> I suppose Dennis hasn't read Eve Sedgwick (or much of queer theory, for
> that matter). Hence his inability to distinguish homosexuality
> analytically from the (often violent) repression/sublimation of homoerotic
> possibilities in homosociality (and such repression/sublimation of same-sex
> eroticism in homosociality is dependent upon the exclusion/repression of
> homosexuals).
I've read Eve Sedgewick and plenty others. But you sure haven't read Adorno, who goes on and on and on lamenting the violence done to the subject, it's rigidification, its fragmentation, its erasure by seamless power-bureaucracies, and constantly insists, over and over, that a true Leftwing utopia is the heterogeneity of non-identity -- an almost unimaginable counter-cultural blossoming, crossover, and interfusion of identities, sexualities, genders, peoples, languages or whatever other categories are used to classify, divide, and oppress people. There's a deep, healing nonviolence in all of Adorno's work, a refusal to bow to the existent, which informs the entire postmodern Left: a global resistance to the global nightmare called late capitalism, a resistance which asks us to *think*, to engage contradictions, drive them further, push them to their emancipatory limit.
Adorno's point about sexuality under Fascism is subtle: Fascism was not just the canalization of the official Left (the NSDAP: National Socialist German Workers' Party), it was also the canalization of unofficial progressive energies, especially the short-lived sexual liberation of the Weimar era. In short, it was the nightmarish parody of progressive impulses, a false collectivity and a false solidarity, founded on horrific violence; the eroticism which might have found expression in a progressive community was instead cathected through war, slaughter, and of course that favorite occupation of occupying troops since the invention of organized warfare, unlimited rape. Of course, the more violence the Nazis did to occupied Europe, the faster they sealed their own doom; in Minima Moralia Adorno talks about the death-wish apparent in the Fascist parades, the overwhelming sense of doom in 1933, which wasn't really a celebration but a preternatural funeral -- unconscious acknowledgement that the whole criminal enterprise was a kind of mass suicide from the very start.
-- Dennis