[FRA:] Hello!

[msalter1 at aol.com]

I am also doing work on adorno and elements of aeshetics connecte with the use of signs and semiotics, and would welcome conversion on this, my work is for a book on semiotics and i am cross referencing Hegel and Adorno

cheers

Michael


-----Original Message-----
From: Lloyd West <lww21 at cam.ac.uk>
To: Discussion of Frankfurt School Critical Theory <theory-frankfurt-school at srcf.ucam.org>
Sent: Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:32
Subject: [FRA:] Hello!



Hello!

I noticed your post to the "Discussion of Frankfurt School Critical Theory" 
list. In contrast to the usual nonesense on there, your post caught my eye. 
You are also in Cambridge - the damp, dank fens.

I am interested in Adorno and german philosophy generally (esp. 
aesthetics). I would like to meet others with similar interests. As these 
seem few and far between here, I am jumping on the chance to make contact 
with you. I hope you don't mind.

Are you in the english faculty? I am studyng mathematics (this has more to 
do with aesthetics than most people realise or admit, though perhaps not of 
the adornische kind).

Best wishes,
Lloyd


On Jan 23 2009, Josh Robinson wrote:

>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
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
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>theory-frankfurt-school at srcf.ucam.org
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>


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