1920 enlaces miscelaneos
Enlaces misceláneos
Theodor Adorno
- Lambert Zuidervaart, 2019?, Theodor W. Adorno: Exposing capitalism’s blind domination, TLS, en: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/theodor-adorno-footnotes-to-plato/ | accessed 14/12/2019
____ Minima Moralia (1951), Theodor W. Adorno’s book of aphorisms, bears the telling subtitle Reflections from damaged life. [...]
____ Founded in 1923 as an independent centre for interdisciplinary Marxist scholarship and led after 1930 by its director Max Horkheimer, the Institute included the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, literary sociologist Leo Löwenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm, and other scholars in economics and political theory. In the 1930s they developed an interdisciplinary research programme called critical theory.
____ Adorno expanded and deepened this argument in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the groundbreaking book he co-wrote with Horkheimer during the Second World War, by which time both had moved from New York to southern California. In it, they set out to explain why a world with so much potential for good had become so unrelentingly bad, why the dawn of enlightenment had become the nightmare of fascism, why the social promise of happiness had been broken. Interweaving philosophy, literary commentary and social critique, they tried to show that reason, the purported agency of enlightenment, had become irrational. Whereas the purpose of reason was to liberate people, it had instead served to trap them in patterns of blind domination. By not serving its own purpose, and instead serving as a tool for domination, reason had become irrational. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, blind domination occurs in three tightly interlinked forms: (1) human subjugation of nature, (2) psychological repression and (3) social exploitation. What drives all three forms in contemporary society is an ever-expanding capitalist economy, wedded to massive state power, and fed by the latest science and technology.
____ Contrary to some interpretations, the diagnosis in Dialectic of Enlightenment does not mean the authors give up on rationality and have no hope for social transformation. Their attempt at a comprehensive critical diagnosis is an exercise of dialectical reason. It aims to recall and project the origin and goal of thought itself, namely, freedom – not blind domination, but thoughtful reconciliation, not the subjugation of nature, the repression of needs and desires, and the exploitation of disadvantaged people but rather their liberation. And, within Dialectic of Enlightenment itself, their diagnosis yields powerful insights into both the culture industry as “mass deception”
____ the principle of exchange is both highly abstract and all-pervasive in advanced capitalist society. The principle comes down to the imperative that nothing has value except insofar as it can be exchanged for something else and, in this exchange, generates a profit for those who control the conditions under which exchange occurs. Moreover, exchange is how the three-fold nexus of blind domination works. In an advanced capitalist society, people subjugate nature, repress their needs and desires, and exploit one another by following the principle of exchange.
Walter Benjamin
- Samantha Rose Hill, 2019, Walter Benjamin's Last Work, Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/walter-benjamins-last-work/ | accessed 14/12/2019
____ On the Thesis on the Philosophy of History, and various friendships, including Arendt, Adorno...
- Colin Dickey, 2014, Shoring Against the Ruins, Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/shoring-ruins/ | accessed 14/12/2019
____ Good review of WB's biography by Eiland and Jennings, 2014, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
