So I suppose Adorno evolved in his thinking on sexuality (good
> for him, but too late for homosexuals who perished in the concentration
> camps).
>That's
> the poverty of left-Hegelian dialectic that I mentioned earlier. In other
> words, it is an otherworldly dialectic that refuses to be anchored in
> history.
>
> Yoshie
I really do not get this way of reading Adorno. I mean, is this the point to see if Theodor is proto-queer friendly? To invoke Sedgwick, is that what it comes down to at the end of the day, good dog (queer friendly!)/ bad dog (homophobic---eeew) criticism? Talk about unmoored from history: as if Adorno had had different ideas about sexuality, Auschwitz would have been a bath house? I can picture it now, Hitler youth, en fuego! Besides, even if MM in 1944 had been different, it couldn't have meant jack to everyone who had already been gassed, buried, dug up and then burned, since *it was already 1944*.
As for the formalism of the Hegelian dialectic--okay, but what kind of historical representation isn't open to this kind of formal tampering? I'll give you Helma-Sanders Brahms, but it's precisely because she knows how to mimic cultural codes of historicity that "Germany Pale Mother" works. That film too, could pretty easily be emptied of its content. Indeed, it's that recognition that makes it work.
Christian