Mindful Pleasures

At this point then we find ourselves really and truly in a contradictory situation. We need to hold...

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:41:00 +1000

At this point then we find ourselves really and truly in a contradictory situation. We need to hold fast to moral norms, to self-criticism, to the question of right and wrong, and at at the same time to a sense of the fallibility of the authority that has the confidence to undertake such self-criticism. I am reluctant to the the term ‘humanity’ at this juncture since it is one of the expressions that reify and hence falsify crucial issues merely by speaking of them. When the founders of the Humanist Union invited me to become a member, I replied that ‘I might possibly be willing to join if your club had been called an inhuman union, but I could not join one that calls itself “humanist.”’ So if I am to use the term here then an indispensable part of a humanity that reflects on itself is that we should not allow ourselves to be diverted. There has to be an element of unswerving persistence, of holding fast to what we think we have learnt from experience, and on the other hand, we need an element not just of self-criticism, but of criticism of that unyielding, inexorable something that sets itself up in us. In other words, what is needed above all is that consciousness of our own fallibility, and in that respect I would say that the element of self-reflection has today become the true heir to what used to be called moral categories. This means that if today we can at all say that subjectivity there is something like a threshold, a distinction between a right life and a wrong one, we are likely to find it soonest in asking whether a person is just hitting out blindly at other people - while claiming that the group to which he belongs is the only positive one, and other groups should be negated - or whether by reflecting on our own limitations we can learn to do justice to those who are different, and to realize that true injustice is always to be found at the precise point where you put yourself in the right and other people in the wrong. Hence to abstain from self-assertiveness- and this goes right up to the metaphysics of death and the defiant self such as can still be found in Heidegger’s ‘resoluteness’ - seems to me to be the crucial thing to ask from individuals today. In other words, if you were to press me to follow the example of the Ancients and make a list of the cardinal virtues, I would probably respond cryptically by saying that I could think of nothing except for modesty.

T.W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, Lecture 17

Now this opposition does not arise for consciousness in the restricted sphere of moral action alone;...

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:12:00 +1000

Now this opposition does not arise for consciousness in the restricted sphere of moral action alone; it emerges in a thoroughgoing cleavage and opposition between what is absolute and what is external reality and existence. Taken quite abstractly, it is the opposition of universal and particular, when each is fixed over against the other on its own account in the same way; more concretely, it appears in nature as the opposition of the abstract law to the abundance of individual phenomena, each explicitly with its own character; in the spirit it appears as the contrast between the sensuous and the spiritual in man, as the battle of spirit against flesh, of duty for duty’s sake, of the cold command against particular interest, warmth of heart, sensuous inclinations and impulses, against the individual disposition in general; as the harsh opposition between inner freedom and the necessity of external nature, further as the contradiction between the dead inherently empty concept, and the full concreteness of life, between theory or subjective thinking, and objective existence and experience.

These are oppositions which have not been invented at all by the subtlety of reflection or the pedantry of philosophy; in numerous forms they have always preoccupied and troubled the human consciousness, even if it is modern culture that has first worked them out most sharply and driven them up to the peak of harshest contradiction. Spiritual culture, the modern intellect, produces this opposition in man which makes him an amphibious animal, because he now has to live in two worlds which contradict one another. The result is that now consciousness wanders about in this contradiction, and, driven from one side to the other, cannot find satisfaction for itself in either the one or the other. For on the one side we see man imprisoned in the common world of reality and earthly temporality, borne down by need and poverty, hard pressed by nature, enmeshed in matter, sensuous ends and their enjoyment, mastered and carried away by natural impulses and passions. On the other side, he lifts himself to eternal ideas, to a realm of thought and freedom, gives to himself, as will, universal laws and prescriptions, strips the world of its enlivened and flowering reality and dissolves it into abstractions, since the spirit now upholds its right and dignity only by mishandling nature and denying its right, and so retaliates on nature the distress and violence which it has suffered from it itself. But for modern culture and its intellect this discordance in life and consciousness involves the demand that such a contradiction be resolved.

G. W. F. Hegel: Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, p. 53

And even if art restricts itself to setting up pictures of passions for contemplation, even if...

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:08:00 +1000

And even if art restricts itself to setting up pictures of passions for contemplation, even if indeed it were to flatter them, still there is here already a power of mitigation, since thereby a man is at least made aware of what otherwise he only immediately is. For then the man contemplates his impulses and inclinations, and while previously they carried him reflection-less away, he now sees them outside himself and already begins to be free from them because they confront him as something objective.

G. W. F. Hegel: Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, p. 48.

T.W. Adorno: 14th Lecture on Metaphysics (15th July 1965)

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 22:16:06 +1100

At the end of the last lecture I attempted to explain why temporal elements decisively affect our thinking about metaphysics, and have a bearing on metaphysical experience itself. And I should like to say to you straight away that it would be mistaken to take these comments in a purely subjective sense - as meaning that it is more difficult to have metaphysical experiences under present conditions. That would be a complete misunderstanding of what I wish to communicate to you in words which inevitably are far too insipid. Naturally, the subjective difficulty also exists, but given the intertwinement between subjective experience and the objective in this sphere, the two cannot be separated as neatly as it might appear to a naive, unreflecting consciousness, which says that all this just depends on how one happens to feel towards metaphysics today, but changes nothing at all in its objective contents. My thesis is directed against precisely this attitude, and you will only understand me correctly if you take what I have to say in the strong and far from innocuous sense in which it is meant. You will have noticed from my analyses and expositions of Aristotle’s Metaphysics how far this whole metaphysics is filled by the affirmative side forgive me, something can hardly be filled by a ‘side’ - how fundamental the affirmative moment is to this whole conception of metaphysics. You will therefore have seen how far the theory that, even without a divine influence, being is teleologically orientated towards the divine by its own nature - how far that implies that what is meaningful. From this Aristotle draws the conclusion – I mention this to make fully clear the metaphysical problem which concerns me here - that matter - as that which is represented by possibility, must be endowed with some kind of purposiveness; and he argues this even despite the fact that it is in some contradiction to his own doctrine of possibility as wholly abstract and indeterminate.

