Search

Theodor W. Adorno resisted Sigmund Freud’s explanation of artistic creation as the sublimation of the artist’s libidinal drives. It focuses too much on the artist rather than the work and is in the service of accommodation to the status quo. But Adorno also questioned the simple reversal of Freud’s formula, pointing out the dangers of unmediated desublimation. The artist, he suggested, should sublimate his or her rage instead. No less significant was the retrospective cultural sublimation of objects from exhausted devotional or cultic contexts, which preserved the unfulfilled yearnings originally expressed in them.

The underlying assumption of Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness is that “history” can be understood as a unified and meaningful meta-narrative, which can be read along the lines of a realist novel. Although the future is not guaranteed, the present contains “objective possibilities” which can be identified and realized through activist intervention in the world by those who are destined to “make” history, the proletariat. In the intervening century since the Russian Revolution, it has become impossible to read “history” as a singular, triumphalist story leading to human emancipation or identify any one group as its subjective agent. To salvage the revolutionary potential of Lukacs’ work, it has been read instead in terms of “fidelity to the Event” by such latter-day Leninists as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižik. But their recourse to a meta-historical notion of pre-figuration and future realization is itself no less beholden to a literary or rhetorical device, that of figura, which was traced by Erich Auerbach in originally religious terms.

In the various texts posthumously published in translation in 2017 as The Rigorism of Truth, Hans Blumenberg audaciously compared Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem as efforts to debunk founding myths of Jewish identity. He accused both thinkers of robbing the Jews of the ideological ammunition needed to confront anti-Semitism and defend the creation of the state of Israel. Both, he claimed, were moral rigorists who fetishized truth telling despite its practical consequences. Although this charge may well be dubious, especially in the case of Arendt, who understood the risks of veracity in the political realm, Blumenberg himself pursued uncomfortable truths wherever they led. By providing a reflective defense of the function of myth (along with metaphor) rather than its alleged meaning, he demonstrated his own unwillingness to abandon logos for mythos.

The challenge of nominalism in philosophy and theology to the reality of universals has been a motor of modern thought. Translated into aesthetic terms, it has abetted resistance to generic conventions and helped undermine essentialist notions of aesthetic form. Theodor W. Adorno had a characteristically dialectical response to nominalism, applauding its subversion of categorical reifications, but alarmed by its indiscriminate leveling of the distinction between concept and object, which could also efface the distinction between works of art and everyday objects. In musical terms, he appreciated the nominalist emphasis on individual works as opposed to generic formal categories, and praised Arnold Schoenberg's atonal revolution. But he was also aware that carried to an extreme, nominalism could lead to the subjective domination of a nature that was understood to be without essential characteristics of its own. In his late embrace of musique informelle, he admired a music that eschewed both reified categories and subjective domination of the apparent contingency of the material world, a music that expressed a nominalism that might better be called “magical” than “conventional.”

Ever since Clifford Geertz urged the “blurring of genres” in the social sciences, many scholars have considered the crossing of disciplinary boundaries a healthy alternative to rigidly maintaining them. But what precisely does the metaphor of “blurring” imply? By unpacking the varieties of visual experiences that are normally grouped under this rubric, this essay seeks to provide some precision to our understanding of the implications of fuzziness. It extrapolates from the blurring caused by differential focal distances, velocities of objects in the visual field, and competing perspectival vantage points to comparable effects in the intersection of different scholarly disciplines. Arguing against the holistic implications of Geertz's metaphor, as well as the even more totalizing concept of “consilience” introduced by E. O. Wilson, it suggests that blurring implies new types of complexity between or among those disciplines.

Even since William of Ockham’s critique of scholastic realism, the nominalist impulse in philosophy has been understood to undercut the inherent intelligibility of the world and abet its disenchantment. As a result, it has often been tied to a voluntarist notion of God or of human subjects who construct a world through self‐assertion. Drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss and most notably W. J. T. Mitchell, this paper explores an alternative version of non‐conventionalist nominalism, which it calls ‘magical’ based on the Adamic quest for ‘true’ names. It argues that photography in certain respects exemplifies a visual expression of the same quest, which can be understood as the assertion of the world against the domination of the subject.

