Noted: Kaufman; Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion
I have a very strong feeling that the work of the Frankfurt School is very important as we try to understand our current situation. So if only I could understand the Frankfurt School, I might be a happier man!:
Robert Kaufman: Poetry's Ethics? Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/pdf/27669156.pdf: 'The overarching and thoroughgoing inhumanity of the situation of what Adorno calls "damaged life" structured everything around it, so that, in Adorno's formulation, wrong life could not—cannot—be lived rightly, and the very attempt or reflex of trying to act ethically, or of finding oneself seeming to act ethically, is precisely what leads one to feel barbaric, for it makes all the more clear that nothing but unjustifiable luck has been operative: at the moment of a sheerly arbitrary, chance, statistical survival, the projection of an ethical attempt to assist the other comes to feel like an unspeakable mockery or perverse miming of ethics, since the thought and act meant to differentiate themselves from the barbarism of survival-due-to-statistical-probability turn out to be not the necessary fiction, not the generative, as if illusion, of undetermined, ethical behavior, but instead the cruel delusion that the latter still has any operative existence in these circumstances...
#cognition #noted #publicsphere #20230-05-13