In face of the experiences we have had, not only through Auschwitz but through the introduction of torture as a permanent institution and through the atomic bomb - all these things form a kind of coherence, a hellish unity - in face of these experiences the assertion that what is has meaning, and the affirmative character which has been attributed to metaphysics almost without exception, become a mockery; and in face of the victims it becomes downright immoral. For anyone who allows himself to be fobbed off with such meaning moderates in some way the unspeakable and irreparable things which have happened by conceding that somehow, in a secret order of being, all this will have had some kind of purpose. In other words, it might be said that in view of what we have experienced - and let me say that it is also experienced by those on whom it was not directly perpetrated - there can be no one, whose organ of experience has not entirely atrophied, for whom the world after Auschwitz, that is, the world in which Auschwitz was possible, is the same world as it was before. And I believe that if one observes and analyses oneself closely, one will find that the awareness of living in a world in which that is possible - is possible again and is possible for the first time - plays a quite crucial role even in one’s most secret reactions.

I would say, therefore, that these experiences have a compelling universality, and that one would indeed have to be blind to the world’s course if one were to wish not to have these experiences. In view of them, the assertion of a purpose or meaning which is formally embedded in metaphysics is transformed into ideology, that is to say, into an empty solace which at the same time fulfils a very precise function in the world as it is: that of keeping people in line. No doubt metaphysics has always had its ideological aspects, and it is not difficult to demonstrate in detail in what ways the great metaphysical systems have functioned ideologically. But unless I am mistaken something like a qualitative leap has taken place at this point. That is to say that although the old metaphysical systems transfigured the existing order by insisting on this moment of meaning, they always had the moment of truth at the same time; they tried to understand that which is, and to gain certainty about the enigmatic and chaotic. And one could always demonstrate in the older metaphysics, no less than in their ideological character, this moment of truth, this increasing power of reason to understand what is opposed to it, and not to be content with mere irrationality. This can be seen most splendidly in the metaphysics of St Thomas Aquinas, which is an attempt to bring Christian doctrine into agreement with speculative thought, and therein has the potential to transform what is merely posited and inculcated dogmatically into a kind of critique - however positive this critique may have been in the Thomist philosophy. That is now finished. Such an interpretation of meaning is no longer possible. And I believe I have already said that it seems to me an achievement of Jean-Paul Sartre’s that should not be overlooked - although I regard his philosophy as very incoherent and not really adequate as a philosophical structure - that he was the first to formulate this realization without any embellishment. In this he went far beyond Schopenhauer who, of course, was a pessimist in the usual sense and vehemently opposed the affirmative character of metaphysics ( as you probably know), especially in its Hegelian form. Nevertheless, in his work he turned even this negativity into a metaphysical principle, the principle of the blind Will which, because it is a metaphysical principle and therefore a category of reflection, contains the possibility of its own negation by human beings. Thus, he also posits the idea of the denial of the Will to Live, a denial which, in view of what has been and continues to be perpetrated on the living and can increase to an unimaginable degree, is an almost comforting idea. I mean that in a world which knows of things far worse than death and denies people the shot in the neck in order to torture them slowly to death, the doctrine of the denial of the Will to Live itself has something of the innocence for which Schopenhauer criticized the theodicies of philosophers.

After the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire, who had been a follower of Leibniz, abandoned Leibniz’s interpretation of the world as the best of all possible worlds, and went over to the empiricism of the most progressive figure of that time, Locke.3 Admittedly, Leibniz’s dictum is not so optimistic as it seems, but refers only to the optimum, the minimum optimum. But what, in the end, is such a limited natural catastrophe compared to the natural catastrophe of society, spreading towards totality, the actuality and potentiality of which we face today - when socially produced evil has engendered something like a real hell? And that situation affects not only metaphysical thought, but, as I showed you in relation to the moment of meaning, the content of metaphysics itself. And perhaps I may add at this point that there seems to me to be hardly anything more contemptible, hardly anything more unworthy of the concept of philosophy, of what philosophy once wanted to be, than the mood, especially widespread in Germany, which amounts to a belief that, just because the absence of meaning is unbearable, those who point out that absence are to be blamed. This mood leads people to draw from the postulate that life in a world without meaning cannot be endured, the conclusion that (because what should not be cannot be) a meaning must be constructed: because, after all, there is a meaning. If I may reveal to you what I really meant by the ‘Jargon of Authenticity’, I was not just criticizing this or that linguistic cliché - I should not have taken those quite so tragically. What I was really attacking - and if you pick up that little book I would ask you to be quite clear on this point - is precisely the supposition of a meaning on the sole grounds that there must be one since otherwise one could not live: this supposition of a meaning as a lie. And in Germany this supposition seems to me to have slipped into the language to a worrying degree, so that it is no longer made explicitly in thought. That is the reason why I attacked a certain linguistic form so energetically in that book.

