Littleton: it's Adorno's fault <fwd>

kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca
Sun Sep 26 19:58:43 PDT 1999


On Sun, 26 Sep 1999 13:51:30 -0400 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:


> BTW, what Adorno has in common with LaRouche is homophobia. Adorno
> wrote: "Totalitarianism and homosexuality go together."

Which, as Marsha Hewitt notes (Critical Theory of Religion), is a serious inconsistency in his own work (the "woman" question is no different - check out his comments about woman as shrew in D of E). It probably helps to go behind this quote, which is wholly unsupported in the text from which it originates (Minima Moralia) ... Adorno couldn't conceive of male homosexuality outside of his analysis of identity thinking... Andrew Hewitt's book (no relation) Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism & the Modernist Imaginary traces the image of male homosexuality and fascism theoretically... probably one of the best accounts I've read (starting with Freud and Adorno)(esp. in contrast to Martin Jay who chalks it up to an "unreflected bias"). It should be noted that Adorno has no excuse here... since we was probably aquainted with the work of Karl Kraus and Kurt Hiller - who both advocated de-pathologization of homosexuality. Adorno's comments on homosexuality in Notes on Literature are slightly different (if memory serves... so even a high end mandarin like Teddy can change his mind).

In any event, Adorno's greatness, if you can call it that, does not lie as a direct contributer to queer theory (although Butler, Hewitt, and others all acknowledge Adorno as a source of inspiration) but as a modernist... someone who was content to situate the antagonisms of enlightenment in a radical and unresolved tension).


> Klaus Theweleit on Reich, Freud, & Adorno:

Someone stole my copy of Male Fantasies: vol. 1 & 2 (sigh).


> [Yoshie: Ah, the poverty of 'dialectical' thought in the
Frankfurt School!]

Then I guess you can write off Theweleit too then, eh? (doh!) (being highly indepted to the FS) (and hell, why not Jessica Benjamin's Bonds of Love as well) (bah, dialectical poverty) (practically a quote right out of Popper's rejoinder to Adorno in the Positivist Dispute!) (curses! critial rationality or bust).


> In other words, Adorno, et al contributed a left-wing twist to the
> repertoire of homophobic discourse on homosexuals: "blame sexism on
> homos (and of course, 'real men' are not sexist)!"

Of course you happen to be ignoring the highly negative formulation of Adorno's dialectics here... Adorno was always very careful never to assign blame to individuals... despite his damning remarx... he was critical of both femininity (as the stamp of patriarchy) and masculinity (as militant bullshit).

ken



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