To: <bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU>
Subject: BHA: Re: Bhaskar on Adorno
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 1997 22:27:34 +0300


Hi all--

I'm back on line, sort of (irregularly at best for the next couple weeks). 
Anyway, since Colin's quotation of the passage in *Dialectic* is, for the
time being, my only access to the text, and since Ruth has focused on the
problematic "But," I'd like to say that the syntax appears ambiguous to me.
Here's the passage yet again:

> >"Adorno warns, by contrast, that the whole project of reducing subject 
> >to object or vice versa is fundamentally mistaken" (Dialectic, p. 50)
> [snip]
> >"But it seems intuitively, scientifically and philosophicaly 
> >unsatisfying and indeed refutable not to see subjectivity as grounded 
> >in _some sense_ (my comment: these are in italics), or over-reached, by 
> >objectivity, if only in a meta-reflecive totalising situation of the 
> >couple." (Dialectic, p. 50.)

This reads to me as *continuous*: that is, in the second sentence, RB is
still summarizing Adorno, not critiqueing him.  So the period may as well
be a semicolon.  (As we all know, Roy's writing style is a bit rough at
times....)  By this reading, the current argument could be moot.

Then again, such a reading could show that I'm still suffering from jet
lag (or e-mail fatigue, having just slogged through about 100 lengthy
messages--nice to know you folks have been active).

By the way, RB was *last* year's "winner" (loser?) of the Bad Writing
Contest.  I think this year's was Fred Jameson.

Hope to see some of you in Warwick (which an acquaintance has just taught
me how to pronounce; ah, the English!).  Cheers 'n' beers.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-gwi.net OR tobin.nellhaus-AT-helsinki.fi
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce



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