ABSTRACT
Life in bourgeois society is contained within a series of inescapable contradictions.
No description of the human reality of capitalism can resist, nor any history of its culture avoid, the brutalizing exclusiveness engendered by almost 400 years of inconclusive struggle. Its loving polarities, subject/ object, mind/matter, theory/fact, form/ content, being/nothingness, exchange/use, are so many ways of rendering experience coherent by dividing it against itself. In its world all possible phenomena are categorized through the successive invocation of a universal Either/Or. In this, of course, bourgeois society is not unique. ‘Dual organization’ is the central organizing principle of many cultures.1 And the bourgeois world cannot be defined, therefore, solely in terms of such formalisms; it must be described by reference to the entire range of social meanings embedded in the antagonistic differences specific to its ideal order.