Briefly, therefore: the traditional compatibility between metaphysical thought and intra-mundane experience has been shattered. As I indicated by the comparison between Voltaire’s situation and our own, there has been a kind of switch from quantity to quality. The millionfold death has acquired a form never feared before, and has taken on a very different nuance. Nuance - the word alone is a disgrace in face of what one would like to say and for which language truly lacks words; it actually cannot be said. And that is the strongest proof of how much these things can now be understood only in material terms. Today something worse than death is to be feared. Perhaps I might draw your attention in this context to an essay on torture by Jean Amery, an author otherwise entirely unknown to me, in the latest issue of Merkur. The philosophical backbone of the essay, existentialism, does not accord with my own views, but the author does quite admirably express the changes in the rock strata of experience which have been brought about by these things. The change I have in mind can also be expressed, perhaps most simply, by saying that death, in the form it has taken on, no longer accords with the life of any individual. For it is a lie to say that death is an invariant at all times; death, too, is a quite abstract entity; death itself can be a different thing in very different times. Or one might say, if you will not take my literary references amiss, that there is no longer an epic or a biblical death; no longer is a person able to die weary, old and sated with life. Another aspect of the situation I am trying to indicate to you is that old age, with categories such as wisdom and all that goes with it, no longer exists, and that old people, in so far as they are condemned to become aged and too weak to preserve their own lives, are turned into objects of science - the science of gerontology, as it is called. In this way age is seen as a kind of second minority, so that something like a programme of euthanasia carried out by some future form of inhumanity, of no matter what provenance, becomes foreseeable. Thus, the reconciliation of life, as something rounded and closed in itself, with death, a reconciliation which was always questionable and precarious and, if it existed at all, was probably a happy exception - that reconciliation is out of the question today.

I would say that the approach adopted in Being and Time – and here I’d like to make a few more comments on the ‘jargon of authenticity’ - is perhaps nowhere more ideological than when its author tries to understand death on the basis of ‘Dasein’s possibility of Being-a-Whole’, in which attempt he suppresses the absolute irreconcilability of living experience with death which has become apparent with the definitive decline of positive religions. He seeks, in this way, to rescue structures of the experience of death as structures of Dasein, of human existence itself. But these structures, as he describes them, only existed within the world of positive theology, by virtue of the positive hope of resurrection; and Heidegger fails to see that through the secularization of this structure, which he at least tacitly assumes in his work, not only have these theological contents disintegrated, but without them this experience itself is no longer possible. What I really hold against this form of metaphysics is the surreptitious attempt to appropriate theologically posited possibilities of experience without theology. I hasten to add, to avoid misunderstandings, however unlikely, that in view of the historical state of consciousness my remarks should not, of course, be construed as a recommendation of theology, simply on the grounds that, under the protection of religion, it was allegedly easier to die. Now, if one is speaking of the form of death which exists under the absolute controllability of people, including their mass annihilation, one will have to say that from an intramundane standpoint the change signifies that the process of adaptation to which people are subject is posited as absolute - just as torture is an extreme form of adaptation. Words such as ’ brainwashing’ already, indicate that by these horrifying means, which include the electric shock treatment of the mentally ill, human beings are to be standardized by force. Any slight difference, any deviation they still possessed in relation to the dominant tendency - that too must be eradicated.

In other words, the change that we are experiencing in metaphysics is on the most fundamental level a change in the self and its so-called substance. It is the liquidation of what the old metaphysics sought to encompass by a rational doctrine of the soul as something existing in itself. Brecht has characterized this experience, though in a very uncertain and ambiguous way, with his formula: ‘A man’s a man’. I would just point out (but will not be able to go into this in detail in these lectures) that it is here, in the question of the liquidation of the self or the ego, in the question of depersonalization, that the most unfathomable problems of metaphysics are concealed; for this ego itself, as the incarnated principle of self preservation, is involved in the context of social guilt right to its innermost core. And in its social liquidation today the self is only paying the price for what it once did by positing itself; repaying the debt of its guilt. This is a horizon of metaphysical speculation that I can only touch on here, since one cannot speak at all seriously about these things without knowing at least whether the concept of the person itself, into which, for so many - for example, Martin Buber, who died recently – the metaphysical substance has withdrawn and concentrated itself, is not precisely the node which needs to be removed in order to liberate that which might be different in human beings. One should not, therefore regard the liquidation of the ego that we are witnessing today as absolutely evil and negative, since to do so would probably be to make into the principle of good and bad something which itself is entangled in evil, and which bears within it an historical dynamic which prevents it from being hypostatized. For people chained to the blind principle of self-preservation under the prevailing social conditions of production, however, this liquidation of the ego is what is most to be feared. And in the present situation, in order to recognize the dialectic between the ego and its disintegration that I have just touched upon, or to gain any insight into present conditions, what is called for is precisely that unyielding and unerring strength of the ego in face of the predominant tendency which is obstructed by the historical tendency and which is realized in fewer and fewer people now. What meets its end in the camps, therefore, is really no longer the ego or the self, but - as Horkheimer and I called it almost a generation ago in the Dialectic of Enlightenment - only the specimen; it is, almost as in vivisection, only the individual entity reducible to the body or, as Brecht put it, the torturable entity, which can be happy if it has time to escape that fate by suicide. One might say, therefore, that genocide, the eradication of humanity, and the concentration of people in a totality in which everything is subsumed under the principle of self-preservation, are the same thing; indeed, that genocide is absolute integration. One might say that the pure identity of all people with their concept is nothing other than their death – an idea which, most surprisingly and remarkably, though with a quite different, reactionary accent, is anticipated in the theory in the Phenomenology of Spirit by which Hegel equates absolute freedom with death. I do not need to engage polemically with the denunciation of the French Revolution which Hegel had in mind at that point; but it is the case that the early Hegel, with his unparalleled speculative power, had an inkling of the fact that absolute self-assertion and the absolute negation of all that lives, and thus, finally, genocide, are the same thing, at a time - more than one hundred and fifty years ago - when nothing of that kind was foreseeable within the actual historical perspective. In this connection, a formulation - reported by Kogon in his book on the ‘SS state’ - which was said to have been used by SS henchmen against earnest Bible scholars moments before their end, made an indelible impression on me. They are said to have told them: ‘Tomorrow you shall wind from this chimney as smoke to the heavens.’ That is no doubt the most exact formulation of the satanic perversion of the metaphysical idea and of the substance of metaphysics itself that we are forced to witness today.

