November 2011
20 posts
Today I’m leaving for two months of intensive vipassana at the Hse Main Gon forest meditation centre in Burma. I may not continue posting when I return, but if I do it will be fairy sparse, so I wanted to take this opportunity to thank those of you here who I don’t really interact with but have gained a lot from, both intellectually and emotionally, in the past year. To all the people I...
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If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths” — that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite...
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“What does the value of primordial presence to intuition as source of sense and...”
– Jacques Derrida: Speech and Phenomena
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Playwrights often overdo the clever line or turn as the curtain’s about to fall. It shows lack of taste. You don’t find it in good plays.
The strange thing is that when people come together in a community for the purpose, simply, of production, or for reasons of geography, they start to hate each other and do one another down. Because each one only loves himself. Community is an illusion, as a...
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Beethoven: Concerto in D Major, Op. 61- I. Allegro...
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“As a child, Adorno would often visit the Frankfurt zoo, accompanied by his...”
– Robert Savage: Adorno’s Family and Other Animals
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Aesthetic truth was bound to the expression of the untruth of bourgeois society. Art really only exists as long as it is impossible by virtue of the order which it transcends. That is why the existence of all the great forms of art is paradoxical, and more than all the others that of the novel, the bourgeois art form par excellence which the film has now appropriated for itself. Today with the...
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“In the commodity fetishists of the new model, in the ‘sado-masochistic...”
– Theodor Adorno: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening
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“The change in the function of music involves the basic conditions of the...”
– Theodor Adorno: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening
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“The themes of the Judaeo-Christian heritage help to explain the cultural, but...”
– Jürgen Habermas: A Conversation About God and the World
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“This is Hegel’s reading of the actual significance and deep meaning of the...”
– Robert Brandom: A Spirit of Trust
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“The most tremendous thing which has been granted to man is: the choice, freedom....”
– Kierkegaard: Journals
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October 2011
19 posts
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“Enlightenment depends upon myth, it depends upon the entire range of...”
– J.M. Bernstein: Adorno, Disenchantment and Ethics.
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“Enlightenment and myth each contain, at least, a double signification....”
– J.M. Bernstein: Adorno, Disenchantment and Ethics.