Monstrous, Alienated, and Still Labouring Dead Philosophers: Karl Marx ('with Chinese characteristics' and 'chthulumedia' features') meets Confucius … in a crepuscular theory crystal

Abstract

This essay explores the Chinese “TV Theory Film” When Marx Met Confucius, which surfaced in 2023 charged with complex political, ethical, and philosophical tensions. Engaging several of these, the paper argues that the live-action portrayal of Kong fuzi (Master Confucius) alongside a ‘Deepfaked’ Karl Marx, and a chaotic constellation of other Chinese politico-philosophical icons, appear designed to dislodge a potent political image of deep Chinese time—one that the crystalline theories of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze can help us to politically deconstruct and map. The reanimated aesthetic figures of dead philosophers intellectually performing therein are also discussed as being doubly or even trebly “monstrous”: first, in Marx’s sense of how alienated workers become dismembered and dis-organ-ised monsters under systems of capitalism; second, through Deleuze’s notion of the history of philosophy producing mutant “monsters” made to speak whatever their creators dictate. In this case, Marx and Confucius function as monstrous philosophical personae—intercessors for an absent-present author, one articulated through the master signifier of what is known as “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture.” However, these propagandised images of still-labouring dead philosophers also betray a mutation in semicapitalist desires for technological monstration. For, newfangled non-human software actors gesture us towards the weird agencies of deceptive, and con-trolling forms of “chthulumedia,” which help to reify a synthetic and syncretic version of “Marxism with Chinese characteristics.” With this exposing in turn another facet of, what we might call after Benjamin, a “small crystal of the total event,” or what Deleuze might frame as a disjunctive crystalline synthesis. By such means the paper identifies a new twist to the ‘Lazarean’ return of long dead philosophers for political work in the remediated present.