When I said that these experiences affect everyone, and not only the victims or those who narrowly escaped them, I did not mean only that the experiences I have tried to characterize are of such terrible violence that no one whom they have touched, even from a distance, so to speak, can ever escape them - as Amery says very convincingly in his essay that no one who has once been tortured can ever forget it again, even for a moment. By saying that I also referred to something objective, and, again, my intention in pointing this out is that you should not simply equate the things I am speaking of today with the subjectivity of the person who experiences them. A situation has been reached today, in the present form of the organization of work in conjunction with the maintenance of the existing relations of production, in which every person is absolutely fungible or replaceable, even under conditions of formal freedom. This situation gives rise to a feeling of the superfluity and, if you like, the insignificance of each of us in relation to the whole. That is the reason, located in the objective development of society, for the presence of the feeling I have referred to, even under conditions of formal freedom. I am trying, inadequately as ever, to express these changes for you today, because I have the feeling that to speak of metaphysics without taking account of these things would really be nothing but empty verbiage. In my view, these experiences have such deep objective reasons that they are actually untouched even by political forms of rule, that is, by the difference between formal democracy on the one hand and totalitarian control on the other. That, at least, is how matters have appeared up to now. But we must also be well aware that, just because we live under the universal principle of profit and thus of self-preservation, the individual has nothing more to lose than himself and his life. At the same time - as Sartre has shown in his doctrine of the absurdity of existence – the individual’s life, though it is all he has, has become, objectively, absolutely unimportant. Yet what he must know to be meaningless is forced on him as the meaning of his life; indeed, a life which is really no more than the means to the end of his self-preservation is, by that very fact, bewitched and fetishized as an end. And in this antinomy - on the one hand the debasement of the individual, of the self, to something insignificant, his liquidation, and on the other, his being thrown back on the fact that he no longer has anything but this atomized self which lives our life - in this contradiction lies the horror of the development which I regard it as my duty to present to you today.

I once said that after Auschwitz one could no longer write poetry, and that gave rise to a discussion I did not anticipate when I wrote those words. I did not anticipate it because it is in the nature of philosophy - and everything I write is, unavoidably, philosophy, even if it is not concerned with so-called philosophical themes - that nothing is meant quite literally. Philosophy always relates to tendencies and does not consist of statements of fact. It is a misunderstanding of philosophy, resulting from its growing closeness to all-powerful scientific tendencies, to take such a statement at face value and say: ‘He wrote that after Auschwitz one cannot write any more poems; so either one really cannot write them, and would be a rogue or a cold-hearted person if one did write them, or he is wrong, and has said something which should not be said.’ Well, I would say that philosophical reflection really consists precisely in the gap, or, in Kantian terms, in the vibration, between these two otherwise so flatly opposed possibilities. I would readily concede that, just as I said that after Auschwitz one could not write poems - by which I meant to point to the hollowness of the resurrected culture of that time - it could equally well be said, on the other hand, that one must write poems, in keeping with Hegel’s statement in his Aesthetics that as long as there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also be art as the objective form of that awareness. And, heaven knows, I do not claim to be able to resolve this antinomy, and presume even less to do so since my own impulses in this antinomy are precisely on the side of art, which I am mistakenly accused of wishing to suppress. Eastern-zone newspapers even said I had declared my opposition to art and thereby adopted the standpoint of barbarism. Yet one must ask a further question, and this is a metaphysical question, although it has its basis in the total suspension of metaphysics. It is, in fact, curious how all questions which negate and evade metaphysics take on, precisely thereby, a curiously metaphysical character. It is the question whether one can live after Auschwitz. This question has appeared to me, for example, in the recurring dreams which plague me, in which I have the feeling that I am no longer really alive, but am just the emanation of a wish of some victim of Auschwitz. Well, the bleaters of connivance soon turned this into the argument that it was high time for anyone who thought as I did to do away with himself as well - to which I can only respond that I am sure those gentlemen would like nothing better. But as long as I can express what I am trying to express, and as long as I believe I am finding words for what otherwise would find none, I shall not, unless under extreme compulsion, yield to that hope, that wish. Nevertheless, something said in one of the most important plays by Sartre, which for that reason is hardly ever played in Germany, deserves to be taken immensely seriously as a metaphysical question. It is said by a young resistance fighter who is subjected to torture, who asks whether or why one should live in a world in which one is beaten until one’s bones are smashed. Since it concerns the possibility of any affirmation of life, this question cannot be evaded. And I would think that any thought which is not measured by this standard, which does not assimilate it theoretically, simply pushes aside at the outset that which thought should address- so that it really cannot be called a thought at all.

from Theodor Adorno: Metaphysics, Concepts and Problems

590.

