more reification

It also presents the most sophisticated Marxist case for considering an object free of its systematic attachments:
It is only infatuation (with the object contemplated), the unjust disregard for the claims of every existing thing, that does justice to what exists…. The existent’s one-sidedness is comprehended as its being, and reconciled. (76)
Adorno’s praise for the “sabbath eyes… that save in their object something of the calm of the day of its creation” (76) is beautiful. But it is also influenced, indeed fatally compromised, by the existentialism that he elsewhere denounces. To speak of toy trains climbing free of the exchange-value system and its compulsions is to posit that the linguistic system, and the taxonomic ordering of the world, are cognate with a system of political oppression-- a system from which escape is possible. Similarly, in most modernist writing, there remains an assumption that objects are able somehow to gain “freedom” from systematic classification, just as the autonomous human in existentialist accounts is said to rise clear of an obligatory world to gain a life in the moment of choice. In such accounts, the negative space from which a three-dimensional animate object springs erect -- is either ignored or (systematically) trivialized to the point of nonexistence.

- John Plotz, “Objects of Abjection: The Animation of Difference in Jean Genet’s Novels,” 103, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 44, No. 1, (Spring 1998)