or money. Thus, under capitalist conditions of production, and within the inverted and distorted political forms corresponding to it, the manner in which people come into contact with one another in order to satisfy their basic human needs is mediated through money, and the conditions under which working people must satisfy their needs leads primarily the self-valorization of capital and only secondarily, if at all, to the satisfaction of the material needs of the actual producers of the social wealth. Rather than individuals becoming the real subject of history, capital becomes the subject and uses people to its own ends. What could be more irrational than this?
For Marxist Critical Theory, fetishism is a phenomenon connected to more than simply the product of our labor and it extends rather well beyond the economic sphere narrowly conceived. Marx’s concept of the ‘inverted’ ‘topsy-turvy world’ implies that fetishism should be understood as a general phenomenon that permeates the entire spectrum of our daily lives. In this philosophical tradition, which began with Marx, dialectics is the study of the intertwinement of form/appearance and essence/content. To put it otherwise, in the critical theory/‘Open Marxist’ philosophical tradition, dialectics is neither simply the study of the laws of history nor the historical tendencies that have developed, but rather the study of the mediation, the intertwinement of form/appearance and essence/content.
Dialectical thinking opens up the fetishized, objectified forms, like the state is, by revealing their origin in our alienated labor. Through this, it reveals their inherently negative character. In so doing, it exposes their inherently negative character. No matter how tightly bound the forms/appearances are or how closed and fetishized they appear to be, they cannot hide the negation that lies at the heart of their essence: the fact that the system fails us.
My first book attempted to plug a gap in the literature by offering an unorthodox overview of the key concepts employed by the major thinkers of the critical theory tradition: Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Bloch and Holloway, namely: totality, negativity, fetishization, contradiction, identity thinking, dialectics, and corporeal materialism. It would be wise, therefore, to be aware of the fact that Leninism is not the only line of thinking that originates from Marx’s dialectics. There is a second reading, an anti-Leninist one, that is based in Marx, that is critical Marxism, otherwise known as the ‘Open’ Marxist tradition. The second book follows and extends this path of thinking.
What is your work about?
The second book published this year, is essentially the continuation of the problematic of the first, since it uniquely examines, through the lens of Adorno’s negative dialectics, i.e. through the aforementioned dialectic between social fetishized and illusory forms of appearance and content/essence/class struggle, the work of Nietzsche, Benjamin, and the Situationists, who put the concept of illusion at the forefront of their philosophy and attempted to show how capitalism, by its innate rationale, creates social forms, such as the bourgeois-liberal-representative form of democracy, that seem inevitable. The novelty of my approach is that I have identified this dialectic also to Nietzsche, Benjamin, and the Situationists. Hopefully, this also explains why I include these philosophers in the book. I do so because they are much closer to this kind of dialectic and, consequentially, to Open Marxism/critical theory, than previously thought. The unified purpose of the book is to show that these political philosophers, have up to now been considered wrongly by many scholars to be far from the line of thinking of the early Frankfurt School of Critical Theory furthered by the “Open Marxist’ tradition.
Castoriadis does not maintain such a dialectic, but I would be remiss if I did not include him in the book, first, because my analysis on him better clarifies the overall project, that is the concept of illusion and the open character of the concepts in the other philosophers mentioned in the book, second, because he is famous for having elaborated, from an anti-capitalist standpoint, the concept of the imaginary and of illusion, which is the most important concept of my book and lastly, because he also holds the idea of the open character of the concepts, like, in my view, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and the Situationists do. I also examine his theory through a negative dialectics/Open Marxism standpoint, that is through the dialectic between form/content and this sheds new light on his work. Although he is judged by other scholars to be a critical theorist, he does not follow, at least for my special reading, the Open Marxism/negative dialectic understanding of critique. So, I tame the radical character of his concept of the imaginary.
How is your work relevant to everyday life?
Marx underlined in the introduction to Capital that ‘here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are ‘the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests’ (pp. 10). So the key dialectical question is how are people made into embodiments of opposed class interests, while they only attempt to make a living, to survive the fierce competition in capitalism? This is not a question of personal ethics. One has to analyze the mad rationale of the capitalist system in order to answer it. I support the original idea that the philosophers analyzed in this book, attempted exactly that.