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:37:00 +1100

But the supreme reality and the reality which stands in the greatest antithesis to universal freedom, or rather the sole object that will still exist for freedom, is the freedom and individuality of actual self-consciousness itself. For that universality which does not let itself advance to the reality of an organic articulation, and whose aim is to maintain itself in an unbroken continuity, at the same time creates a distinction within itself, because it is a movement of consciousness in general. And, moreover, by virtue of its own abstraction, it divides itself into extremes equally abstract, into a simple, inflexible cold universality, and into the discrete, absolute hard rigidity and self-willed atomism of actual self consciousness. Now that it has completed the destruction of the actual organization of the world, and exists now just for itself, this is the sole object, an object that no longer has any content, possession, existence, or outer extension, but is merely this knowledge of itself as an absolutely pure and free individual self. All that remains of the object by which it can be laid hold of is solely its abstract existence as such. The relation, then, of these two, since each exists indivisibly and absolutely for itself, and thus cannot dispose of a middle term which would link them together, is one of wholly unmediated pure negation, a negation, moreover, of the individual as a being existing in the universal. The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.

G.W.F. Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller

INTERVIEWER How then, fifty years later, do you assess Adorno’s famous dictum, “No poetry...

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:07:00 +1100

INTERVIEWER

How then, fifty years later, do you assess Adorno’s famous dictum, “No poetry after Auschwitz”?

STEINER

It seemed to me at the time an absolutely natural and crucial thing to say; and it hoped for disproof. That disproof came with Paul Celan’s poetry, which refuted that statement — and Adorno knew it before he died. Let’s take a few steps backward. The obscene question of counting dead heads doesn’t arise, but I group the concentration camps, whether they be in Poland, in Germany or all over the damn place, together: the phenomenon of massive incarceration and elimination of millions of human beings from one end of the world to the other. One of the possible responses is to say our whole culture proved absolutely impotent and defenseless, in fact it adorned much of this stuff. Gieseking was playing the complete Debussy piano music on the nights when one could hear the screams of the people in the sealed railway cars at the station in Munich on the way to Dachau, just outside Munich. They could be heard all the way to the concert hall. That is on record. There’s not the slightest witness that he didn’t play magnificently or that his audience wasn’t wholly responsive and profoundly moved.

So there was a nihilistic critique, which was Adorno’s, or the formulation of Walter Benjamin: “at the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism.” You could take that line, as many in the Frankfurt school in a sense did, but take it a step further and say, “Let’s shut up for a while.” I often had a dream of a moratorium on discussing these things at all — for ten years, fifteen, a hundred years — to try not to reduce them to articulate language, which in a curious way was to make them acceptable. That’s what Adorno really meant: Careful! Even the greatest outcry if it is formalized, let’s say, into verse or rhyme or stanzas, adds a mystery of acceptability to the phenomenon.

The second and most difficult step of all was saying, “No, in despite of all this, I can still convey, communicate something of the essential experience.” Out of the whole enormous range of Holocaust literature only three or four writers have pulled this off.

INTERVIEWER

Who are they?

STEINER

Celan above all. Without any doubt, Primo Levi, the Italian-Jewish writer: supreme, supreme, supreme. There isn’t a word out of place; it’s a miracle. One or two far less known East Europeans, some wonderful Latvian short stories. Perhaps half a dozen texts where I would say it has justified this incredibly bold attempt. But at what cost? Celan commits suicide. Primo Levi commits suicide. Jean Améry commits suicide. Long after, as if having borne witness, there was no more meaning to their lives and to the language they were using…

George Steiner, The Art of Criticism No. 2, from The Paris Review, no. 137.

If it is the case that the possibility of formally transcending our historical predicament is...

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 20:42:00 +1100

If it is the case that the possibility of formally transcending our historical predicament is factitious, that the “we” that conditions the possibility of self consciousness and self-identity is always historically concrete through its immanence in social practices incapable of being wholly objectivized, then two important conclusions follow. First, individual acts of re-narration are never more than limit cases of self-transformation. If individual subjectivity is but a weak precipitate of the “we” that makes it possible, then substantial self-transformations require the re-formation of the practices conditioning individual subjectivity. And this may be another reason why apparently strong cases of re-narration, namely those found in modern autobiographies, not only appear as fictions but are fictions. No individual on their own can substantially remake him- or herself. Indeed, is this not the acknowledged pathos of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? Any transformation of the self would be a transformation of intersubjective practice; but this one cannot do alone.

Second, if the conditions for self-consciousness are, as sedimentations of past collective subjectivties, incapable of ever being fully objectivized, then while our narrative predicament is in important ways historically specific, it is not historically unique. A tragic dimension of all collective identities and their narrative representation is that the moment of self-recognition must always be wrested from a social substantiality that remains submerged in the darkness. But this is just to say that the tragic pathos I have just attributed to Zarathustra must infect all narratives claiming insight into collective identity and collective fate. Absence of such tragic pathos is a sign of naivety, not of better insight.

J.M. Bernstein: Self-Knowledge as Praxis

He was dead. Permanently dead? Who shall say? Certainly our experiments in spiritualism prove no...

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 19:50:00 +1100

He was dead. Permanently dead? Who shall say? Certainly our experiments in spiritualism prove no more than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be polite even, nor make the talented artist consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill by an artist who must for ever remain unknown and is barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this, which we leave in order to be born into this world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—and still!—to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not wholly and permanently dead is by no means improbable

Marcel Proust, from The Captive, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff

Arnold Schoenberg “Die Glückliche Hand” (1913) op....

