I did not know that

In his lectures on metaphysics, Adorno writes:

Even the categories of male and female are distinguished according to the same dualism by Aristotle, all the higher, form-giving categories being equated with the male -- as was only too evident in a patriarchal society -- and the merely material and existent with the female. No doubt you will have endured a learned school-teacher telling you that the roots of mater and materia are related, and you will recall the ensuing howl of triumph -- that, too, is an echo from Aristotle's Metaphysics. (p. 78)

I never endured learning this from a learned school-teacher. The devolution of philosophy in our lives is measured by the progressive disappearance of even philosophic pedantry and charlatanism.

short sunday long

jane dark's sugarhigh not only has some swift Adorno for us (especially good for LS) -

The consciousness of the unfreedom of all existence, which the pressure of the demands of commerce, and thus unfreedom itself, does not allow to appear, emerges first in the intermezzo of freedom. The nostalgie du dimanche is not a longing for the working week, but for the state of being emancipated from it; Sunday fails to satisfy, not because it is a day off work, but because its own promise is felt directly as unfulfilled; like the English one, every Sunday is too little Sunday. The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

- but there's also a new term for us to learn today:

The anxiety of having to pay the rent, having to show up for work on Monday, is now only a start. There is a new anxiety into which that anxiety now hemorrhages. It's no longer enough to find happiness is being always at work; that fades over the long Sunday. One must place that work within the space of flows, within the interlocking, competing and colluding organizations of interstatal politics and transnational capital, and this knowledge comes with a price: weltsystemangst, "world system anxiety."

The pleasure of the world-wide accessibility of your texts. The sense that you type into Burma, Moscow, Brazil's backwater-ranches, Central Park West. The unbearably light weight of the whole that you move with your insomniac fingers. The job well down, everywhere all at once. And what drives it, what need it fulfills, what hole it fills.

The international-access - and international-labor - of the blog (especially as voluntary work) remains under-theorized...

Whatever. I must admit, I fantasize at times about international business travel. That I will be called to present in Sao Paolo, Cape Town, Copenhagen, and yes, above all, Shanghai. That it will be all Lost in Translation, all the way down. Laptoping myself towards the sublime.

Deleuze and Guatarri on the national state and human rights

In a discussion of Deleuze and Guatarri's notion of the concept in What is philosophy?, one of the commentators points to p. 107 of that book where 'communication' is discussed. Starting with 106, the authors write:

If there is no universal democratic State, despite German philosophy's dream of foundation, it is because the market is the only thing that is universal in capitalism. In contrast with the ancient empires that carried out transcendent overcodings, capitalism functions as an immanent axiomatic of decoded flows (of money, labor, products). National States are no longer paradigms of overcoding but constitute the "models of realization" of this immanent axiomatic . . . .

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Adorno meets Tronti

(This is a guest post by John Holloway, author of Change the World Without Taking Power.)

It is clear that non-identity is the hero, the centre, the moving force of the world as Adorno presents it.  But what do we understand by non-identity?  Is it just a philosophical concept or is the conceptualisation of a social force?  The answer, surely, is that we are non-identity.  The force that does not fit, the force that contradicts all identification, the force that overflows is subjectivity, we.  And who are we?  We are the subject, uncontainable within any definition.  We can say that we are the working class, but that makes sense only if we understand "working class" as a concept that explodes against itself, a concept that bursts its own bounds.

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Reflections on Culture, Empire, and Decadence

From a comment at UFO Breakfast Recipients:

I have hard time differentiating between [dying cultures and dying empires], at least in the US. There is no culture here on a national level, not outside the mid-Atlantic accented, corporate packaged $25,000 smile, the b-mod routines of the workplaces. The haughty affectations of the faculty lounge are not qualitatively different from the banal glurge wisdom mouthed in sports bars. The vampiric logic is the same in both places. They all do that thing with the eyes, where they cock their head a little on the side to catch the glint from the overhead lights. You are wrong by virtue of disagreeing with them, but therapy can help you. You must accept the common ground or suffer.

Link

If such a thing can be quantified, the degree to which conformity, and not competence, guarantees an individual's success is probably an excellent index of the objective decay of an organization or culture. The disquieting point raised here is the extent to which oppositional culture, simply because it is embedded in a larger decaying system, replicates this fault. Adorno makes a similar point in the closing sentences of “The Health Unto Death” in Minima Moralia.

Nixon is supposed to have said, “we are all Keynesians now,” and that may have marked the beginning of the decline of Keynesianism in the US. Maybe, despite our best efforts not to be such, American intellectuals, salaried or not, are all Straussians now. The distance between the exoteric meaning Straussians proper use to hide their intentions and Lakoffian frames isn't as great as either party would care to admit. And in a time of objective decay, nothing is more banal than an attempt to be individual by penning a feuilleton decrying the ubiquity of conformity.

irresistible movements

p. 261 of Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (Columbia University Press, 1998).

Section 2 of Marginalia to Theory and Praxis:

It would be too coarse a generalization were one, for the sake of a historico-philosophical construction, to date the divergence between theory and practice as late as the Renaissance. But the divergence was first reflected upon only after the collapse of that *ordo* that presumed to allocate the truth as well as good works their place in the hierarchy. The crisis of praxis was experienced as: not knowing what should be done. Together with the medieval hierarchy, which was connected to an elaborate casuistry, the practical guidelines disintegrated, which at that time, despite all their dubiousness, seemed at least to be suitable to the social structure. The much attacked formalism of Kantian ethical theory was the culmination of a movement that began irresistibly, and through legitimate critique, with the emancipation of autonomous reason.

I make a big deal out of the last sentence above. That is, one can in a way be too abstract with criticisms of a doctrine.

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Open Memorial?

A friend of mine has an interview with Peter Eisenman, architect of the new Holocaust memorial in Berlin, published in The Nation.  I've excerpted one bit, but the whole thing is rather worth reading.  One aspect of the memorial that strikes me is the apparent concern for irregularity, in particular for irregular distances, or steps.  (Agamben counterposes the "memorable" to the "unforgettable," where the "unforgettable," as represented by the tombstones, is that which resists closure or archival.)  While neither a uniform, sterilized graveyard nor purely ostentatious and inaccessible (nor excessively immune), the site suggests the opposite of what might be described as any essential distance.  Perhaps.

You once said in an interview that when you travel to Germany you go as a New Yorker and you return as a Jew. What did you mean by that?

I think that's really part of the problem. The Germans treat me with so much deference, and that makes me feel Jewish, right? They step all over themselves to be nice. Nobody treats you this way in New York. In New York a Jew is a Jew, an Italian is an Italian, a Muslim is a Muslim: Nobody's going out of his way to treat you in a special way. I really don't even think of myself as being Jewish except when I'm in Germany. And that's what we're trying to get over. The Germans should stop pretending that they love all Jews.