[FRA:] [marxistphilosophy] Hullot-Kentor distills Adorno & the barbarism of our time

[Ralph Dumain]

There are several articles by Hullot-Kentor in /The Brooklyn Rail/. I'm 
on my second one now:

*WHAT BARBARISM IS?*
by Robert Hullot-Kentor
Feb 2010
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/02/art/what-barbarism-is

Similar in respects to the other article I cited. I don't understand 
this, though:

    On the contrary, as Adorno developed the concept of barbarism, he is
    criticizing the form of maturation itself, that is, the struggle to
    dominate nature as a primitiveness that destroys the primitive
    rather than becoming reconciled with it in its emancipation. This
    alliance with the primitive fundamentally distinguishes Adorno’s
    epithet of barbarism from the instances of nineteenth century
    American censure cited earlier.

 From there there's a discussion of Levi-Strauss, and I'm lost. From all 
this, H-K comes to a stark conclusion:

    To elucidate Adorno’s concept of barbarism in this way, however,
    does not suppose that the critical impulse of the concept can be
    restored. Insight that has lapsed, is just that. Its moment is gone,
    and its impulse can not be recovered by systematic labor. In seeking
    to carve into the moment, Adorno’s concept of barbarism is no less
    futile than is the idea of reification, which no effort of
    clarification and expansion will revive, not any more than the stale
    academic banquets on five continents devoted to the
    culture-industry, dialectics or historical materialism will
    resurrect those now decisively vestigial ideas. They are defunct.
    One must, on one hand, regret the fragile loss of insight. But, on
    the other hand, “our problem is not what we have lost, but what we
    have failed to find.” This recognition is allied with what was once
    most alive in those concepts by acknowledging that they now verge on
    an irreversible vacancy. Citing them is legitimate only when they
    resonate with their imminent disuse. They remain actual exclusively
    as memorials to the effort to differentiate the vanishment of
    differentiation—the actual loss of reality—which is the preeminent
    sense of our own moment.

I don't quite get this, as he seems to be saying more than that the 
capacity of critique has been neutralized, as Sloterdijk wrote a 
quarter-century ago.

There's a continuing discussion of Wallace Stevens that eludes me, along 
with comments on Melville and the pronoun "you".  There is then another 
discussion I don't understand, of /Aesthetic Theory/. For example:

    /Aesthetic Theory /is organized in this fashion because a philosophy
    devoted to the emancipation of nature that is conceived as much in
    alliance with the barbarically primitive as in opposition to it,
    required making the experience of natural beauty central to
    aesthetics. Aesthetic Theory thus runs self-consciously contrary to
    the telos of the modern development of aesthetics, which
    participates in the ban on the mimetic relationship in the
    marginalization of natural beauty from aesthetic reflection.
    Structurally considered, Adorno’s aesthetics is organized
    concentrically around the section on Natural Beauty, which may also
    be this almost intolerably interesting work’s most interesting
    section. The section itself turns most of all on the study of the
    experience of a movement at a standstill in nature.


I'm afraid most of this essay eludes me.



On 12/29/2010 10:02 AM, Chris Cutrone wrote:
>
> I also very much like:
>
> http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/07/art/robert-hullot-kentor-in-conversation-with-fabio-ackelrud-durao
>
> -- Chris
>
> --- On Tue, 12/28/10, Ralph Dumain <rdumain at autodidactproject.org 
> <mailto:rdumain%40autodidactproject.org>> wrote:
>
> > From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain at autodidactproject.org 
> <mailto:rdumain%40autodidactproject.org>>
> > Subject: [marxistphilosophy] Hullot-Kentor distills Adorno & the 
> barbarism of our time
> > To: "Discussion of Frankfurt School Critical Theory" 
> <theory-frankfurt-school at srcf.ucam.org 
> <mailto:theory-frankfurt-school%40srcf.ucam.org>>
> > Cc: marxistphilosophy at yahoogroups.com 
> <mailto:marxistphilosophy%40yahoogroups.com>
> > Date: Tuesday, December 28, 2010, 10:34 PM
> >
>
>