Thanks; I'm glad I'm not crazy. But again I want to say that it's not conservatism: Adorno castigates capitalism at every opportunity. So it's something like knowing that humans suffer domination because of capitalism but also refusing easy categories like those of (official) dialectical materialism.

I agree it's not conservativism. It's an expression of alienation, is what I've gathered so far from the first 20 aphorisms. There are expressions in there that I'm uncomfortable with when he's talking about marriage and gender and Freud, and there's part of me that thinks that's very much an era thing.

It's interesting how he laments -- most of it, thus far, feels like an expression of alienation. A sort of bewildered wondering that does not want the status quo, refuses to accept the world as it is, while refusing to accept easy palliatives.

I liked your conclusion the most:

In contrast, humility would lead one to an appreciation of the nonidentical, that which exceeds our concepts; the thisness of this and that. Thus, one opens up to the world in all its inconvenient multifariousness. — Jamal

That resonates with how I think about things.

That resonates with how I think about things. — Moliere

Yeah, me too, and that's pretty much what his Negative Dialectics is about so that's what I'm aiming for at the moment.

Sweeeeet.

So the mouthpeice of something maybe better, with all the caveats of caution?

:pray:

I got faith we'll figure it out one day.

EDIT: Until then -- I can think of worse things to do with my time than reading and talking.

I'd be up for a TPF reading group. But I reckon nobody else would be interested.

Never have I ever done a reading group with only 2 people ;)

It'd force me more, and it looks like the text is more readable than the other ones I bring up. lol

I'm down. Especially without a schedule, I'm thinking -- I powerhouse texts when I'm "in the mood" and not elsewise. What do you think?

What do you think? — Moliere

I'm up for it and I'm in the mood.

Cool.

Start a thread. Minima Moralia? Or one of the others you mentioned?

Yeah I will/would start a thread. I'm thinking Negative Dialectics, specifically the non-official but apparently only decent English translation by Dennis Redmond.

Minima Moralia is too aphoristic for a reading group, IMO

Cool.


I found a pdf in the wild world of the net.

Fair.

Useful as preparation — or we could even start with it — is Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966. His lectures are — relatively — a breeze.

Sounds good to me to start with it, unless you'd like me to prepare ahead of time.

Starting there is ok with me.

BTW I haven't studied Hegel, and some might think it's mad to tackle this without doing Hegel first, but I'm not massively concerned — I'm working back to Hegel via Adorno, like I did with Kant, via Schopenhauer (though some might say there's a huge difference, namely that Adorno actually understood Hegel).

I've studied Hegel, and I very much doubt that Adorno scholarship is in some way dependent on Hegel scholarship. "Studied" in the way an autodidact studies, so not a class, but I've at least touched The Science of Logic and finished The Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind once upon a time.

So a real Hegel scholar would school us. And perhaps @Count Timothy von Icarus or @Tobias could provide some guardrails in interpretation, since my reading isn't broad and largely motivated by understanding Marx.

I think Hegel believed there was something sleeping in humanity. Something that would eventually awaken and become conscious of itself. Hegel thought it was unfolding according to its own inner logic.

This is related to what Trotsky says in his history of the Russian revolution, that the global proletariat uprising was supposed to happen all by itself. There was no need to make it happen, yet the revolutionary government acted with bloody ruthlessness to clear the way for the new era of human history. Trotsky doesn't really explain why.