[lbo-talk] Frankfurt on the Hudson

dredmond at efn.org dredmond at efn.org
Wed Aug 19 12:48:22 PDT 2009


On Wed, August 19, 2009 10:35 am, Doug Henwood forwarded:


> [via Lou Proyect]
>
> Frankfurt on the Hudson
> How the fathers of Critical Theory found their way to America
> By Adam Kirsch | 7:00 am August 18, 2009
>
> Reading Adorno on modern music, or Benjamin on literature, it is
> momentarily possible to believe that criticism is a weapon of liberation,
> rather than simply a hermetic exercise for intellectuals.

[Extended cackle of post-Imperial glee]. Ah, Adorno is truly the ghost in the neoliberal machine, isn't he? No bubble-speculation is safe from the rapier of negative dialectics...

To paraphrase Adorno slightly, true criticism has been and will always be nothing other than the thought-form of emancipation. And hermeticism is functional in our ever more totalized, Googled and Terror-War-warped system: it is the principled rejection of what is, in the name of what could be.

-- DRR



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