Alfonso Iacono

Both Marx and Wittgenstein reject the Renaissance and Cartesian epistemological assumption, born with the invention of the linear perspective, according to which depth is associated with distance and knowledge is based on the correspondence between subject and object. Karl Marx, in explaining what the fetish character of the commodity is, states that 'things appear as what they are'. If so, then the truth is found in the plots of appearance just as the depth must be discovered on the surface. 'The depth must be hidden, declares Hugo von Hofmannstahl. Where is it? On the surface.' And Italo Calvino juxtaposes this observation with Wittgenstein's: 'What is hidden, we are not interested'.

In Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, written after the fall of the Berlin wall and in controversary with Fukuyama’s book about the end of History, he points out that when Marx talks about commodity fetishism in his book Capital he refers to the dancing tables of a spiritualistic séance, and when he gives the example of the table, he uses the term auftritt which means enters the stage. A table is a table when it has use-value and is made of wood, an organic material that takes shape, it changes and transforms itself, but it is still wood. When Marx refers to the table as a commodity which is ‘sensuously supersensitive’, placing the accent on the adverb ‘sensuously’, he emphasizes materiality, that is, a referent that is not an original, but a support that has to have a physical dimension. It is supersensitive because the table has an exchange value which is its representation of the use-value, exceeding reality while representing it. This excess is both the visible and invisible: the exchange is visible as the result of social labour, of the cooperation among men, of a collective process, it remains invisible. In commodity the immateriality of human and social relationships is presented as an exchange of relations.

Starting from the problem of correspondence between words and things, immagine and objects, I analyze Wittgenstein’s notion of übersichtlichen Darstellung in relation with comprehension. This relation is possible thanks to our capacity to see connections. The thesis I support claims that, in order to clarify this point, it is important to take into consideration Spengler’s Philosophy, that is undoubtedly a Wittgenstein’s source. I also refer to Goethe, who is called by Wittgenstein against Spengler on the topic of the distinction between the experimenter subject and object of the experimentation.