"The search for authenticity, nearly everywhere we find it in modern times," writes Marshall Berman in his book on Rousseau, The Politics of Authenticity, "is bound up with a radical rejection of things as they are. ... the desire for authenticity has emerged in modern society as one of the most politically explosive of human impulses."1 Even those with less radical agendas, like Sigmund Freud, have been seen as sharing the same desire. According to Lionel Trilling in his classic study Sincerity and Authenticity, Freud's insis tence on the tragic dimension of the human condition "had the intention of sustaining the authenticity of human existence that formerly had been rati fied by God."2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Trilling added, dreaded "the inauthenticity

Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001)Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: Pantheon, 2002)“Great writers are either husbands or lovers,” Susan Sontag explained in a 1963 essay on Camus. “Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover—moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality—that they never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar—if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions, and dangerous sensations.” Camus was “the ideal husband of contemporary letters,” she opined, but “as in life, so in art both are necessary, husband and lovers. It's a great pity when one is forced to choose between them.”

(2003). Mourning a Metaphor: The Revolution is Over. Parallax: Vol. 9, Mourning Revolution, pp. 17-20.

In 1930, Walter Benjamin reviewed a collection of essays edited by the conservative revolutionary Ernst Junger and entitled War and Warrior. Noting its contributors' avid romanticization of the technology of death and the total mobilization of the masses, he warned that it was "nothing other than an uninhibited translation of the principles of l'art pour l'art to war itself" (122). Six years later, in the concluding reflections of his celebrated essay "The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin widened the scope of his analysis beyond war to politics in general. Fascism, he charged, meant the aestheticization of politics, the deadly consummation of l'art pour l'art's credo "Fiat arspereat mundus" (244). Like much else in Benjamin's remarkable corpus, the reception and dissemination of these ideas was delayed for a generation or so after his suicide in 1940. By then his remedy-the politicization of art by Communism in the 1936 piece,1 the transformation of war into a civil war between classes in the earlier review

The exemplary anecdotes are known to us all. Adorno arrived in America in 1938 to work on Paul Lazarsfeld's Princeton Radio Research Project. Lazarsfeld wrote of his new acquaintance: "He looks as you would imagine a very absent-minded German professor, and he behaves so foreign that I feel like a member of the Mayflower society."' Adorno traveled to the Project's offices in an abandoned brewery in Newark, New Jersey through a tunnel under the Hudson river and admitted: "I felt a little as if I were in Kafka's Nature Theater of

The posthumous appearance of Max Horkheimer's Notizen of 1950 to 1969 in the same volume as a new edition of Dammerung, his aphorisms of 1926 to 1931,1 amply documents many of the transformations of the theoretical and political positions of the Frankfurt School's leading figure. None is perhaps as striking as that of his attitude towards anti-Semitism and what was once known as "the Jewish question." In the later collection, at least a dozen entries discuss these and related issues, often from the very personal vantage point of a survivor of the Holocaust. In contrast, Dammerung virtually ignores anti-Semitism as a problem in its own right and has little to say about the plight of the Jews in Weimar Germany. The one major exception is an aphorism entitled "Glaube und Profit" ("Belief and Profit"), which contains a debunking reduction of Jewish identity to class interests: "As the material base of ghetto life was left behind, the willingness to sacrifice life and property to one's religious belief also became a thing of the past. Among bourgeois Jews, the hierarchy of goods is neither Jewish nor Christian but bourgeois. The Jewish capitalist brings sacrifices to power, just like his Aryan class colleague. He first sacrifices his own superstition, then the lives of others, and finally his capital. The Jewish revolutionary in Germany is not different from his 'Aryan' comrade. He commits his life to the liberation of man."2