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:46:00 +1100

Arnold Schoenberg “Die Glückliche Hand” (1913) op. 18

“Music should not decorate, it should be true…”

Arnold Schoenberg: Problems in Teaching Art

“Art stands tensed in opposition to the horror of history. Sometimes it insists, sometimes it forgets. It cedes and hardens itself. It persists or it renounces itself in order to outwit fate… For the sake of the human, the inhumanity of art must over top that of the world. Artworks test their skill against the enigmas that the world devises for devouring men. The world is the Sphinx and the artist is the blinded Oedipus, and the artworks resemble his wise answer, which topples the Sphinx into the abyss…To give this response, to give voice to what is already there and fulfill the commandment of the ambiguous by the “one” itself ever contained in that commandment, is at the same time the new that goes beyond the old by fulfilling it. In this, in making schemata, lies the utter seriousness of artistic technique. This serious is all the greater because today the alienation inherent in the consistency of artistic technique itself forms the content of the artwork. The shocks of the incomprehensible - which artistic technique in the age of its meaninglessness dispenses -reverses. They illuminate the meaningless world. New music sacrifices itself to this. It has taken all the darkness and guilt of the world on itself. All its happiness is the knowledge of unhappiness; all its beauty is in denial of the semblance of the beautiful. No one, neither individuals nor groups, wants anything to do with it. It dies away unheard, without an echo. Around music as it is heard, time springs together in a radiant crystal, while unheard it tumbles perniciously through empty time. Toward this latter experience, which mechanical music undergoes hour by hour, new music is spontaneously aimed: toward absolute oblivion. It is the true message in the bottle.”

Theodor Adorno: Schoenberg and Progress

Joseph Ceravolo Reading at the Ear Inn, New York, October 21, 1978 Comments (1:21): MP3 Lightning...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:37:00 +1100

Joseph Ceravolo

Reading at the Ear Inn, New York, October 21, 1978

Comments (1:21): MP3
Lightning (0:50): MP3
Birth in the Dunes (0:32): MP3
Earthquake in Phillipines (0:42): MP3
Tensions (0:33): MP3
“Where can I go now…” (0:35): MP3
Meadowlands (0:28): MP3
E=MC2 (0:41): MP3
“Come sit next to me…” (0:19): MP3
“They go wandering…” (0:45): MP3
Bird on Chimney (0:33): MP3
Sleep in Park (0:57): MP3
Descending the Slope (1:03): MP3
Romance of Awakening (0:32): MP3
Migratory Noon (0:36): MP3
Spell of Eternity (1:01): MP3
“The sun is shining…” (1:02): MP3

Complete Reading (11:53): MP3

1. “O.K.”A Sea of Blood, An Army of Graves. This is...

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:29:48 +1100

1. “O.K.”
A Sea of Blood, An Army of Graves. This is Bolshevism.
Circa 1919
Lithograph poster (backed to canvas)
44 1/2” x 31 3/4”

2. Johannes Safis
Bolshevism Means Drowning the World in Blood.
Circa 1919
Lithograph poster (Backed to canvas)
Printed by Heymann & Schmidt A. G., Berlin
45 1/2” x 36 1/4”

3. Rudi Feld
The Threat of Bolshevism
Circa 1919
Lithograph poster (backed to canvas)
37” x 27 1/4”

The catastrophes that inspire Endgame have exploded the individual whose substantiality and...

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:45:00 +1100

The catastrophes that inspire Endgame have exploded the individual whose substantiality and absoluteness was the common element between Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and the Sartrian version of existentialism. Even to the concentration camp victims, existentialism has attributed the freedom either inwardly to accept or reject the inflicted martyrdom. Endgame destroys such illusions. The individual as a historical category, as the result of the capitalist process of alienation and as a defiant protest against it, has itself become openly transitory. The individualist position belongs, as polar opposite, to the ontological tendency of every existentialism, even that of Being and Time. Beckett’s dramaturgy abandons it like an obsolete bunker. In its narrowness and contingency, individual experience could nowhere locate the authority to interpret itself as a cipher of being, unless it pronounced itself the fundamental characteristic of being. Precisely that, however, is untrue. The immediacy of individuation was deceptive: what particular human experience clings to his mediated, determined. Endgame insinuates that the individual’s claim of autonomy and of being has become incredible. But while the prison of individuation is revealed as a prison and simultaneously as mere semblance – the stage scenery is the image of such self-reflection -, art is unable to release the spell of fragmented subjectivity; it can only depict solipsism. Beckett thereby bumps up against art’s contemporary antinomy. The position of the absolute subject, once it has been cracked open as the appearance of an overarching whole through which it first matures, cannot be maintained. Expressionism becomes obsolete. Yet the transition to the binding universality of objective reality, that universality which could relativise the semblance of individuation, is denied art. For art is different from the discursive cognition of the real, not gradually but categorically distinct from it; in art, only what is transported into the realm of subjectivity, commensurable to it, is valid.

Theodor Adorno: Trying to Understand Endgame

54.

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:33:44 +1100

The Robbers. – The Kantian Schiller is both more non-sensuous as well as more sensuous than Goethe: both more abstract as well as more entangled in sexuality. This latter, as immediate desire, turns everything into an action-object and thereby the same. “Amalia for the band” – that is why Louise remains as flat as lemonade. Casanova’s women, not for nothing identified with letters instead of names, are scarcely to be distinguished from each other and also not from the figurines, which form complicated pyramids in Sade’s mechanical organ. Something of such sexual brutality, the incapacity to make distinctions, lives however in the great speculative systems of idealism, all imperatives to the contrary, and chains the German Spirit [Geist] and German barbarism to each other. What peasant greed, only held in check with difficulty by the warnings of the priests, advocates as autonomy in metaphysics, is the right to reduce everything in its path to its essence as brazenly as peasant conscripts vis-à-vis the women of the conquered city. The pure factual treatment [Tathandlung] is the violation projected into the starry skies above. The long, contemplative glance, however, in which human beings and things really unfold, is always that in which the compulsion towards the object is broken, reflected. Non-violent reflection [Betrachtung], from which all happiness of the truth comes, has this condition, that those who reflect do not incorporate the object into themselves: nearness to distance…

Theodor Adorno: Minima Moralia

We normally tend to pay the relatively ritualized talk of relatively common troubles an attention as...

