History, Georg Simmel tells us, consist of a conflict between life and form. Life—the physical and biological basis of existence—is, in itself, bereft of culture and devoid of form. Through culture, however, the energies life harbors can become manifest. “We speak of culture,” Simmel writes, “whenever life produces certain forms in which it expresses and realizes itself; works of art, religions, sciences, technologies, laws, and innumerable others.” Life, in this way, produces something related to yet different from itself: “Life as such is formless, yet incessantly generates forms for itself.” Though form proceeds from life, conflict between them is unavoidable. Form struggles to liberate itself from the “pulse of life,” while life attempts to draw form back into its own “immediacy,” in a gambit to reduce culture's achievements to “direct manifestations of life.” The unprecedented character of modern culture, Simmel maintained, lies in the fact that life's forces were henceforth targeting the very “principle of form.” In the latest and most radical round of this conflict, life's cultural partisans assert that they no longer need the opaque and alien resources of form to express life's energies; form can be jettisoned, mediation dispensed with, and life can exist and relish its powers in their most unalloyed purity.

Marx's Fate begins with a quote from W. B. Yeats, who says that he “often has had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.” There is no one Myth for anyone, including Jerry Seigel, but there is, I think, in his work an “inner sameness and continuity,” as Erik Erikson would put it, which is matched, once we reflect on the matter, by a “continuity of [his] meaning for others.”