> who died in Iraq? Adorno has it that if a lion had
> consciousness, the rage it feels towards its prey would
> be ideology; it's not hard to imagine that someone like
> Albright harboring a similar blind fury against her victims.
Hmm, the Ashton version (we won't dignify it with the name "translation", because it's just a horrid butchery, one of the worst I have *ever* seen of *any* thinker... well, maybe it isn't that bad, but Lord, it sure ain't good). Here's Adorno as he should've been translated:
Idealism as Rage (pg 33-35 of Negative Dialectics, original text) "The system, by which the sovereign Mind thought to transfigure itself, has its Ur-history in that which is pre-intellectual, in the animal life of the species. Predators are hungry; the pounce onto the prey is difficult, often dangerous. The animal needs, as it were, additional impulses in order to dare this. These fuse with the displeasure [Unlust] of hunger into rage at the victim, whose expression is designed to terrify and weaken the latter. During the progression to humanity this is rationalized through projection. The animal rationale [Latin: rational animal], which is hungry for its opponent, must, already the fortunate owner of a super-ego, have a reason. The more completely it follows the law of self-preservation, the less it may confess the primacy of this to itself and others; otherwise its laboriously achieved status as a zoon politikon loses, as modern German puts it, credibility. The life-form to be devoured must be evil. This anthropological schemata has been sublimated all the way into epistemology. In idealism -- most obviously in Fichte -- unconsciously rules the ideology that the non-Ego, l'autrui [French: the other] finally everything reminiscent of nature is inferior, so that the unity of the thought bent on preserving itself may gobble it up, thus consoled. This justifies the principle of such as much as it increases the desire for such. The system is the Mind turned belly, rage the signature of each and every idealism..." (more text online at http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/ndintro.PDF)
Substitute "neoliberalism" for "epistemology" and you've got a kickass diagnosis of global capitalism ca. 2001, no?
-- Dennis