The book aspires to offer a special overview of the main concepts, such as madness, illusion, totality, fetishization, contradiction, mystification, identity thinking, dialectics, in the theory of the above political and social philosophers and attempts to assess how their understanding of critique can help us open cracks in capitalism today, that is how we could conduct revolution in everyday life and not towards the state and therefore, radicalize democratic social practice today. John Holloway, the well-known Open Marxist, was absolutely accurate when he wrote in the preface:
‘Mad, All of them, all of us, Vasilis Grollios is mad too […] Vasilis takes us into the world of mad misfits- Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis and the Situationists- and reads them very consciously and carefully from the perspective of his own mad misfitting.’
By misfits he means that we do not endorse and fully form our living according to the rationale of the capitalist mode of production that is competition, accumulation of profit, by following the mentality of ‘time is money’. If you are curious to read how these philosophers shattered this rationale, maybe you are mad and a misfit too…hahaha. In this case, you should be proud of being mad in this sense, because you promote the crisis of capital.
What’s next for you?
These two books attempt to fill a gap I identified in the literature in the early years of my graduate studies, at the beginning of the 2000s, when I was looking, in vain, for a book about the methodology of the radical or socialist democracy, not from a historical viewpoint but from a philosophical perspective. I am now conducting research for a third book that will promote and investigate the idea of the enchanted, topsy-turvy, mad world to the French political philosophy and more specifically to Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Foucault. I have almost finished the chapter on Baudrillard and I uniquely read him as an open Marxist, since his theory revolves around this dialectic between social naturalized forms-appearance and content-essence- alienated labor, while he attempts to study the madness we live in.
What effect do you hope your work will have?
I would be very happy if I could shake even a little bit the mainstream understanding scholars have on the philosophers I analyze in my two books. They are hardly ever read as thinkers who based their philosophy in a theory of alienation in everyday living and investigated how this is the inner-hidden essence/content of the apparent social forms like the state or the bourgeois-liberal so-called democracy is. This is a heretical standpoint, very far from mainstream reading. I understand that a scholar feels very suspicious about the validity of studies that explode what she believes about a philosopher who she might have studied even for decades. I am also aware that with the intensification of her university duties it is hard to find time for such ‘weird’ studies, but I hope that, maybe, one could at least give my two books a chance. They are heavily cited. I think I do substantiate my arguments. So even if someone does not agree with my general standpoint, she would find at least some food for thought.
"Vasilis Grollios’ new book is a distinctive and important contribution to contemporary Critical Theory. In a series of innovative readings of Benjamin, Castoriadis, the Situationists and above all Nietzsche, he shows how they contribute to the tradition of Open Marxism based in the work of the early Frankfurt School. This book will be of interest to political philosophers, activists and all those interested in the pursuit of new pathways beyond the social and political forms of capitalist society." - Paul Patton, Hongyi Chair Professor of Philosophy School of Philosophy, Wuhan University
"In this exciting and important book, Vasilis Grollios looks at the complex relationship between the fetishism of the social forms and material essence through the lens of a negative dialectic. Working off his previous book on this subject, Grollios explores Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis and the Situationists in order to reveal how each of these thinkers engages in fundamentally Marxist understandings of this relationship without replicating the dangers that come from what might be called a positive dialectical outlook. This work is not hagiographic. These thinkers come in for their share of criticism but overall, Grollios shows how these authors demonstrate the power of materiality to resist phantasms of capitalism and how class struggle and alienation remain at the center of contemporary politics." - James Martel, Professor, Department of Political Science, San Francisco State University
Vasilis Grollios
Vasilis Grollios is currently an independent postdoctoral researcher. He holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, where he has taken all his degrees (B.A., M.A. in the history of philosophy and Ph.D.). He completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Greek Institute of Research and Technology, and has taught at various Greek universities. Grollios is the author of Negativity and Democracy. Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition (Routledge 2017) and has been published in academic journals such as Constellations, Critical Sociology, and Philosophy and Social Criticism.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