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:56:11 +1100

We normally tend to pay the relatively ritualized talk of relatively common troubles an attention as empty and as formalized as the ritualistic “how are you?” that triggers it. We have all heard stories of struggles over inheritances or conflicts with neighbors about educational difficulties or office rivalries, and we apprehend these through perceptual categories which, by reducing the personal to the impersonal and the unique drama to a human interest story, allow us in a way to economize on thought, on emotion, in short on understanding. And even when one mobilizes all the resources of professional vigilance and personal sympathy, it is difficult to shake off the inattentive drowsiness induced by the illusion that we’ve already seen and heard it all, and to enter into the distinctive personal history to attempt to gain an understanding at once unique and general - of each life story. The immediate half-understanding based on a distracted and routinized attention discourages the effort needed to break through the screen of cliches behind which each of us lives, and which we use to express both the minor problems and major ordeals of our lives. The “one,” stigmatized by philosophy and discredited by literature, but which we all are, tries with its desperately “inauthentic” means to say something which, for the “I” that in our most common claim to uniqueness we believe ourselves to be, is the most difficult to hear.

Thus, at the risk of shocking both the rigorous methodologist and the inspired hermeneutic scholar, I would say that the interview can be considered a sort of spiritual exercise that, through forgetfulness of self, aims at a true conversion of the way we look at other people in the ordinary circumstances of life. The welcoming disposition, which leads one to make the respondent’s problems one’s own, the capacity to take that person and understand them just as they are in their distinctive necessity, is a sort of intellectual love: a gaze that consents to necessity in the manner of the “intellectual love of God,” that is, of the natural order, which Spinoza held to be the supreme form of knowledge.

Pierre Bourdieu: The Weight of the World

Melancholia: From "Mourning" to Suicide

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 01:03:36 +1100

In the light of our hypothesis of incorporation, is it possible to interpret the struggle of “love and hate” in a subject who, according to Freud, has in fact been disappointed in and mistreated by the love object? We find it crucial to affirm the prior existence of a love totally free of ambivalence, to insist on the undisclosable character of this love, and ﬁnally to show that a real and therefore traumatic cause had put an end to it. The system of counter-investments—using the themes of hate, disappointment, and mistreatment supposedly endured on account of the object—results from some traumatic affliction and from the utter impossibility of mourning. Hence the fantasized aggression is not in fact primary; it merely extends the genuine aggression the object actually suffered earlier in the form of death, disgrace, or removal—-this being the involuntary cause of the separation. Inclusion does not occur unless the subject is convinced of the object’s total innocence…

This is why melancholics cherish the memory as their most precious possession, even though it must be concealed by a crypt built with the bricks of hate and aggression. It should be remarked that as long as the crypt holds, there is no melancholia. It erupts when the walls are shaken, often as a result of the loss of some secondary love-object who had buttressed them. Faced with the danger of seeing the crypt crumble, the whole of the ego becomes one with the crypt, showing the concealed object of love in its own guise. Threatened with the imminent loss of its internal support—the kernel of its being-—the ego will fuse with the included object, imagining that the object is bereft of its partner. Consequently, the ego begins the public display of an interminable process of mourning. The subject heralds the love-object’s sadness, his gaping wound, his universal guilt—without ever revealing, of course, the unspeakable secret, well worth the entire universe. The only means left by which the subject can covertly revive the secret paradise taken from him is to stage the grief attributed to the object who lost him. Freud is surprised that melancholics show no shame at all at the horrible things for which they blame themselves. Now we can understand it: the more suffering and degradation the object undergoes (meaning: the more he pines for the subject he lost), the prouder the subject can be: “he endures all this because of me.” Being a melancholic, I stage and let everyone else see the full extent of my love object’s grief over having lost me.

N. Abraham and M. Torok: Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation

The Intrapsychic Tomb

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:38:05 +1100

Even when denied introjection, not every narcissistic loss is fated to incorporation. Incorporation results from those losses that for some reason cannot be acknowledged as such. In this special cases the impossibility of introjection is so profound that even our refusal to mourn is prohibited from being given a language, that we are debarred from providing any indication whatsoever that we are inconsolable. Without the escape-route of somehow conveying our refusal to mourn, we are reduced to a radical denial of the loss, to pretending that we have absolutely nothing to lose. There can be no thought of speaking to someone else about our grief under these circumstances. The words that cannot be uttered, the scenes that cannot be recalled, the tears that cannot be shed – everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject. Reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes, and affects, the objectal correlative of the loss is buried alive in the crypt as a full—fledged person, complete with its own topography. The crypt also includes the actual or supposed traumas that made introjection impractical. A whole world of unconscious fantasy is created, one that leads it own separate and concealed existence. Sometimes in the dead of night, when libidinal fulfillments have their way, the ghost of the crypt comes back to haunt the cemetery guard, giving him strange and incomprehensible signals, making him perform bizarre acts, or subjecting him to unexpected sensations.

