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

Dennis R Redmond dredmond at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Mon Sep 27 00:36:08 PDT 1999


On Sun, 26 Sep 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


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

Eh? Adorno was talking about Rohmer's SA and the violent, patriarchal militarization of sexual identity under Fascism; the bond between the Fuehrer and the soldier in the field was an unconscious, canalized homoeroticism. All that Nazi stuff about Blut und Boden, death's heads, shiny boots, strutting dictators squawking before their captive staff -- it's totally S & M, only not the play version, but a real and deadly theater of violence.

Theweleit can be entertaining, but he's clueless about theory and clueless about Adorno.


> 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)!"

Stuff and nonsense. Adorno just doesn't say very much about sexual politics, period, other than to denounce witchhunts and to say nice things about Proust, but there's a powerful proto-feminism and proto-queer theory at work in his dialectics, apparent in "Minima Moralia" and elsewhere.

-- Dennis



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