I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government. the cafe-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone, the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Negro's dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night.
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Fragments of social theory, western Marxism, sexual politics, continental philosophy and high modernism.
Melbourne, Australia.
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There is no exit from the entanglement. The only responsible option is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence, and as for the rest, to behave in private as modestly, inconspicuously and unpretentiously as required, not for reasons of good upbringing, but because of the shame of still having air to breathe in hell.
"Enlightenment depends upon myth, it depends upon the entire range of anthropomorphisms for the possibility of enacting its skeptical reflections. Without material to negate, there can be no enlightenment…the dialectic of enlightenment is a dialectic of claimed interdependence and disavowed dependence; and thus in the same way in which the master in Hegel’s version of the dialectic of independence and dependence, through and in virtue of his claim to absolute independence, becomes the slave of the slave, so in Adorno and Horkheimer’s rationality version of this dialectic enlightenment “reverts” to myth, to mythic stasis, to the inertia of the master: a final physical theory, the principles of reason, a will without anything worth willing."
J.M. Bernstein: Adorno, Disenchantment and Ethics.