N. Abraham and M. Torok: Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation

Yes, you’re right, I’m a louse. I haven’t done anything in this...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:32:39 +1100

Yes, you’re right, I’m a louse. I haven’t done anything in this world and I cannot do anything… And neither could I give anything to my wife! And I do not have any friends and I cannot have, but you cannot take what’s mine from me! Everything is already taken from me, there, on the other side of the barbed wire. All I have is here. Can you understand! Here! In the Zone! My happiness, my freedom, my dignity – everything’s here! I bring here people like me, desperate and tormented. They… They have no other hope left! And I – I am able to! Can you understand – I am able to help them! Nobody else can help them, but I, louse, am able to! I am ready to shed tears of happiness that I am able to help them. That’s all! And I want nothing else…

“It is worth nothing that Greenberg fully endorses the...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:31:42 +1100

Clyfford Still: 1954- 1954

Barnett Newman: Adam- 1951-2.

Mark Rothko: Black, Red and Black- 1968

“It is worth nothing that Greenberg fully endorses the thought that the vitality of an avant-garde practice depends on its remaining progressive, transforming itself by more fully exploring its conventional constitution, risking more in reducing itself to its essential features, which conversely have to be more explicitly observed, more rigorously adhered to, the further the limits are pushed back. Literature and music have passed the point of dynamic progress. They are exhausted as forms of resistance to rationalized society. That painting could suffer the same fate is conceded by analogy with the cases of literature and music. As de Duve narrates the tale, correctly i think, the progressive analysis of art unraveled rather rapidly in the face of the 1959 exhibition of Frank Stella’s black stripe paintings…

…It is as if, with these paintings of Stella, painting had suddenly broached its limiting conditions, that it no longer had conventions it could expend, that the energy of negation has been depleted at one go. What is surprising in this is Greenberg’s surprise, his denial and beleaguered resistance. Imagine a room with three large canvases: a late Clyfford Still all black with just a few bark-like crevices of red; a Newman; and a Rothko. Seeing these together, one’s astonishment would have the form of near disbelief that these painters had avoided the monochrome; thought of together and in retrospect, their art appears to be an abandonment to the claims of the monochrome while nonetheless avoiding it, just the slightest inflection - ragged crevice, zip, contrasting colors of paint soaked into the canvas - separating their pictures from the zero point of the monochrome (with the blank canvas forever lurking behind…). But painting did not have to wait till this point to appreciate that somewhere in the history of negations that comprise the advance of modernist painting in its abstract phrase there stood the iron gate of the monochrome, since almost simultaneous with the birth of abstract painting we have the examples of Malevich’s Black Square and Rodchenko’s red, yellow, and blue triptych. Is there anything in music, or literature, like the monochrome is being so identifiable as an end (it is, after all, the telos of the progress of negations) and exhausted limit…?”

J. M. Bernstein: Against Voluptuous Bodies

Resources for the Study of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit:

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:05:05 +1100

29. Science sets forth this formative process in all its detail and necessity, exposing the mature configuration of everything which has already been reduced to a moment and property of Spirit. The goal is Spirit’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience demands the impossible, to wit, the attainment of the end without the means. But the length of this path has to be endured, because, for one thing, each moment is necessary; and further, each moment has to be lingered over, because each is itself a complete individual shape, and one is only viewed in absolute perspective when its determinateness is regarded as a concrete whole, or the whole is regarded as uniquely qualified by that determination. Both because the substance of the individual, the world spirit, has possessed the patience to pass through these forms over the long passage of time and to take upon itself the prodigious labor of world history, and because it could not have reached consciousness about itself in any lesser way, the individual spirit itself cannot comprehend its own substance with anything less…

Text:

Terry Pinkard’s Draft Translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Bilingual)

Lectures:

J.M. Bernstein’s lecture course on the Phenomenology

Richard Dien Winfield’s lecture course on the Phenomenology

Key Commentaries:

H. S. Harris: Hegel’s Ladder vol. 1 The Pilgrimage of Reason, vol. 2 The Odyssey of Spirit

Draft Chapters from Robert Brandom’s “A Spirit of Trust: A Semantic Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology”

Jean Hyppolite: Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”

Robert Pippin: Hegel’s Idealism

Alexandre Kojève: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel

Additional Commentaries:

Martin Heidegger: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Hans-Georg Gadamer: Hegel’s Dialectic

Charles Taylor: Hegel

Background Resources:

Glenn Alexander Magee: A Hegel Dictionary

Terry Pinkard: German Philosophy 1760-1860, The Legacy of Idealism

G.W.F. Hegel: On Christianity, Early Theological Writings

Love brings an end to the opposition between gift and property without surmounting and without...

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:28:00 +1100

Love brings an end to the opposition between gift and property without surmounting and without sublating it: if i return to myself within love, I do not return to myself from love (the dialectic, on the contrary, feeds on the equivocation). I do not return from it, and consequently, something of I is definitely lost or dissociated in its act of loving. That is undoubtedly why I return (if at least it is the image of a return that is appropriate here), but I return broken : I come back to myself, or I come out of it, broken. The “return” does not annul the break; it neither repairs it nor sublates it, for the return in fact takes place only across the break itself, keeping it open. Love re-presents I to itself broken (and this is not a representation). It presents this to it: he, this subject, was touched, broken into, in his subjectivity, and he is from now on, for the time of love, opened by this slice, broken or fractured, even if only slightly. He is, which is to say that the break or the wound is not an accident, and neither is it a property that the subject could relate to himself. For the break is a break in his self-possession as a subject: it is, essentially, an interruption of the process of relating oneself to oneself outside of oneself. From then on, I is constituted broken. As soon as there is love, the slightest act of love, the slightest spark, there is this ontological fissure that cuts across and that disconnects the elements of the subject-proper, the fibers of its heart. One hour of love is enough, one kiss alone, provided that it is out of love - and can there, in truth, be any other kind? Can one do it without love, without being broken into, even if only slightly?

Jean-Luc Nancy: Shattered Love