Dedication The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter's con- ersion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an or substance of its own. He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objec tive powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewellery, and make people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as if they still had the actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer. But the relation between life and production, which in reali ases the former to an ephemeral appearance of the latter, is totally absurd Means and end are inverted. a dim awareness of this perverse quid pro quo has still not been quite eradicated from life Reduced and degraded essence tenaciously resists the magic that transforms it into a fagade. The change in the relations of produc tion themselves depends largely on what takes place in the'sphere cature of true life: in the consciousness and unconsciousness of ndividuals. OnI by virtue of opposition to production, as still not wholly encompassed by this order, can men bring about another more worthy of human beings. Should the appearance of life, which the sphere of consumption itself defends for such bad reasons, be once entirely effaced, then the monstrosity of absolute Nevertheless, considerations which start from the subject remain false to the same extent that life has become appearance. For since the overwhelm g objectivity of historical movement in its present