Th is text, fi rst published in Deleuze and Music, edited by Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 54–74, Nick Nesbitt compares Th eodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectical approach with Gilles Deleuze’s antidialectical approach to the question of multiplicity and diff erentiation within music. Nesbitt concludes with a consideration of the attempts made to address the problem in the work of important twentieth-century musicians, particularly that of John Coltrane. Th e Czech translation here is by Marta Martinová and Michal Jurza.
Th e article distinguishes between two fundamental dynamics in Marx’s critique of capitalism: the humanist, cyclical, perpetually-renewed struggle between capitalists and wage labor over profi ts, wages, and the distribution of social wealth more generally and what I term a “posthuman” dialectic between humans and machines, unfolding as the unilinear historical dynamic of automation and the corresponding decreases it brings to the capacity of living labor to produce surplus value. Th e consequence of this posthuman dialectic is both the growing superfl uity of living labor relegated to a planet of slums and the actual and coming collapse of valorization as a global process (as opposed to its operation in any single unit of capital). If the former, humanist dialectic remained predominant in what Moishe Postone has termed “traditional” Leninist Marxism, the contemporary context of the “Second Machine-Age” and the expanding automation of virtually all production and services points to a collapse of valorization that philosophers such as Michel Henry and Robert Kurz identifi ed in Marx’s conceptualization of capitalism as “the moving contradiction.”