[FRA:] wrong life can't be lived rightly... so then what are you going to do?

[Josh Robinson]

On Thu, 2009-01-22 at 13:32 -0800, Jason Gallagher wrote:
> It may be that life cannot be lived rightly.  OK, I get that,... but
> we all still need to live in any case, so do we constantly have to be
> depressed and so god darn pessimistic all the time?

obviously, the answer is neither a simple yes or no. the alternative to
pessimism is to place blind faith in the values of the enlightenment,
without recognising the moment of barbarism within the enlightment's
dialectical progression. it's difficult, for example, to look at the
global reaction over the last few weeks to the situation in Gaza, a
reaction which has at least as much affinity with barbarism as do the
events against which the protests are directed, without a certain degree
of pessimism. 

but this pessimism cannot exist on its own. the claim that there is no
trace of true life within the false life that we are forced to live has
to be read in the light of the insistence in _Negative Dialektik_ that
'Consciousness would not be able to despair over the colour grey at all
if it didn't harbour a concept of a different colour whose scattered
trace remains present in the negative whole'. Without this image, it
would make no sense to say that life is damaged -- it would simply be
shit, a despair from which there is no way out. This is not the case for
Adorno, for whom the only response to despair is to 'contemplate all
things as they would appear from the standpoint of redemption' -- an
imperative which explicitly does not depend on whether there is a
possibility that this redemption might ever take place.

Adorno's dig at psychoanalysis in _Minima Moralia_ (that 'only its
exaggerations are true') is perhaps a helpful way of thinking about his
own philosophy. It is obviously an exaggeration to claim that there is
no trace whatsoever of true life within false life. The truth of this
exaggeration consists in its insistence that we mustn't attempt to
reconcile ourselves with false life simply because of the positive
moments -- aesthetic experience might be thought of as one of them --
contained within it.

pessimism on its own would be no less a resignation to the conditions of
actually existing capitalism than the liberal attempt at reconciliation
with them. the Bradley epigraph in _Minima Moralia_ is perhaps helpful:

	Where everything is bad
	it must be good
	to know the worst.

Despair must be understood as containing a dialectical moment of hope,
the promise of something new. Or perhaps not even the promise: 'The new
is the longing for the new, seldom the new itself: that is what
everything new suffers from. What feels like utopia remains a negation
of that which exists, and is obedient to it.' We must do more than
attempt the bad negation of that which exists, but rather recognise that
the damage done to life is necessarily also damage to our own
subjectivity. But this perhaps also provides us with an opportunity to
see things that we would not otherwise have seen: 'The mote in your eye
is the best magnifying glass.'

Josh