File spoon-archives/frankfurt-school.archive/frankfurt-school_2000/frankfurt-school.0004, message 7


Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 01:41:13 -0400
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: ADORNO VIZ. LUKACS?


Well, I'm grateful for your assistance in any case.  Interesting though,
that of all the insults I've hurled at various people on countless
occasions, I don't recall ever once accusing anyone on this list of being a
capitalist, let alone a capitalist porker.  Of all the inferences that can
be made by others about my mental state, doesn't it seem peculiar that this
is the one that has been made?  Is it possible that such a characterization
of what it is that bothers me about so many people in the academic
knowledge industry, in its very inaccuracy, is symptomatic of the inability
of said people to listen and hence respond to anyone they don't already
know, to pay attention without projecting onto other people extraneous,
preconceived agendas?

But back to the main point.  I enjoyed re-reading "Reconciliation Under
Duress" in AESTHETICS AND POLITICS, which is indeed the same essay as that
in volume 1 of NOTES TO LITERATURE.  (I was also impressed in re-reading
"Commitment" in the former volume as well, which is a brilliant critique of
Sartre and Brecht.)  Adorno does a bang-up job exposing the basis of all of
Lukacs' bad judgments in the realm of literature.  It is breathtaking to
see him in action, and the argument against Lukacs on aesthetic matters
appears to be definitive.  

But there is one little bit in which Adorno passes summary judgment without
justifying himself, and this is what mosts interests me: Adorno claims in
passing that THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON exemplifies the destruction of
Lukacs' own reason, and that the irrationalist idealist philosophy Lukacs
excoriates was itself a protest against reification.  This is just what I
do not believe, and here Adorno exposes his own fatal flaw.
Oversimplifications and ideological shortcuts notwithstanding, Lukacs' hard
line is exactly what appeals to me.  Lukacs cut his teeth on the very
philosophies he later came to reject, and in his better moments he surely
must have understood what it was he was rejecting.  I do not believe the
capitulation to Stalinism explains it all.  And, Adorno himself developed
his own criticisms of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and others of the
irrationalist stripe.  Surely a comparison of the approaches of the two men
to this subject matter is in order?  Is it unreasonable to be curious as to
what the scholarly community has made of this?

I must confess a near total indifference to the question of psychoanalysis,
except as regards the heinous treatment of Erich Fromm on the part of the
leading Frankfurters, which reveals much about the abdication of their own
reason under duress in the USA.

I repeat, what interests me most in a comparative analysis of Lukacs and
Adorno  is the question of their approaches to ontological and
epistemological issues, esp. in their treatments of the heritage of German
idealist philosophy.  As for the question of the philosophical orientation
towards cultural and social phenomena, what is most important for my
purposes is the contrast between Adorno's fixation on non-identity and
heteronomy with respect to the repressive subsumption of particulars under
universals, and Lukacs' more hidebound, apparently organic view of the
relation of the individual to society. 

At 01:38 AM 04/24/2000 +0200, you wrote:
>perhaps the meager results have something to do with your attitude 
>that everyone except Ralph Dumain is a bourgeois capitalist pig?



   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005