Logic of identity

[bob scheetz]

matt,
   you think your quotes suggest marxism escaped  the critique of reason?

  in practice, from the beginning, and with the exception of the blanquists
and exigencies of party discipline of practical politics whose marxism is
purely instrumental (presumably they have in mind leninism/stalinism)
socialists have felt the need to simultaneously embrace a complementary
metafisics, xtianity and laterly existentialism/onto-theology.
the case seems rather that it is adorno's critique that seems crimped,
applying the reductionist monocle of reason to a complex (ie at least
dialectical) being.

which brings to mind a recent profession of yerz:  "Me also fairly
intolerant of bloody religion."  I've observed there are a few very lucky
people who have no metafisical need, perhaps you and adorno are two?

bob




----- Original Message -----
From: "matthew piscioneri" <mpiscioneri@hotmail.com>
To: <frankfurt-school@lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2003 6:00 AM
Subject: Logic of identity


> According to H. & A. in their _DoE_ is the dynamic of the logic of
identity
> (the universal's totalising domination of the particular) that of "self
> preservation?
>
> Also to make available a number of quotes from the _DoE_ which I think
help
> clarify the earlier thread on Marxism and H&A:
>
> The bad conscious of cliques which ultimately embody economic necessity is
> betrayed in that its revelations, from the intuitions of the Leader to the
> dynamic Weltanschauung, no longer recognize (in marked contrast to earlier
> bourgeois apologetics) their own misdeeds as necessary consequences of
> statutory contexts. (1995: 37-38)
>
> But to recognize domination, even in thought itself, as unreconciled
nature,
> would mean a slackening of the necessity whose perpetuity socialism itself
> prematurely confirmed as a concession to reactionary common sense. By
> elevating necessity to the status of the basis for all time to come, and
by
> idealistically degrading the spirit for ever to the very apex, socialism
> held on all too surely to the legacy of bourgeois philosophy. Hence the
> relation of necessity to the realm of freedom would remain merely
> quantitative and mechanical, and nature, posited as wholly alien  just as
> in the earliest mythology  would become totalitarian and absorb freedom
> together with socialism. (1995: 41)
>
> With the abandonment of thought, which in its reified form of mathematics,
> machine, and organization avenges itself on the men who have forgotten it,
> enlightenment has relinquished its own realization. By taking everything
> unique and individual under its tutelage, it left the uncomprehended whole
> the freedom, as domination, to strike back at human existence and
> consciousness by way of things. But true revolutionary practice depends on
> the intransigence of theory in the face of the insensibility with which
> society allows thought to ossify. (1995: 41)
>
> I don't think marxism escaped H & A's critique of reason as the above
quotes
> suggest,
>
> mattP
>
>
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